2954-05-13 – Tales from the Inbox: The Search of the Zenith Treader
Lightspeed signal delay ensured that the port controller on The Sprawl didn’t receive Zenith Treader’s request for a docking berth for nearly an hour, and of course the reply signal took nearly as long to work its way back. By the time Gareth Glass saw the indicator that they’d gotten signals from the station, Patricia Lowell was long gone, and the command deck was awash with the light of Sagittarius and Gareth’s favorite music.
He’d chatted with Lowell for some time, mostly about their favorite music, holo-dramas, novels, and vidcasts. This was the sort of thing that most people learned about their shipmates within a few days, but people kept to themselves on Zenith Treader. Perhaps, Gareth mused, that wasn’t as good a thing as he once had thought.
The data stream from the station was highly irregular. It denied immediate docking clearance, which was unusual, instead prescribing a parking orbit right under the guns of one of the system’s military stations. That was a quarantine directive, used for ships returning from forays into the deep Sagittarius Frontier.
There had been mixups before, of course, and they had the better part of four shifts of back-and-forth to sort it out before Treader needed to alter its course one way or another. Gareth fired back a polite request for confirmation, copying the ship’s transponder ident into the message and providing a few other helpful hints to the port controller. The docks at Sagittarius Gate were always busy, so he didn’t grudge the overworked control personnel a few mistakes now and again.
He forwarded the response to the skipper, who gave no response. She was probably composing personal messages in her cabin, and if she saw the update, she probably didn’t think much of it either.
It wasn’t until a half-hour after he’d sent off the confirmation request, when signals started to arrive on military channels, that Gareth began to get concerned. They could handle low-grade military encryption, of course – they’d done contracts with the Navy plenty of times back on the other side of the Gap – but any time they had to, it meant something was up.
Gareth had hardly finished decrypting the messages when Ellia Kossner appeared on deck. “Trouble?” She asked, without preamble.
“Let’s find out.” Gareth turned down his music and put the first transmission on the main display, just ahead of his station. A flickering image of a Navy officer appeared, his uniform crisp and a severe look on his face.
“Starship Zenith Traveler. When you have finished your in-system transit, you will be boarded and searched. If you make any attempt to deviate from the directives of the port controller, you will be fired upon.”
“Damnation.” Kossner sighed. “What now? This is going to mess with our schedule. I was hoping to turn around and start back the other way in four days.”
“Searched.” Gareth repeated, staring at the now-paused recording. “For what? We’ve got nothing on board that wasn’t in our manifest when we left Maribel.”
“And the more they don’t find what some fool thinks we have got, the more they’ll tear my ship apart looking.” The skipper fell heavily into her chair. “But Sagittarius is the military’s game. So we’d better do as they say. Do try to see what they think they’ll find, Gareth.”
Gareth responded to the officer’s video message with a politely worded text query about the nature of the problem, which carried two separate assurances that Zenith Treader had nothing to hide and would cooperate fully. There would be another long delay, of course, before they got any answers.
“There.” He said, sitting back in his chair. “I’ll put the helm on auto for whatever the port sends us, then I’m going to go tidy up my cabin.”
“Why?” Kossner frowned.
“Think they’ll stop at the hold and the storage lockers when they don’t find anything?” Gareth rolled his eyes. “They’ll be in our cabins eventually.”
“Right.” Ellia winced. “I’ll hold things down here. Think I should I announce to everyone else?”
Gareth nodded, then hesitated and shook his head. “I’d send a quiet comm to Sung. The only thing we’ve done differently lately is hire those two techs… Odds are it’s nothing, but if one of them really is moving something, better they don’t know they’re busted until it’s too late.”
The skipper shrugged, saying nothing. Gareth left it at that. It was her ship, after all; if she wanted to make an announcement on the intercom, that was her affair.
I have no news for this audience related to the Håkøya campaign. Offensive action elsewhere seems also to be at a standstill, as if all the forces of both fleets are holding their breath, waiting for the liberation of the jewel of the Coreward Frontier.
