Path to Freedom: The Path, Book One by James Copley

Author:James Copley [Copley, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cannon Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22: Hiding from the Boogie-Man

We were running out of time. The head start we’d gained from our non-standard jump chain was long gone, and hiding from the Clernak'Ta was eating away at our margins. We only had two and a half days to jump back into the Cranotia system, or I’d be in default on the loan. Admittedly, that time limit took into account the minimum transit time to the planet from our projected entry, but if there were any more obstacles, of which I was absolutely sure the bank would be happy to provide, I was going to be ship-less, broke, and stranded.

Ask me for anything but time, I groused silently. The wait was excruciating. I was able to get the occasional update from Joe by making a pest of myself on the bridge, but I could tell he really didn’t want to talk. I could understand his reluctance, but my impatience was getting the better of me, not to mention the lack of ventilation fans and gravity. Or water. I was beginning to truly stink, and not even a full carton of sani-wipes was going to be able to handle my musk for much longer. Thankfully, the waste systems were waterless and could be used with no power or grav, or we would have been up shit creek without a toilet… literally. Not even the food processor was working, so Gina and I were forced to resort to emergency protein tubes which had been stored aboard the regulation escape pod we’d been required to take on board before we launched from Cranotia. The CMV Camel’s lifeboat had been missing when I purchased the ship, which to me just lent credence to the idea that this ship had been purposefully abandoned.

The time wasn’t a complete waste, though. A little bit of… Okay, a lot of convincing, got me a single terminal with access to the passive sensor feeds so I could study the Roo’s arch-enemy, now only two light minutes away. Yet again, I was amazed at the resolution the distributed array was capable of, even at this distance. I liked to think the sensors on a dedicated Confed surveillance platform were comparable, but my gut was telling me that was just pride talking. From what I gleaned from various hints in our dealings with the Roo AI, these sensors were embedded into every single hull tile of the ship. And to make things worse, that wasn’t all the tiles did. They also functioned as image projectors, exactly mirroring the star field from one side of the ship as an image on the skin on the other, perfectly matching the background and making visual detection virtually impossible.

That part of the system was limited in scope, though. Joe mentioned that the effect was mono-directional. You had to know where your enemy was in order to hide from them. Someone looking at the ship from a different vector would see a minor distortion, or offset, in the image projected from

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