Cyber Dreams 3.15 - Company

Good morning :)

Lots of space and ship talk here - let me know if something doesn't make sense. If it sounds good, I'd love to hear that, as well. Hope you enjoy!

-Plum

Juliet sat in one of the extra acceleration couches on the bridge as the Kowashi made its final approach to Saturn; they’d been decelerating for days, “falling” toward the planet with the drive cones pointed at their destination. Her eyes were glued to the vid screens, currently displaying the view over the ship’s drive plumes, burning at a hard two-point-four Gs on their final approach. Beyond the fiery exhaust, she could see the planet and its rings; Juliet had a hard time believing she wasn’t watching a movie—those immense objects were really outside the ship, and she and the others were fast approaching.

Saturn was unbelievably beautiful. The planet's atmosphere was characterized by thick, swirling clouds, with colors ranging from soft shades of pastel yellow and beige to deeper hues of rusty red and orange. Overall, the gas giant gave Juliet the impression of a pale golden glow with an almost ethereal quality. She’d seen pictures and videos of Saturn before, but it was so different to see it in high definition and know it was right outside the little metal box in which she and the others were hurtling through space.

More than the planet, the rings, at this distance, dominated the feed, and again, Juliet felt awed by them. They were beautiful, sure, but it was their size that really blew her mind; they seemed to stretch endlessly away to the black horizon, and she had to remind herself that all of Earth’s oceans and grand vistas would be just a spec in those tremendous rings.

“Something else, isn’t it?” Alice asked from her couch.

Juliet glanced over at her and said, “Yes. It’s . . . so much bigger than my mind could imagine. The planet, the rings, they seem to go on forever, and they still keep getting bigger as we approach!”

“Yeah. It’s hard for a human brain to wrap itself around how damn big things are out in space. You kind of have to get into it, you know? I mean, before you really start to grasp the scale. Of course, these H-3 drives kind of spoil us; it feels like we went on a week-long camping trip, but we were hurtling through space fast enough to circle the Earth every thirteen seconds or so. Think about that.”

“Damn,” Juliet breathed, trying to wrap her head around the distance. It wasn’t news to her; she knew, objectively, how far away Saturn was from Earth. Still, the idea that every ten seconds or so, they’d traveled farther than most humans living on Earth ever did in their lives was a new way to look at it.

“Dione will come into view in about fifteen minutes, and then I’m going to really push this old girl; we’re coming in kind of hot,” Alice spoke into the crew channel, not just aloud, “That said, make sure you’re deep in your couches ‘cause we’re going to be touching four Gs for a minute or two.”

“Dammit, Alice,” Bennet’s voice said—he was in the single acceleration couch in a cubicle across the hall from engineering, “I don’t know if she can manage that! We talked about this. If you melt the cones, we’ll be limping to Titan for a week.”

“I thought you upgraded the nozzles, Bennet?” Shiro interjected.

“The nozzles, Cap, not the cones. I mean, yeah, it’s all a system, but we didn’t have enough money for every piece. It’s in my maintenance report.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Alice cut in. “I’m sorry, but calculations like this are damn hard with what I’m working with. Our speed fluctuated a lot more than I wanted during this trip, and unless you want to overshoot Dione, we’re braking hard, and she’s going to have to hold together.”

Juliet thought she heard Shiro muttering something in Japanese before he turned off his comms. Before she could get too nervous, though, Alice spoke again, “Alright, I’m starting the hard brake early. I recalculated our approach to try to lighten the load. Hold on—G’s climbing in 5 . . .  4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .” Suddenly, it felt like someone had grabbed hold of Juliet’s skin and was trying to pull it off her from behind.

“Oof,” she managed before the air slipped out of her, and then it was a battle of abdominal contractions to suck in quick gasps, trying to fill up her lungs again.

“I’m sorry, Juliet,” Angel said, “I should have spoken to you about breathing and proper muscle contractions during high G scenarios.” Juliet grunted in response, well aware from vids and fiction that she’d read that whatever she was experiencing was well within human tolerance, especially in an acceleration couch. Nevertheless, she wasn’t used to it, and the pressure seemed to be mounting by the second.

Alice seemed fine, her voice coming through comms without much strain, “Not bad. Everything’s green, and we’re up to three-point-one. At this approach, we’ll need to hold this for about sixteen minutes, and then I’m going to have to push it a little harder; we’ll stay under three-point-seven, though, Bennet. Everyone’s couches working okay?”

“Aye,” Shiro grunted.

“Yep.” Aya’s voice was chipper, and Juliet would have grinned if she could control her face better, picturing the little woman in her couch.

“Good,” Bennet added.

And then it was Juliet’s turn. She sucked in a quick breath, then grunted, “Fine.”

The next nearly twenty minutes felt like an ab workout from hell, and then it got cranked up to a new level as Alice pushed the drives even harder. Juliet’s vision remained clear, but Angel informed her, at some point, that she was making adjustments to her ocular implants’ blood pressure. She also felt the gel in the couch working hard to massage her limbs and torso, helping to keep her blood moving. Minutes bled into one another, and the whole thing felt like a long weird nightmare.

As suddenly as the high G burn had started, it stopped, and Alice breathed into comms, her thick voice revealing her strain for the first time, “We did it. I don’t think anything burned up, but you’ll need to inspect the cones yourself, Bennet. Some readings are . . . bordering on red. I’m going to pull us into a tight orbit, so I can keep gravity at about half a G while we scan for the wreck.”

“Uh, thanks, Alice, but I’m still in a walking boot. You want me to EVA out there?”

“I’ll send a drone, and you can study the footage,” Aya interrupted.

“Right. Thanks. Meet me at the cargo hold.”

“On my way!”

“Guys,” Alice cut in. “You might want to take a look at the vid feed. Dione’s prettier than I expected.” Juliet had been blinking her eyes and flexing her facial muscles, trying to get things to feel normal again, but at Alice’s words, she looked up at the big viewscreens at the front of the bridge. Sure enough, filling most of the view and growing larger by the second was the crystalline surface of Dione.

It was like a diamond or a ball of glittering ice floating in space, the majestic rings of Saturn providing a dark, shimmering, gray-scale backdrop to the image. Dione wasn’t perfectly spherical, at least it didn’t look so to Juliet, but something about how the ice had formed, or the way it reflected the light from the sun or off of Saturn—again, she didn’t know—was spectacular. She could see the ridges of craters and other rough terrain, but with everything coated in that ice, the irregularities only provided more shimmering sparkles.

“Woah,” she said, admiring the sight. The ship swung, changing its trajectory to aim for an orbital entry, and the view shifted, revealing Saturn hanging in space behind the icy moon like a great, lurking beautiful behemoth. “God,” she whispered, unable to think of anything more suitable.

“Yeah. Well, we’re going to be approaching this side of Dione for a while; I’ll start scans. Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Alice breathed, manually shifting the ship's trajectory again with a yoke that jutted out of her acceleration couch between her legs. Juliet hadn’t noticed her using it earlier, but she supposed that was because they’d been moving too fast for manual controls. Was that true? She wondered if fighter or interceptor pilots used manual controls or if they just interfaced with the ship. She determined to ask Alice about it when she wasn’t so busy.

“Lucky,” Alice said, startling her out of her daydreaming, “Can you and your PAI interface with the scanners? Not the planetary dish; I’m handling that. I mean the passive antennas, radar, lidar, and optics. I want to see if any other ships are hanging around Dione.”

“Uh, sure. Do I just plug into the console on the couch here?”

“Yeah. I’d have Shiro do it, but he’s getting the winches set up in the bay.”

“Uh, shouldn’t I do that? He’s probably better at reading this data . . .”

“No. He’s not.” Alice made a funny sound, half tsk and half chuckle. “Trust me. I asked for you or Aya up here for a reason.”

“Oh, all right,” Juliet grinned as she pulled out her data cable and plugged it into the console. “Can you find your way to the sensor data?” she subvocalized.

“Yes. Out of curiosity, would you ask Alice if she didn’t check the sat net for public flight logs?”

“Okay,” Juliet said, drawing the word out, but then she passed the question along to Alice.

“Sure I did, but nobody’s going to record a job like this. The SSFRC is a joke, especially away from Earth. I mean, yeah, if I want to dock at a regulated facility, I’ll need to record my intent and flight path, but coming out here? Anyone who gives a shit and wants to watch me is going to have a two-hour delay on their scanning, and that’s if they can find me among all this stuff,” she gestured toward the viewscreen and the current image showing Dione, Saturn, and its rings. “Space is big, the SSFRC has nearly eighteen hundred member corporations, and they’re all constantly trying to change regs, backstab, or hide from each other; everyone knows its bullshit.”

“Uh,” Juliet said sheepishly, “SSFRC?”

“Sol System Flight Regulating Commission. Anyway, you seeing anything? Your PAI good at looking at data?”

“Yeah, she’s nuclear,” Juliet said before she could think about her words. She smiled, though, figuring Angel would like the compliment and it was worth it to get a funny look from Alice. “How about it, sister? Find anything?” she subvocalized.

“Still going through the data; there are a lot of signatures and readings around Saturn. Nothing close yet . . .”

“Still sifting through the data,” Juliet said. “I guess there are a lot of ships around Saturn, huh?”

“Yeah,” Alice replied. “Thousands at any given moment. But Saturn is big, and there’s a lot going on in these rings. It’s easy to disappear. Anyway, most traffic should be around Titan; even the harvesters like to work near there so they can offload what they pull from the atmosphere at New Atlas Port.”

“That’s accurate,” Angel said. “I’m seeing most of the ship data on the sensors coming from near Titan’s orbit. Still nothing . . . I stand corrected. I’m currently studying the optical scans from the arrays facing Saturn, and I believe I see a ship’s shadow on a large ice formation approximately thirty-four hundred kilometers aft and toward Saturn. On review of other array footage, I believe this ship began following us on our hard burn approach.”

“We might have company,” Juliet said. “Hang on, sending the data to one of the viewscreens.” At her words, the left-most viewscreen began to play a series of short video clips on which Angel had circled, in bright yellow, an object that, to Juliet, looked like a pair of bright lights. The object was clearly following the Kowashi, but it pulled off, and then the light disappeared as the Kowashi drew near Dione. Angel then displayed a highly magnified image of a massive hunk of ice floating in Saturn’s rings, and on it, she’d outlined a shadow that, Juliet supposed, looked a little like it could be coming from a spacecraft.

“Dammit!” Alice hissed. Then, into comms, she said, “We picked up a tail on our approach, and they’re being shifty, hiding in the rings. Twin cones on the drive signature, but they were small. My PAI’s running ‘em through a database.” She paused, looked at Juliet, and said, “Nice work, Lucky. You’ve got some good software your PAI’s running.”

“Yeah,” Juliet nodded.

“Well?” Shiro asked, strain evident in his voice.

“Gimme a minute; it’s a big database, and Hank’s running a few comparison models, to be certain.”

“Hank?” Juliet grinned.

“Yeah. He’s a good old boy. What do you call your PAI?”

“Angel. She’s the best,” Juliet grinned as Alice’s ginger eyebrow rose, and her mouth twisted into a wry smile.

“Don’t try to make Hank jealous. Oh, hey, he got it.” She cleared her throat, and Juliet saw the crew comm channel light up as she continued, “It’s a pair of Rogalt gen-two H-3 rockets. Factory equipped on the Donella Pisces, Foro-tech Adroit, and Foro-tech Ferry—all small ships. Only the Pisces was factory equipped with any weapons, but that ship last came off the assembly line in 2078. If these are pirates, they’re low budget.”

“Still newer than the Kowashi!” Aya chimed in.

“All right,” Shiro growled. “We keep on. If they want to fight, they have to wait ‘til we’re down ‘cause those ships cannot force a breach and board.”

“And if they strafe us or attack us when we go down?”

“I doubt their little ship has guns; if they do, we’ll probably hear their threats before we start to land. If they follow us down, that’s what Lucky’s for,” Bennet said.

“Oh God,” Juliet said aloud, though she’d meant just to think it.

“Well,” Alice said, chuckling, “he’s not wrong. Might wanna go clean your guns ‘cause we need this haul.”

“Sure you don’t want my PAI to help analyze the surface scans?”

“Nah,” Alice said, flipping some switches under the console before her, “Hank’s doing fine. I’ll keep you posted with everyone else if you wanna get geared up.”

“Roger,” Juliet said, trying to put on her game face, imagining how Ghoul would respond to the situation. She pulled herself out of the couch and almost launched herself into the ceiling; they had gravity, but it was a lot less than a G. “Oof,” she grunted, catching herself with her plasteel hand and then, as she settled back to the deck, she, much more carefully, began walking toward the door.

“Carefully,” Alice chuckled, but she didn’t look up from the console she was working with, clearly too busy trying to analyze data from the moon’s surface.

Juliet hurried to the lift and then down to the habitation level. As she walked toward her quarters, she subvocalized, “Was it too much to hope that we wouldn’t run into anyone on this job?”

“There’s still the chance there’s no salvage to be found. Alice may be able to turn the ship and burn for Titan soon.”

“Well . . . I don’t want to hope for that because these guys are out a lot of money for fuel and supplies flying so hard out here. I’d feel bad if they went home empty-handed.”

“Even if it meant you didn’t have to combat hostile claim jumpers or pirates?”

“Claim jumpers? Is that accurate? I mean, does anyone really have a claim on a downed pirate ship?”

“Yes! When Alice mentioned the SSFRC, I read through their regulations. Did you know that salvage rights are granted on a first-come-first-salvage basis? If Alice spots the wreck, she can record her claim, and the SSFRC will analyze the location and size of the wreck and give her a claim for a certain amount of time. If the crew can’t finish before their claim is up, then the next salvage crew to file a claim will be allowed to move in, and so on.”

“Do people respect the salvage claims? It seems they don’t listen to the SSFRC about flight plans and all that.” Juliet stepped into her room and pulled out the second drawer of her built-in dresser, revealing her weapons.

“It seems they’re mostly used after the fact to justify violence or to post bounties.”

“Ah,” Juliet sighed. “Lovely.” She looked at her needler and said, “I’m probably gonna be wearing an EVA suit, right? I won’t be able to wear that shoulder holster.”

“That needler is a great weapon, but you’re about to, potentially, get into a heavy firefight. The MP5 is a better option.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s more powerful, accurate, and reliable than the needler in a prolonged firefight. It has enough power and ammunition for suppressing fire and can punch through armor that would challenge the needler.”

“Yeah, and if I get the jump on them, it has this suppressor. Might be nice to keep my momentum without announcing myself,” Juliet said, running her eyes over the vented, eight-inch tube extending from the end of the MP5. Angel made a faint affirmative noise, so she slung it over her shoulder and scooped up her six extra magazines, all loaded with thirty rounds of DLC-coated bullets. The bullets had been in the magazines when she’d looted them up in Madera Canyon, but she’d only recently learned why they had the weird, silky-smooth black coating. “What does DLC stand for again?”

“Diamond-like carbon. Those bullets are excellent at penetrating body armor.”

“Right.” Juliet started toward the cargo bay, an idea in her mind for what to do with the extra magazines.

“Nothing on my scan’s yet,” Alice said into the crew channel. “Our company is still hanging back. I’ve got Hank watching for any movement.”

“How fast could they get down to us if we land?” Bennet asked.

“From there? Unless the pilot wanted to turn the crew to paste, we’re talking hours. Still, they could start sprinting our way when we get into orbit and start to go around the planet’s curvature. In other words, stay on your toes.”

Juliet frowned, wishing she knew more about the ship lurking out there in the debris of the rings. Was it a Pisces with guns? If so, they could, theoretically, murder the crew as they worked on collecting the salvage. If that was too hard, they could probably pump the Kowashi with enough holes to ruin her, then they could try to salvage the wreck themselves. She voiced her concern to Angel, and as usual, the plucky PAI made her feel better.

“If that’s a Pisces class ship, it’s far too small to salvage the wreck, let alone the Kowashi. If those are pirates, they’ll want to kill you and the crew and then steal the Kowashi and use it to steal the salvage.”

“So . . . we’re not going to be murdered from orbit, but I’m probably going to have a fight on my hands. Gotcha.” Juliet pressed her lips into a grim smile and did her best to channel one of her tougher friends, preferably Ghoul or White. “No,” she said, shaking her head and remembering Madera Canyon. “Definitely White . . . maybe Jenson.”