Out of the Dark: An Epic Space Opera Odyssey Series by Mark Henwick

Author:Mark Henwick [Henwick, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Marque
Published: 2022-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

E10. Chapter 4

Minutes later, with Karlin off the ship, Bjorn and Gunny came back on board, we closed the ramp and I hurried back to the bridge, opening my collar and giving my itchy skin some relief and cool air.

“How did it go?” Shami asked.

“Okay. Better than I thought at the start. I guess, at the moment, Karlin wouldn’t arrest Maykn if the Sambuk turned up here, but at least he might be actively looking for a reason to seize the ship.”

“But what if Maykn just arrives in the system and stays outside the Mez until we have to move?” Bjorn said, as he began to strip out of his armor.

“If he did, there would be nothing we could do about it, other than fight him as we make a break for Chang space.” I ran my hand over my buzz cut. “But as soon as Maykn starts behaving like that, his cover is blown. Even if he has a deal with the committee here, they couldn’t cover up something like that. The details would be logged on the navigation beacon and then everyone who passed through the system would know the ship is a pirate, and that he fakes his ID. The word would spread. After a while, the Sambuk wouldn’t be able to dock anywhere except pirate systems. He doesn’t want that.”

Of course, he might not attack us in the Dulong system. If he got close enough to us as we entered Chang space, he could work out where we were going and chase us there. He’d chased us before and we’d gotten away, but we had a mission; we had to keep heading for Earth. We couldn’t just jump to arbitrary destinations to throw him off the trail. Maykn would work that out, and at some point on that route, he would catch us in an empty system.

But at this moment, he didn’t know where we were, and if he backtracked and arrived here by chance, we had some safety. That was as far as we could take it now.

We had other important business which needed to be investigated.

“Piotr, have you found anything?” I asked.

Piotr had been reading the feeds from every news service on the station, looking for an update on the situation from Maynard’s Star.

“No, skipper.” He looked puzzled, as he should.

We’d been downloading information from the moment we’d arrived in the Dulong system. The news from the navigation beacon was brief. I hadn’t expected anything from that source. Broadcast news from the planet and the orbital station were more detailed; they contained general information about politics in other star systems. But nothing from Maynard’s Star, and that was the point when I started getting concerned.

Now we were feeding directly from the information hub on the station. Docking ships would just dump the contents of their entire newscatcher database into it. Everything from anywhere they had visited, and those ships included ones that had routed through Maynard.

Nothing.

A complete absence of news about the disappearance of Princess Lorraine or any political unrest on Maynard’s Star was disturbing.

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