Bad Trajectory

Silas had access to a ship; all Remnant clan captains were assigned one. Few owned them outright. Silas was not one of them.

Slender and smooth, the Peregrine was gull-winged for reentry, but from the lack of carbon scoring, it had never been planetside.

The Peregrine wasn't old. Rem clans had been pulling schematics from wrecks for centuries. However, only now were they getting cocky enough to run the printers at the Drift’s Edge shipyard, and the Peregrine was one of the first. Its AI core was a repurposed Acolyte mind. Rems were always doing that, making droids do what they weren't supposed to.

'How much longer?' Pax said through gritted teeth.

They were on a high-g brake-burn. Had been for days.

Vetch hated them.

He hated the ship too; it was small, a cockpit and a small cargo hold. When under acceleration, they were pinned into the pressure-absorbing gel of a crash chair. They didn't leave the cockpit. Waste went out through their suits' plumbing, and food was delivered through liquidated protein packs. They'd pointed their nose at the point in space their target would be in a few months, then burned as hard as they could up to half-c, until they flipped to slow down just as hard. Drugs kept them out of it while the ship ran itself for the longest haul, but that still meant days with no options but to think.

Vetch hated that the most.

'What's wrong, Pax?' Silas said. 'This is the fun part, one last push on the brakes before we land right on target.'

Vetch smirked. He'd noticed something Silas missed.

'We're off target,' Vetch said.

'What?'

'That last adjustment, the ship miscalculated, we're off target point-oh-two-five. I'm fixing it,' Vetch explained. 'Slew, on my mark.'

Vetch prepped the thruster sequence that would correct their trajectory. He didn't know whether the AI that ran the ship was bad at numbers or doing it on purpose, but he was always correcting micro-mistakes in the nav.

'Mark.'

The gravity shifted momentarily as the port thruster fired for half a second.

'Good spot,' Silas said. 'That's why I made you pilot.'

As Vetch remembered it, he'd made himself the pilot after the last one froze and got himself killed. Helped that he was good at it. Vetch was good at a lot of things as long as those things were dangerous. He didn’t get a choice, not with the hand he’d been dealt. You either learned to swim or you went under.

'Ten minutes left on the burn,' Doc said, voice flat in his ear. 'I'm adjusting your cocktail, adrenaline queued for recovery.'

‘What’s that?’ Pax said, flicking the chair controls and tagging a point of light on the display.

'Fuck,' Silas said. 'It's a drive flare.'

'You said we'd be alone.' Vetch said. The ship pinged two more on the display and calculated their trajectory.

Right on their target.

Vetch set his jaw.

'Nothing wrong with a little company,' Silas said, but this time that smile of his faltered.

***

'Transponders are pinging now.' Vetch said. 'Fuck, they're Renaud clan.'

'All three?' Silas said. 'What do they know we don't?'

'Maybe nothing,' Doc said. 'They might have just had more idle Rems than us.'

'Three ships are a big commitment,' Vetch said. 'We're only here to take a peek.'

'Shit,' Silas said. 'Vetch is right, that one's a haulier. They know something.'

Two breacher crews and a haulier. They weren't sightseeing. They already know this derelict is Choir hot. They already know it's dangerous.

'What do we do?' Pax said, nerves creeping into his voice. 'We pulling out, or what?'

'Black no, we go in harder.' Silas grinned. 'This is now a race. First boots make the dive ours.'

'Silas, we aren't equipped—' Doc started to say.

'Doesn't matter, this just proves my point. Pull this off, and my next contract comes straight from the Helix.'

Vetch pulled some power from the brake. They needed to get there faster.

Not much, but enough.

'We'll brake harder later.' Vetch said. 'Gotta close that gap.'

'Don't bite your tongues,' he added, already preparing the harder slam stop sequence.

'Guess I'm adding more adrenaline to the mix,' Doc sighed.

Pax closed his eyes and started whispering a short phrase to himself on repeat.

At these velocities, closing a million klicks was just a couple of g's delayed. All timing and nerve. Brake too soon, and he'd be last. Brake too late? Thankfully, none of them would know it.

Vetch took a couple of breaths and flexed his fingers on the control panel.

The ship kept him up to date as the gap closed; he kept one eye on the countdown. He had to initiate the stop and avoid the other on the drive plumes. Space was big, but intercept maths wasn't complicated. They were all on the same path.

He grabbed his biter from his chair's storage. This one was homemade, wrapped in leather, and boiled solid.

'Three, two, one,' he counted for the others. He hoped they all knew the drill.

He set the biter between his teeth and squeezed, then slammed the brakes on. Harder than he'd ever dared before. The gel absorbed as much of it as it could, but it still felt like someone was pressing his heart into a vice.

In a flash, they closed the gap on the drive plumes ahead.

The ship chimed a cheery note.

The g's bled off as Vetch tapered the throttle until he could breathe again. They were within a few thousand klicks, but the target was visible only as a scar on the sky.

The violet glare softened as the Peregrine bled down towards intercept velocity. Vetch hated it. It looked cold.

The tanker was just a void in the middle of the cluster's glare, a shape defined by the stars it blotted out. Before long, they were right on top of it, and the Peregrine’s floods washed over dead plating. Vetch killed the last of the burn. The engines died, but the speed didn't. They were drifting in sync now, locked in the same ballistic tomb.

'Won't... they... just do the same?' Pax asked, and all the words were still a struggle for him.

Vetch spat and cleared his mouth. 'Where the fuck's your biter?' he said as his own bounced off the hull in front of him in the now zero-g. He caught it as it bounced right back at him.

'My what?'

'Fuck's sake, Silas, have you told the kid anything about the black?'

'Hey, I'm nearly the same age as you!'

'I wasn't expecting a slam stop on this one,' Silas defended his lax training. 'Who taught you that?'

'No one.' Vetch shot back before finally getting back to Pax's question.

'I waited until it was too late,' he explained. 'They are already on terminal commit velocity, too committed to make adjustments without overshooting. We've about twenty secs to pick a breach spot if we're to use this.'

Vetch kept it steady, carefully matching their velocity to the tanker's point one C for their final approach. He could use the manoeuvring thrusters to swing the Peregrine around the tanker's hull, but if he hit the thrusters too hard in the wrong direction, they'd lose sync, and he'd waste precious minutes getting back on target. The crew used the manoeuvre to perform a quick visual autopsy.

'Looks like it doesn't matter,' Doc said. Sweat beaded her forehead, and nausea kept her voice tight as they all recovered from the burn.

'What do you see, Risa?' Silas craned in his seat for an angle, but Vetch's flying kept it out of view.

'There's a hole cut, centre deck, starboard side. Someone's already picked this place dry.'

'Hang on,' Pax said. Eyes flicking right to left as he read through sensor outputs as fast as Peregrine's Acolyte could present them. 'This doesn't make sense. The profile's right, but the mass readings are way off. A D-Class tanker should be heavier than this, even empty.'

'What are you saying, Pax?' Silas asked.

'He's saying that ain't no drift-tanker,' Vetch muttered. 'Don't matter, someone's already breached and left us a hole? Save me time. That's our way in.'

'Always the pessimist, Risa,' Silas grinned. 'This place is our ticket. I can smell it.'

'I suppose our contract is to breach and report back, retrieval is only implied...' Pax said, but his tone was soft; he was finding no clarity in the data.

Vetch lined the Peregrine's docking collar up with the old breach point and frowned. Where the collar clamps would normally lock on the hull was torn open like a can under stress. As if something, whatever ship had been here, didn't come away by choice.

'That ain't clean,' he grunted. 'You sure you wanna go through with this, Silas?'

'Never surer.'