Radio Silence by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644705018
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

24

Nyssa had taken to pulling double watches on the quiet bridge. Northwind’s crew didn’t need to know what she really did. A few of them would immediately understand, and all could keep their mouths shut or they wouldn’t be in that portion of the service, but the fewer people who knew who she was, the fewer risks.

Plus, it let Bex and Glen help repair electronics on the derelict, freeing up engineers to handle other tasks. There was always more needed, and only so much time in the day to attempt it.

They’d docked with Northwind twelve hours and seventeen minutes ago. Finished transferring wounded four hours ago and turned the gravity systems back on. Knight Konicek and a crew were in Marrakesh’s flight bay, fabricating a plate to cover the hole in the near flank so they could seal it up.

In an emergency, there were plastic sheets that could be glued in place to hold air, but not for very long, spanning a space that big, as the outermost hole was several meters across, where about half of the energy had liberated directly on Northwind’s hull in that first instant.

Nyssa was mostly alone on the bridge. Right now, her best job was watching the inner portions of the system and identifying everything going on. Northwind had a lot of data, but nobody knew if it had gotten scrambled when the bridge was destroyed. And wouldn’t until Bex and Glen could help wire up a few spans to let Nyssa access those datacores with her tools.

One hundred and eighty-three local ships had been identified and recorded. Most of them small, where wildcatters would nose up to a rock, then drill some holes in it and assay the interior. Nickel, iron, and carbon were fairly common, and useful, but someone finding something up in the platinum groups would be rich when they turned in their claim, and she was reading enough common and unencrypted traffic to understand that there’d been at least one good supernova in the past to seed this place with heavier stuff.

The kind that might even make this system profitable for civilians.

They called it Domnall, though that didn’t apply to any of the planets or moons. Apparently, it was the name of the man who had first surveyed the system and convinced someone to move mining exploration ships out here.

Already, there was something of a base coming into being, docked next to that massive factory ship down where she would have expected the second planet to be orbiting, based on the amount of rubble.

It almost looked like some early celestial interaction had torn apart all of those small worlds closer in, possibly while evicting whatever larger planets might have originally formed in that range.

Just a navigational mess. And a scanner nightmare, as you had to broadcast constantly, then filter out a haze of noise reflecting off all the rubble.

However, it also let her sit quietly and listen. And copy a lot of audio traffic that appeared to be utterly mundane at the moment.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.