Vast Mantis: Mantis Saga 4 by Jim Henderson

Author:Jim Henderson [Henderson, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-16T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight: Suva

Most of the crew was busy during the jump to Suva. Elsbeth and Peter had quite a bit of preventive maintenance to do since Mantis had been out for several months already and had been impacted by the EMP bursts. Likewise, Shao had some fine-tuning to do on the sensors, which had been used extremely heavily for weeks. Raiza was working to meticulously catalogue and secure all her samples of the Ruda and the plague. She was also working on a detailed write-up on the plague, its apparent origin, and spread. Ximon, with a lot of help from Mantis and Euclidia, was writing up detailed reports on the mission so far.

In the past, Mantis’ missions had primarily been for the KSF, so Ximon wrote reports much like he had during his decades of KSF service. However, this time Mantis’ contract was with Robatham Associates and they were operating under an agreement that limited how much they could discuss without approval from Robatham. This was odd and unfamiliar to Ximon, so he was working closely with Silas on reporting.

Ximon would owe reports to Robatham on different aspects of the mission and Silas would owe some as Robatham’s investigator. It would then, notionally, be up to Robatham to inform their customers of their findings, including the KSF. However, Ximon felt he had an obligation to pass some of this stuff to the KSF as soon as possible. He had gotten Silas to agree to send a message to Robatham as soon as they were back on a communication route. Ximon’s hope was to get approval to report at least some of this to the KSF as soon as they got back to Tixaya, preferably by the time they got to Xalanan or whatever Scout base they hit first. Otherwise, he would have to be very careful what he could say. In case that was a problem, Ximon had worked out a scheme with Mantis and Euclidia where certain sections of reports would be flagged with different symbols so they could quickly generate different versions if there were only some things they could share.

Ximon also ensured that everyone was keeping track of supplies and consumables used so he could keep a reasonably up-to-date invoice of costs thus far. They had gotten a pretty good advance of funds but would still have a hefty invoice to submit when they got home, assuming they did.

Ximon also wanted to plan for the mission in Suva, so a few days into jump he had Silas, Elsbeth, Shao, and Peter join him in the cargo bay for a meeting around the beacon they were to put in place. Mantis, as ever, was nearly omnipresent in most areas of the ship. Silas and Peter had already uncrated the beacon and had it up on on a stand, so it was easy to see. It was an irregular shape about one by two meters. It was a strange gray-black color with a few buttons and a small display on the top and a couple of well-sealed access doors near the bottom.

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