Per Ardua, Ad Astra - Part 2
Koyama noticed it first. The One Piece was just edging around the moon further from their entry point into the system. The wreckage grew increasingly larger the further into the debris field they had traveled, as though the attackers had less time to systematically shred the waiting freighters; maybe they had lost the element of surprise after the first few rounds were fired and the first few ships on the outer edge were destroyed. Koyama started with the biggest pieces first whenever they entered a new field of range, and as Yamapi maneuvered around into the moon's shadow, something about the near surface pinged at the back of Koyama's mind.
The only things keeping the moon from being an asteroid was its large size and relatively tight orbit around the main planet in the Nera system. It was almost totally without atmosphere, and the only light the dark side ever got came reflected up from the planet's surface. That was probably what got Koyama's attention: the dark side was totally dark right now, with the planet positioned between the moon and the system's only sun, but something on the surface of the moon was glowing, very, very faintly, and there was no natural source for the light. Koyama eyeballed the space around them for immediate threats, anything he would need to get Massu and Tegoshi information on quickly, but didn't come up with anything. They had independent, secondary sensors in the gunnery stations; that way they could track targets independently, as well as continue to defend the ship even if something happened to the main sensor array or the cockpit. Of course, at that point you didn't have much ship left, but Koyama saw that as a particular reason to want to defend what was left. Otherwise any of his friends in the crew would just be sitting ducks.
Koyama set his sensors to scan the surface of the moon near the faint glow. It was the kind of light that you couldn't see if you looked at it directly; you had to turn your head to the side and focus on something else, and then you could catch it out of the corner of your eye. His sensors registered a small, blocky dome, pitted and scarred on the outside. Inside, he registered low level working electronics and four, no, five, people as fuzzy green blobs against the empty black backdrop of the sensor screen. There didn't appear to be any weapon placements, or even a generator or engine of any kind. What power they had was auxiliary, bare bones life support maybe, or residual traces of power left over from something else.
"Yamapi," Koyama said, looking up at the ship's current pilot. "There's someone down there." Yamapi was up in an instant, crowding behind Koyama to peer over his shoulder. Koyama pointed to the display that held the life signs, then gestured to the moon's surface below. "Two kilometers west, and we'll be right over it." Another monitor started kicking out an analysis. "Looks like it used to part of a ship."
Koyama twisted to look at Yamapi over his shoulder. "What do you think? See if we can raise anything on video?"
Yamapi nodded affirmation. "No matter who they are, if we leave them down there, they'll either freeze or suffocate as they lose power. Try to get them on the line first. All things considered, better to not surprise them."
***
Koyama sent the Space Queen a brief vid-message before he tried hailing the wreckage embedded in the thin crust of the moon. It was important for them to know that they might have found something, and more important for them to keep an extra attentive eye out--first for anything that might come up on their trails through the debris field while the One Piece's attention was diverted; and second in case what Koyama had stumbled upon was hostile and took them down. Kame radioed back acknowledgment of the message with a quick double burst of static, spacer shorthand for 'I copy,' and then it was time for Koyama to see if the bodies on the moon were willing to talk back.
It took Koyama a few minutes to figure out how to phrase his message without giving away too much information. His first inclination was to ask if they had been involved with the other, now broken ships floating around them, but it would be bad, and potentially very dangerous, if he let something slip and it turned out they weren't involved in the convoy. "Hi, we're here to rescue you--are you the good guys or the bad guys?" seemed just a little too simplistic. Koyama was a born talker, though, and soon he was toggling controls on his console and tightbeaming a video to the battered metal bunker on the moon's surface.
"This is the Sayaendou," he said, choosing to use a fake name for the ship just in case. "Are you in distress? We are landing; please respond. Over," Koyama recorded, and sent it down. He programmed the message to repeat; if the wreckage on the moon had had built-in communications devices at one point at all, there was nothing to say it couldn't have been damaged since. If that were the case, the message might come through garbled or in patches; repetition would allow the inhabitants of the wreck to reassemble the message by parsing together the staticky strings of data that did get through. Koyama picked up some bursts of static from what was left of the ship, but nothing even resembling an audio or video line, and no way to know if the five survivors of the crash had received their message.
All they could do now was take the One Piece down--and wait.
***
There was no way to dock directly with the crumpled remainder of the ship, so Yamapi would have no choice but to set down near it and a few of the crew would have to don vacuum suits to reach the wreckage. The atmosphere was far too thin to be breathable, even assuming it was mostly oxygen in the first place.
"I sent the message, so I'll go," Koyama volunteered himself, standing up carefully as Yamapi maneuvered them down. "That way if they got it, there'll be a face they'll recognize." Koyama was good with people. If the people inside the crashed ship were anything but actively hostile, he'd make an excellent envoy. Koyama going also meant that if the boarders were injured, the ship wouldn't be missing anyone absolutely crucial to take-off. If they were out the pilot or the mechanic and something happened, they could get stranded on the moon just like the shell of a ship already furrowed in the moon's surface.
Yamapi slowly started dropping engine power to the main thrusters and redirected it to the hovercoils, breaking their descent. "Get Ryo to go with you," Yamapi suggested. Someone going needed to be able to handle a firearm just in case. Massu would have been a good choice if anyone other than Koyama were going, but Koyama had a softening effect on everyone and Massu was hardly a ruthless person on his own anyway. Massu would be able to take care of Koyama in a pinch, but Ryo would be able to take the trapped survivors out if they turned out to be more dangerous than they hoped.
Koyama murmured in agreement and made his way out of the cockpit hand over hand as the moon started pulling down into an angle a little out of alignment with the ship's gravity. It would even out again once they actually settled onto the moon's surface, but the descent could be confusing for passengers new to traveling between planets, particularly their stomachs, until they got used to the gravity shift. The Manta 52 was designed with cockpit and the hold on opposite ends of the ship. A long hallway stretched between those two endpoints, berthspace clustered around a narrow neck near the cockpit, then blossoming out into the canteen/kitchen area. From the kitchen, the hall branched into two, the shorter of the two leading 'down' relative to the orientation of the cockpit towards the engines, and the longer reaching 'up' relative to the cockpit and around to give access to the main cargo bay. The design had the engines snugged up against the lower walls of the main hold, while the hall opened onto the cargo bay from above, and stairs zigzagged back and forth along that wall to provide access to the hold floor. Ryo joined him in the hallway in the berth section in the middle of the ship--Yamapi must have toggled him on one of the private lines--and they continued back down into the belly of the ship.
Opposite the bulkhead connecting the cargo bay with the rest of the ship were the big hold doors, used for loading and unloading freight. Nestled at floor level to the left of the loading bay doors was a smaller, strictly human-sized entrance designed as an airlock. This door could be used to create an atmospheric barrier against the airlessness of space, a way to cycle out into the vacuum or back into the atmosphere of the ship without blowing the entire contents of the hold into space. It was handy in emergency repairs to the outside of the ship or in deep-space salvage operations. The airlock also served as a convenient sort of deadbolt in port--much smaller and easier to monitor than the big bay doors, surprise visitors and other intruders trying to gain access to the ship would have to force their way through two layers of airtight bulkheads designed to either seal air in or keep space out. The airlock could be operated from within, though, and along with several automated safety measures designed specifically to keep a blow-out from killing everyone on board, control of the doors could also be routed from the cockpit. It was to this airlock Koyama and Ryo headed.
There was a small closet inside the airlock, and Ryo and Koyama each pulled a vacuum suit out of the depths of that compartment. They weren't pretty, made out of orange and blue plaid material that didn't breathe at all--the point, after all, was to keep the vacuum out and the air in. The pattern served the potentially very important purpose of making anyone wearing a vacuum suit easy to spot--good news if you'd been knocked off the shell of a ship or the skin of a space station, or otherwise stranded in the vastness of space, because if you were easy to see, you were also easy to rescue.
The suits were also bulky, particularly under gravity, but once you struggled inside one, fairly easy to move around in. Once you reached the wrist, the material changed to a more supple, similarly airtight material that allowed you to manipulate tools with something approaching dexterity. The suits also had a faceplate made of the same transparent sheeting that was used in viewports across the galaxy. The back of the vacuum suit held a bulky backpack with emergency oxygen canisters and an O2/CO2 conversion filter inside. Models designed specifically for long-vacuum, zero-gravity jobs, such as ship or station construction, came with generators in the backpack as well. This allowed for long stints in vacuum using just the O2/CO2 conversion filter because there was nowhere to get outside air from, but the standard shipboard model took its main air supply from the ship itself through a retractable hose extending from the bottom of the backpack back to an airlock inside the ship from which atmosphere could be pumped to the suit. This design was particularly handy for vacuum environments--like this moon--that had a significant gravity well because the generators necessary to power zero-atmosphere vacuum suits weigh a lot, and severely limit mobility in gravity. All vacuum suits came with tether hooks that could be clipped to the waist of the suit and then attached to something stable, and these suits were no different. Once Ryo and Koyama had clambered inside their suits, they hooked themselves to the handles on either side of the closed airlock door that led to the vacuum of space. The tethers were retractable like the oxygen hoses, so they would play out behind them as they ventured from the ship. Then they attached their oxygen hoses to the nozzles designed for atmosphere transference inside the compartment and cycled through the system to test it. Finding everything in working order, they flipped the panel that controlled the airlock's inner door, sealing them inside.
Yamapi landed gently, hovercoils sending rolling waves of moon dust spiraling away from the One Piece. There were deep gouges in the moon's surface leading up to the wreck; it must have bounced a few times before eventually rolling itself to a stop. Yamapi landed on the opposite side of the wreckage from its crash trail. The moon had little in the way of atmosphere to burn up space debris on its approach, so the surface here was still pitted and uneven from thousands of years of impacts great and small, but it was more stable because it was less recently disturbed and had time for gravity to settle it into place. Yamapi kept the engines running. They wouldn't be able to take off until Ryo and Koyama had gotten back inside--not without cutting off their main air supply, de facto abandoning them on the moon, and opening up the ship to a lot of potential damage with the docking bay doors open like that, but they wouldn't have to wait like a sitting duck for the engines to warm up if there was trouble. Once Ryo and Koyama were back inside, they'd be able to cut and run.
The main engines settled into the dull hum of the hovercoils as the ship settled into place, and Ryo tripped the panel that controlled the bulkhead separating them from the outside of the ship. There was an emergency override handle in a compartment below the panel that would open the door immediately and blow the air from the airlock, but using the regular controls on the panel cycled the air out incrementally before the airlock door opened, saving the ship some costly oxygen. Already sealed inside their vacuum suits, the atmosphere draining away from inside the room had no effect on Ryo or Koyama; they simply had to wait until the cycle finished and the hatch opened. A light came on over the hatch just before its doors slid open; a similar light shone above the airlock's inner door, and another would be glowing on Yamapi's control panel in the cockpit, a warning that the outer hatch door was open.
The gravity on the moon was maybe one eighth of standard, so Ryo and Koyama lined themselves up carefully on the edge of the hatch so that they had a clear line of sight to the wrecked ship before them. Koyama checked his safety line and set it to release the line easily, then held up a hand to get Ryo's attention. Koyama pointed down at his waist, reminding Ryo to set his own line's release, and Ryo gave him a thumbs up in response. He'd done it already. At Ryo's nod, they both pushed away from the One Piece, approaching what was left of the other ship in leaps and bounds.
***
The wreck's airlock was ominously standing open when Ryo and Koyama reached the ship. Ryo tried to tell himself it was probably nothing--it might not even be able to close with the damage the ship took to bring it down, might not even have doors with the damage the ship took crash landing on this isolated hunk of rock. Of course, that made it a lot harder to potentially get anyone out alive, unless they happened to have vacuum suits actually in what parts of the ship were still habitable.
Koyama made it to the entrance just a little sooner than Ryo, longer legs propelling him further, and paused a little on the threshold. Ryo couldn't tell if he was waiting for him to catch up, or if Koyama was looking for a doorbell. Ryo didn't hesitate when he reached the door a few moments later, just barreled inside. No way to assess the situation from the outside, after all.
Koyama followed him inside and tapped the panel inside the door. The doors started sliding together from the top and bottom of the recessed hatch, but ground to a halt about halfway down. They made a few more half-hearted attempts to close completely, but jammed more than halfway open, and Koyama tapped the panel again. The doors slid open without problem. Ryo's relieved sigh echoed loudly inside his helmet. If the doors jammed shut, they'd be as trapped as whoever was already inside, and two extra bodies would use up whatever stores of food, and water and air were in the wreckage faster. Koyama and Ryo toggled their suits to internal air cycle and detached the hoses supplying them with air from the One Piece. The drop in air pressure would cause the hoses to seal themselves; unsealing them was an annoyingly complicated process, but there was no way they could seal the disabled airlock with hoses trailing from them to the other ship.
Ryo tied the ends of the hoses down outside the entrance. They could be retracted automatically from the ship, but if all went according to plan, it would be easier to collect them on their way out and bring them back themselves. Koyama, meanwhile, had pulled out a large white tarp. He spread it out while Ryo got back out of the door way, then positioned it carefully against the edges of the hatch. Ryo moved to help hold the two bottom corners in place, and then Koyama pressed the button on the top edge of the rectangle of white material.
They were in vacuum so there was no noise, but Ryo still imagined a soft sucking sound as the material adhered to the edges of the door and created a seal. It was a temporary patch, and it wouldn't last for more than thirty-six hours if you left it alone, but they shouldn't need nearly that amount of time. If they did, they'd have much larger problems to worry about.
The air cycling through the vacuum suit gets a touch more humid, O2/CO2 not quite able to filter out all of the extra moisture on Ryo's breath. It wouldn't get worse than that, but it was less comfortable than all the clean air that had been coming from the One Piece, and Ryo turned to focus on the inner bulkhead door.
Ryo bypassed the controls on this door entirely. The airlock might be airtight for the moment, but it was still a vacuum inside and the mechanics in the door wouldn't recognize the seal as safe. It was a built-in safety measure on all but the very oldest of ships still flying, because nothing was quite so abruptly fatal as sudden exposure to vacuum. Instead, Ryo crouched down and popped the front off a hidden panel towards the bottom of the wall. It took Ryo just long enough to start wishing he'd brought Shige for him to finally trip the override control and the door popped open with a whoosh of rushing air.
Ryo stood up to find five professional-grade guns being very carefully trained on them, their owner's hands steady as they knelt or stood behind protective, if makeshift, barriers. All five were dressed in dark, presumably military issue garb that covered their torsos with light body armor and masks that hid their faces. It wasn't heavy stuff, but it would be enough to stop or deflect a bullet, and neither he nor Koyama had time to get to their guns. He glanced back at Koyama, a pace behind him, and, as one, Ryo and Koyama slowly raised their hands.
***
The door popped a little sooner than Nino was expecting, in all honesty. None of them betrayed any surprise in their stances, though, and Nino couldn't help but feel a flash of pride for the rest of the bridge crew of the Arashi. Nino wasn't expecting anything less from them. They'd been together for years, ever since training back at the academy, and he knew he could count on them no matter what. They were closer than family at this point, and all very, very good at their jobs. No gun points wavered as the two humans in vacuum suits noticed them and slowly raised their hands in surrender.
Matsujun, standing behind a hastily upended table closest to the now open airlock gestured with his beretta for the two intruders to enter the ship. They complied, still moving slowly; it might just be a result of the slightly stronger gravity in the main area of what was left of the Arashi, but Nino thought it was probably motivated primarily by a healthy sense of caution. They didn't have enough auxiliary power to devote to creating full gravity on board, and the shorter one hadn't had too much trouble standing back up before he realized they were there waiting for them.
Sho had managed to piece together most of the short transmission. They'd sounded like civilian runners, but it never hurt to be careful. Nino resisted the temptation to think that if they'd been a little more careful earlier they could have avoided everything that had happened in the space above this useless hunk of rock. There was no way they could have avoided this, nothing they could have done differently or better to get any of the convoy out of what had happened. They'd been ambushed, a Bizi Kei force jumping in behind them so neatly on their tails that the first few freighters hit by the barrage had broken up before half the other ships in the convoy had realized what was going on. It wasn't a huge force that had attacked them, but they were just a freighter convoy--maybe one or two guns per merchant ship--and the military escort Jimsho had sent had been small. The supply mission had been top secret--the higher ups deeming it better the fewer people were involved--and it wasn't expected to be dangerous. One frigate, the Arashi, with half a squadron's worth of fighters would have been more than enough to handle a larger than usual pirate attack; if only it had been pirates that had attacked them. The force Bizi Kei had sent had annihilated them.
Matsujun holstered his beretta, and motioned for their two guests? saviors? to remove their helmets. There was no point in telling them what to do--vacuum suits, as part of being atmosphere tight, were also soundproof. Verbal instructions would be wasted breath.
The shorter one moved to remove his helmet first, keeping his movements slow and non-threatening, while the taller one copied his actions just a few beats behind. Across from him, Aiba broke into a grin barely visible behind his mask, and holstered his weapon; the rest of Arashi's bridge crew following suit. Matsujun pulled off his mask, and nodded at Ryo, who grinned back. "Na, Ryo. It's been a while. Think you still owe me dinner."
"Like Brahe, I do. What's the point of coming out of pilot school after you if you can't even be a good sempai?"
***
It wasn't as simple as just packing everyone into vacuum suits and leaving, not with the military. After a brief discussion with Ryo, in which they confirmed that there was still some hold space available on the One Piece and bartered some of those materials in exchange for use of that space, they let Ryo and Koyama crawl out of their suits, and then basically consigned them to a corner to sit and wait for them to pack up secret military information and equipment. Arashi's crew worked quickly and efficiently, and it only took them a few hours to box everything that might be useful or necessary, even draining enough of the atmosphere into small, portable tanks that it forced Ryo to have to take careful, deeper breaths or feel just a touch light-headed. Sho and Matsujun filled two small cargo nets with the materials they had salvaged from their ship and dragged them out into the airlock.
They came back into the hallway with vacuum suits for Arashi's bridge crew and dropped them in the middle of the now-cleared floor for their shipmates to take their pick. They were all solid colors, unlike the ones stocked on the One Piece, but they made up for it by being almost impossibly garish. Matsujun kept a bright purple suit for himself and started climbing inside. Ryo took that as his cue to suit back up and in a few moments the area was a mass of people struggling into brightly colored vacuum suits.
Once Aiba had finished climbing into his own eye-catchingly green vacuum suit, he disappeared back into the ship, moving out of sight away from the airlock. Ohno wandered into the airlock and clipped one of the bundled cargo nets to his belt. Sho attached the other to himself, and Matsujun grabbed part of the net to help haul it towards the entrance. Nino had a hand on Ohno's net, helping him keep it out of the way of the other net's line. Once they were out of the ship's gravity, all it would take was a little push, angled and timed correctly, and the nets would sail out behind them, mass giving them momentum.
Aiba was back just a few minutes later, palming the door shut behind him. "We've got twenty minutes," he told Ohno, before settling his helmet into place. They weren't hooked up to the Arashi, naturally, since the whole point was to leave it behind. Besides, they'd taken most of the atmosphere out already; there would be nothing to pump down the hoses even if they were hooked up.
Matsujun put a hand on Ryo's shoulder before he could seal his helmet on. "Twenty minutes. Think Yamapi can get us off this rock before then?" he smirked.
Ryo snorted. "Of course he can. Pi's the second best pilot this side of Freetown. We'd be away faster if I were flying, but someone had to come rescue your sorry tails."
The sound of Matsujun's laugh was cut off abruptly as his helmet sealed on and there was no way for the sound to carry. Koyama moved to the front of the group of people massed in the airlock. He looked around at the others, getting thumbs ups from each as they confirmed that they were sealed in and their O2/CO2 conversion systems were working properly, and then hit the tab on the emergency patch. The patch popped off immediately, crumpling up into a little ball from the force of unsealing. Koyama caught the ball as it disengaged from the edges of the airlock hatch, before the rush of atmosphere out of the airlock could drag the used patch out and away from them.
Ryo moved up and hooked his air hose and tether back to his vacuum shit, then did Koyama's for him so he didn't have to lose time messing with the patch in his gloved hands. Then, they pushed off from the Arashi, leaving it broken and truly abandoned, with its crew following behind them.
***
Ryo waited for the atmosphere to cycle back into the airlock on the One Piece, impatience fueled by anxiousness and a mental clock ticking down far too quickly. There was no atmosphere to send shock waves at them, but there was enough air left in the wreck to create a decent-sized fireball. Ryo didn't know how many explosives Aiba had set, exactly, but if it was enough to tear up what was left of the Arashi, it would be enough to send hunks of hull and chunks of moon flying at them. They needed to take off now, but Yamapi wouldn't know that until there was enough atmosphere in the airlock for him to take off his helmet.
Ryo counted to sixty again in his head. It took about six minutes for the air to make a complete cycle usually, so Ryo impatiently counted seconds away. Three minutes should be around high altitude-thin atmosphere, not fun to breathe, exactly, but not fatal, and not going to knock him out the moment he popped the seal. Ryo counted to sixty a third time, and then another thirty to be safe.
He took a deep breath, pulled his helmet off, and toggled the comm controls. "Pi, we're all in, you need to lift of now," Ryo shouted, and then his voice was drowned out by the sudden roar of engines working to break out of the pull of the moon's gravity.
The atmosphere finished cycling into the airlock before they were entirely away from the moon, and the inner door slid open smoothly. Ryo undid and climbed out of the rest of his vacuum suit; around him everyone else started doing the same. "You can leave the stow here; we'll deal with it later. Koyama, why don't you take them to the galley? I've got to go tell Yamapi what's up." Ryo left the rest of them still crawling out of their vacuum suits and disconnecting the cargo tethers and made for the stairs at the back of the hold. The engine quieted down as the One Piece climbed higher and had to strain less against the moon's tug, settling back into it's usual, ignorable background hum.
***
Ryo let Yamapi do the actual negotiating. Ryo wasn't very good at it--he was not patient or accommodating enough--and Arashi's crew had an advantage because they'd already rescued them--it was pretty unlikely that after all that they would chuck them out the nearest airlock after all. Ryo supposed they could, if they were that kind of crew, but then they would also have a bunch of Brahe only knows what kind of military secrets mixed in with the converter valves and galley pots and water they'd salvaged. Military secrets, even if you didn't know you had them, got you into trouble, and fast. Ryo wanted to make his run, get his pay, and get them off his ship. Old friends or not, they were military first now; those kinds of connections could be good for business, but such entanglements tended not to be good for survival. Ryo thought death was pretty bad for business.
Yamapi called the three best pans Arashi had brought, and four fifths of the clean atmosphere. The pans were frosting, just because he wanted them. Ryo wasn't going to begrudge him that. The atmosphere, though, was a big break. Air was expensive in space. Sure, it was free planetside--assuming you weren't trying to bottle it and bring it aboard--and sure, every ship had a filtration system, larger, more sophisticated versions of the one-person model mounted on the back of every vacuum suit, but clean air was a commodity.
Air wasn't like other necessities. A body needed food and water and heat, but if you had to go without for a while you could manage. You could compensate, layering clothes until you got your ship somewhere warmer, or fixed the broken pieces, or were rescued. Sure, if you didn't manage to do those things, you would freeze to death, but you had some time. Run out of water, and you could last a few days, more if you were willing to junk some systems for the water they ran on; and food, you could go weeks without food in a pinch. You wouldn't come out well, and it wasn't something anyone would ever volunteer for, but you could survive and probably long enough to get out of it. But air, if your ship ran out of air, it was over. Even if just your filtration system went down, you had until you breathed everything already in the ship to fix it, and even long before all the oxygen was gone there would be pockets of gasses that would put you out, maybe for good. And blowing a leak was instant death. Yamapi scored a not-so-small fortune with the atmosphere tanks, either in profits or savings.
"We've got room in the hold for what you've brought, but we're tight on berthspace for you," Yamapi told Commander Ohno, shaking his head. "The One Piece is a freighter first, and it's designed as a freighter. There's not a lot of extra space for passengers." The commander didn't seem too terribly upset about it, though Matsujun was making horrified noises in the background at the prospect of sharing berths. Must be nice to be a lieutenant in the Jimsho, if it got you your own bunk. The quarters were going to be really tight though. Five extra bodies was a lot on a freighter this size, just one short of an entire second crew. They had one extra two-person berth, kept clear for the few times they ran paying customers as well as their cargo, but there would be a lot of tripling up.
"I'll talk to the Space Queen and see what they've got. I know their hold's full up because I helped fill it, but I'm pretty positive they've got an extra berth like we do, since they're also a six-person crew. I'm not sure if they usually keep it open or not, but they might have space for at least one of you, if they're willing to take you on."
It ended up not being very difficult to raise the Space Queen, who had been waiting for contact since the One Piece had climbed back into orbit. Kame listened through Koyama's rambly explanation, and then let out an exasperated sigh and said "Ok. Get Yamapi or Ryo over to the vidview to talk to Jin about docking options. I guess we're coming over." If they were taking anyone on board the Space Queen, they'd all have to be there to make that decision.
***
Jin and Matsujun--now a lieutenant in the Jimsho Confederacy's premier fleet, formerly of the Arashi--didn't get along, which was the entire reason Ryo tried to talk Kame into taking Matsujun on board. Jin and Matsujun never really had liked each other, and neither of them seemed intent on making up any time soon. They'd all been to flight school together, Ryo, Jin, and Yamapi, with Matsujun just a few years ahead of them. Jin and Matsujun had taken an instant disliking to each other for reasons unknown--probably they didn't actually have any. Life had been more peaceful once Matsujun had graduated, since they couldn't run into each other in the hallways and then come bitch to Ryo about how the other had been breathing his air, or had looked at him funny, or hadn't acknowledged his greeting, or whatever trivial slight it was that day. Life had also gotten a lot more boring after Matsujun had graduated, and Ryo would have enjoyed getting to watch the chaos it would inflict on the Space Queen to have them both in such close quarters. It might knock Kame's other screw loose, and Ryo had even money that Koki would lock Jin and Matsujun in a room together just to see who walked out alive.
Ryo's brilliant, sadistic plan was derailed when Matsujun walked into the room, saw Jin, and promptly walked back out again. A couple of them on the Space Queen would appreciate the humor inherent in the situation, but none of them would really want to live with it long term. Ryo couldn't quite blame them for that.
"All right, fine, you big diva. You can stay here," Ryo yelled through the doorway after Matsujun. Everyone always had to ruin his fun.
***
Eventually, Matsujun was coaxed back into the galley and talked into acting like an adult instead of a spoiled child. That's what Jin had called it, anyway, which hadn't really helped. In the end, it was arranged that Sho and Aiba would move to the Space Queen. Kame and Koki would have to clean out the extra room because they'd re-arranged the cargo hold for extra space by moving some staples into the room while it was empty. Now about to receive passengers, they'd have to do some re-arranging again. Kame and Ueda looked vaguely horrified at how cheerful Aiba seemed to be, particularly since they'd seen the Arashi blow. Average mid-level officers stationed to small frigate-class ships could be perky. Secret demolitions experts who were also mid-level officers stationed to small frigate-class ships shouldn't beam so disarmingly. It was kind of disturbing.
Lt. Commander Nino and Commander Ohno would stay on the One Piece along with Matsujun. A little more discussion there put them all in the same berth, preferring to be cramped together than be cramped with anyone else. That was the easy part, sleeping arrangements and knocking together payment for them. Yamapi had already gotten theirs covered; the Space Queen wanted some of the spare engine parts that had been pulled from the Arashi before Aiba had blown it. They had a buyer somewhere who would be interested, and willing to pay a pretty penny for first pick. There was a little bump when Sho wanted to confirm that this mysterious buyer of theirs wasn't going to turn around and sell the parts to the Bizi Kei Alliance. Giving parts away to the enemy wasn't something Jimsho was interested in doing. Nakamaru assured him the buyer was firmly in Jimsho territory, and that was the end of that concern.
Then Yamapi brought up the convoy.
They'd all been dancing around the topic, trying to ignore the debris hanging in space all around them by working out all the other details first--where to put their new cargo, where to put their passengers, how they'd pay for passage, and what, exactly, everything was worth to them--but there was only so long you could put something like that off. At the very least, the specs of this job had been bumped up from 'slightly secret, slightly shady military supply run' to 'could really get us killed because it sure took something out of everyone else.' Yamapi tried to avoid jobs like that whenever possible, not willing to risk his crew or his ship, and past experience with the Space Queen told him they did about the same. It was hard enough staying in the air and keeping the business running. Getting dead was a good way to go out of business.
The bridge crew of the Arashi glanced at each other before Sho cleared his throat. "They knew we were here."
"They were waiting in system?" Kame asked from down the table.
Sho shook his head. "No, they jumped in on our tails. We'd just about collected all our stragglers," and here he paused and gave them all a strange, unreadable look, "Everyone but you, actually--they came in hot and fast. A lot of them. We'd moved the Arashi further into the system, getting ready to take point on the way out. We had some fighters too. We barely got them deployed at all. We were totally blindsided."
The two freighters' crews listened grimly as Sho related how the small freighter convoy hadn't stood a chance, how even if they hadn't been ambushed it was unlikely many of them would have survived to limp out of the system because the force brought to bear on them was so much more than a single frigate and its fighters could handle. "It was like the force was specially designed to have just enough fire power to take us out and wipe all the freighters off the map. They didn't want anyone to get away. No survivors. But they weren't wasting any firepower either. They had more than enough to take us down if that had been their whole goal, but the way they took out every ship in system? That was almost systematic."
Seated to his right, Matsujun cut in. "Any one of you could have let the rendezvous point slip. Twenty-five separate cargo ships, crews ranging from four to ten, that's a lot of people not to have one slip up." Intentionally or unintentionally, he didn't say, but the accusation was there. Matsujun was military. He knew the pilots on these ships, so he was giving them the benefit of a doubt, but he didn't really trust independent spacers to know when to keep their mouths shut, and it showed. "Thing is, none of you knew how many other ships were going to be involved in this run. None of you knew what kinds of ships, how big. All you had was a time and place, and that information was relayed to you late, so you'd have less time sitting on the info in port somewhere. The only lines all of that information was traveling through were Jimsho lines, which means we have a leak somewhere, and somewhere big.
"Takki needs to know about this. He needs to know in person, because we can't trust that any other lines of communication we use won't have the same security breaches as the rendezvous information did. You need to take us there." There was a moment of total silence when Matsujun stopped talking, his words collectively processing.
Then Ryo was up on his feet, staring at Matsujun in incredulous shock, and didn't quite shout, "Like, Tycho Brahe on an erzot cracker we are! Our job is to get your stupid frapping cargo to wherever the hell it was supposed to go. That's what we're getting paid for. That doesn't include taking you Brahe knows where on some kind of military sightseeing tour. " Matsujun was up in a spacer's second, outraged at being refused and maybe a little bit shocked too, because he was used to his orders being followed. He knew he was requesting instead of commanding, logically, but it hadn't really sunk in on some level that requesting meant the spacers could say no.
Jin was up when Matsujun was, dislike for the other man adding to his dislike for the idea. Koyama and Koki both jumped up then too, each looking more like they were getting ready to try to defuse the rapidly degenerating situation than inflate it. Honestly, Yamapi wasn't sure how much good it was going to do. Koki put a hand on Jin's shoulder, pulling back just a little, enough to say back down without putting enough order in it to raise Jin's hackles further. Koyama didn't touch Ryo yet, giving the shorter man some space still, but he slid close enough that he could get in the way if Ryo decided Matsujun would look better after he got a chance to rearrange his face. Matsujun glared back and forth between Ryo and Jin and the tension in the room ratcheted up even higher. "You don't understand," Matsujun started. Jin shrugged off Koki's hand.
"It's ok, Jun." His voice wasn't loud, but it was pitched to cut through the noise. "We can get transport from Kefera. Their job isn't to get us to Command," Ohno said. Matsujun turned to look at him, and Koki put his hand back on Jin's shoulder. He didn't shrug it off this time. Ryo relaxed a little and came back down onto his heels from the balls of his feet. "Let them do their jobs and get this cargo where it's supposed to be going. We need it there more now than ever."
***
After that, the trip to Kefera was pretty uneventful. Koki and Kame got the extra berth on the Space Queen clear of spare parts and extra food, and Sho and Aiba moved in without much trouble. Matsujun, Ohno and Nino bunked down in the One Piece as they'd agreed earlier. Tegoshi managed to scrounge up an extra fold-away set of bedding from somewhere, and Kame frankly didn't care how they slept over on the other ship.
They all spent some time conferring about the best route to take, particularly now that their military escort was short any actual defensive capabilities. It was not incredibly far from Nera to Kefera, but the shortest route was also straight through no-man's land, an empty string of systems that had an unfair share of space pirates, and a couple of radically militant planetary governments whose official diplomatic policy might actually have been 'Shoot first; ask questions later.' Other routes would add days of travel time to their course. After consultation with Shige and Koki, respectively, it was decided the freighters had enough fuel to make one of the longer routes without stopping to refuel--something none of them wanted to do.
The run itself went smoothly. Nothing broke, they had enough food and no one mangled it too badly in the making, no one started any fights, either about whether or not they should really make an extra stop wherever Takki and Tsubasa's operation headquarters were or about who really had the next shift doing dish duty. Everyone was a little tense, which for Kame translated to nearly compulsive make-work. He rechecked the cargo in the hold three times against the inventory roster--the first two he even talked Nakamaru and Junno into helping--before breaking out charts of all the systems near Kefera to see which port would be best to hit next. Sho had mentioned that it would be better for mission security if they weren't seen taking anything on too close to Kefera, and Nino had pointed out that they'd leave less of a trail themselves that way; since he didn't want to become one of the Jimsho Confederacy's regular runners, the less exposure the Space Queen got for the jobs she did take for them, the better.
All in all, even with the extra day and a half it took them to hit Kefera and unload, and the extra day they were going to take to get far enough away from the system to look like they were somewhere else, their down time in transit seemed to melt by. Kame was too much of a worrier to assume that just because nothing bad had happened meant nothing would, but he also didn't see any reason to jump at shadows that probably weren't there.
They were all relieved drop off their passengers and their cargo, and get paid. Lifting off from the fifth planet in the Kefera system, it felt like they were leaving behind more than the weight of the planet's gravity. Kame toggled the vidview over to the One Piece. "Later," he said, sketching a little mock salute to Ryo, who was at the communications console waiting to take his stint at flying once they were out system.
"Much," Ryo replied with a friendly smirk, and then the Space Queen and the One Piece headed for opposite sides of the system and parts unknown.
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