Hunter's Oath by Richard Tongue

Author:Richard Tongue [Tongue, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

With Samarkand running on such a small staff, Astrogation was usually unmanned, the required ship functions handled from the bridge, but now it had been pressed into use once again, Zhou manning the controls while Kozak and Luther looked on, watching as the walls of the room seemed to disappear, instead replaced with empty, endless space, a series of stars lighting up to show those where outposts had latterly vanished.

“Cygnus Station was the first, as far as we can tell,” Kozak said. “Then Delta Nine, and Zhang’s World. All small outposts, no more than a hundred people in total, but all vanished without a trace. Delta Nine was a surface base, and according to the data we have, there’s nothing there but a crater now. Not even any sign of debris. Meaning that someone decided to cover their tracks.”

“I’ve been to all of them,” Luther said, eyes wide. “A long time ago, of course, but while I was wandering around the Rim, I followed leads all over the map. All of them had some trace of ancient contact, nothing that I could ever really prove, not to anyone else’s satisfaction, but part of the trail that led me out here in the first place.”

“What sort of proof did you find?” Zhou asked.

“At Cygnus Station, a trace of ancient alloy, or what I thought was an ancient alloy, something unlike anything I’d ever seen before. The sample was brought in by a prospector who was investigating some anomalies during a survey run, part of a larger node. The asteroid was on a strange orbit, one that took it a long way out from the primary.”

“Gas giant perturbation.”

“No large planets in that system. I’ll grant that it isn’t impossible as an explanation, but it seems unlikely to me. Not when there is a more reasonable answer, that someone moved it in the distant past.”

Nodding, Kozak said, “I’d like to take a look at that asteroid.”

“So would I. It was out of range of anything on the station by the time I got there. There was another flyby scheduled three months ago, but I was busy here working on the Vault.” He paused, then said, “I should have tried to organize an expedition, I know, but when I was excavating something like that, it just didn’t seem like a high priority.”

“I would probably have felt the same way,” Kozak replied. “What about the other two? Delta Nine?”

“Traces of what looked like the spoil from a mining operation on the world the station orbited. Spoil heaps.”

“Was there another possible explanation?”

“Several, but they looked too regular to be natural formations of any kind. There wasn’t much down there, either, but a geologist I was working with suggested that there were faint races of rare elements, or at least, that there should be. I thought it confirmation that there was something out here worth looking at.”

“And the third?”

“Footprints in an undisturbed crater, signs of a potential landing site from a long, long time ago.”

Nodding, Zhou said, “I think I remember reading about that in an old book.

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