Mission Pack 2: Missions 5-8 (Black Ocean Mission Pack) by J. S. Morin

Author:J. S. Morin [Morin, J. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Speculative
Publisher: Magical Scrivener Press
Published: 2015-11-22T07:00:00+00:00

Moon of Odysseus

Mission 8 of the Black Ocean Series

J.S. Morin

Moon of Odysseus

Mission 8 of: Black Ocean

Copyright © 2015 Magical Scrivener Press

“Blackjack, this is Scarecrow. I finally found it. We’re going to be rich.”

Carl Ramsey raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t often anything showed up on this old comm ID. Few even knew he had it. Checking on it had become a habit more than an expectation of getting a message, but that didn’t mean the message was unwelcome. It was welcome as hell. For months the Mobius had been drifting around, sneaking in and out of colonies, starports, and scrapyards. Small time stuff. A theft here, a barter there, and once in a while a frantic escape.

Carl set the datapad beside him on the bed, still displaying Scarecrow’s message. This could be the real deal. Plenty of shady contacts out there offered too-good-to-be-true opportunities; Carl’s message dump was filled with them. But this was Scarecrow, his old wingman and one of the survivors of Squadron 333. The day Scarecrow’s word wasn’t good enough for him was the day he didn’t deserve to captain a starship.

There were no details in the message, no explanation pending if he read farther down. The only hint was a set of coordinates buried in the comm routing code. It would be a rendezvous site. That would be where they’d meet, if Carl wanted in. And Carl wanted in.

The night was silent, save for the thrumming, mechanical background grumbles that he had learned to all but ignore. The holovid playing in the common room had ended nearly an hour ago—some weepy romance that Rhiannon and Esper were keen on. He couldn’t hear any signs of activity from beyond the door of his quarters. He had time to think while the crew all slept.

Come morning, he’d need to have a plan to convince them all to go treasure hunting.

# # #

Outside the cockpit window, the pin-speckled darkness of the Black Ocean loomed. As Carl watched, the unfamiliar local starscape faded, blurring into the uniform gray of astral space. Counting in his head, he waited. At fifty-eight, the gray darkened into realspace once more, and the stars reappeared. It had been happening at regular intervals all morning as Esper practiced guiding the ship back and forth between the two planes of existence.

The first time he’d noticed them drop into astral, he’d blamed Mort. A random astral drop by an experienced wizard was an annoyance. Instead Mort had informed him that it was part of Esper’s training. Being tossed without warning into a parallel dimension by a novice was downright terrifying. However after a few weeks of not dying, the terror had worn off, replaced by a dull, nagging worry—the same sort of worry as getting onto a decrepit intra-system shuttle or getting worked on by a med tech wearing a “trainee” badge.

“Get out of that goddamn chair.”

The regular pilot of the Mobius tore Carl from his musings. “Hey, Tanny. Got a comm last night. Figured I’d run it by you first.

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