Redline Corps 3: Vanguard by Rachel Aukes

Author:Rachel Aukes [Aukes, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

The trip to the Aurora boneyard took several days, not because we couldn’t jump straight there, but because there was a lot more traffic the deeper in-system we traveled. After being caught on way too many satellites and cameras in the Earth area, we didn’t want to be caught on camera again. Knowing a gray ship popped in and out of Earth would be unnerving, but finding out that there was at least one gray ship popping up all around the solar system would escalate “unnerving” to “ready for war.”

As we neared the Aurora boneyard, the sight took my breath away. It reminded me of the stories about the mile-wide island of plastic garbage somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Only instead of plastic, this was a thousand-mile-wide metal sea of starliners, defenders, transports, stations, and other debris, all smashed together. Many were looped together by cables; others just seemed to be tossed into the ball of junk. The remnants of countless battles and even more dreams.

“How in the world are we going to find the Tereshkova in this mess?” I asked.

“Easy, I’m tracking its ADS-B,” Sam replied.

“ADS-what?” Jason asked.

“ADS-B is the unique identifier transmitted by every ship,” Sam answered. “It stands for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. The first ADS-Bs only broadcast when the ship was running and flying, but A-gen tech upgraded them to make a ship always trackable. That way, if a ship went offline somewhere in space, it could be found before someone else ran into it. So, yeah, the Tereshkova’s in this mess. Whether she’s easy to get to or not is another story.”

Sam then cranked the ship to skirt around a hunk of metal that looked like a locker.

“You know, this ship’s tough enough to plow through that without a scratch,” Jason said with a raised brow.

“Old habits die hard,” Sam said easily.

We maintained a thousand-mile separation between us and the boneyard since the space was a minefield of debris. As we flew, I took in the island. Some ships were broken in half, others had huge holes in their hulls, while a few seemed to be in flying condition. As I looked closer, I noticed there were temporary airtubes built between several ships. Lights shone inside one ship. A drone with a floodlight was flying through the broken hull of another.

I jerked. “Wait a second. Is that what I think it is?” I pointed to a spot on the viewscreen. As I zoomed in, the ship was unmistakable. It was a Raptor ship, concealed by wreckage around it.

“Is it powering up?” Jason asked.

“No, but it definitely has power,” Sam said, still plugged into the ship. “Scans are reading life-forms inside too. And not just in that ship, but in the surrounding ships. I’m counting at least thirty.”

“A hidden nest?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” Sam answered.

“Think we should open up a portal and suck it out of here?” Jason asked.

Sam squinted as he communicated with the ship. “Can’t do. They don’t have a wormway system onboard. If they had one, it’s not working anyway.

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