“Looks like this won’t be a quiet trip after all,” the pilot said as she adjusted the shuttle’s flight pattern. It was a small ship, only meant for travel between the colonies of the Belt, but that made it more maneuverable than the ship that pursued them.
“What did they say they wanted?” Douglas Bradford asked from the seat next to the pilot.
Normally, he would have been required to sit in the back of the shuttle, but he was the only passenger, so the pilot had welcomed the company during their trip to Bala’s Colony.
“Claiming to be a patrol ship for the Colony of Yellow Rock, and they have probable cause to believe we are corsairs. Ever heard of a Yellow Rock Colony?” the pilot asked as she made further evasive maneuvers, pushing him up into the shoulder straps of his seatbelt.
“Never heard of them…,” Bradford said as he tried to hold his breakfast down. Once the g’s lessoned, he added: “But, small colonies come and go so quickly.”
“Yeah, and there are plenty of creeps that like to play this game. I’m not going to drop my panties and spread my legs for every stranger that claims to be a gynecologist.”
Bradford couldn’t disagree with her logic, given their lack of information about their pursuers. He watched in silence as she gently touched the shuttle down on an asteroid that was about ten times the size of their craft. There were enough other little asteroids drifting nearby to make it difficult for their larger pursuer to maneuver within the field, even if it did find them. She powered down the engines and then shut down most of the shuttle’s electronics. With that done, she unstrapped and floated out of her seat.
“You might as well do the same,” she called out to Bradford as she gracefully pushed off her seat and glided out of the cockpit into the passenger compartment. “We can eat while we wait.”
Bradford unstrapped with a bit more difficulty, and by the time he had pulled himself into the back of the shuttle, the pilot had a sandwich waiting for him.
“Thanks,” he said as he settled himself into a chair and hooked his feet into its stirrups.
“Its been getting worse over the last year,” she said. “The mining boom is bringing in a lot of new people. Most of them are good –just looking to make their fortunes and start a new life. Unfortunately, all that new money also brings the filth in like flies to shit. A lot of them play this con now -claiming to be a patrol ship for some non-existent colony, and then robbing you once onboard. Sometimes, they will keep the passengers of a shuttle like this alive long enough to determine if they can ransom them, but it’s usually in their interests not to leave witnesses…” She suddenly seemed to realize that now wasn’t the best time to be talking about the possibility that they would both be murdered, and changed the subject: “So, what brings you to Bala’s Colony?”
“I’m a delegate from New Connecticut for the upcoming Conference of Colonies. I’m here to investigate the incident between the Aries and the Claymore, and try to come up with a workable solution that will prevent it from happening again.”
“‘Incident’ is an understatement,” she said. She was on the verge of saying more when they started receiving a transmission. She touched a button so that Bradford could hear it over the speakers in the passenger compartment.
“This is Captain Aleksandrov of the Bala’s Colony patrol ship North Star, do you read me?”
“Sergei! You old space dog! They still letting you fly a ship?” The pilot turned to Bradford and grinned as some of the nervous tautness left her body.
Aleksandrov explained that he was on his way back to the home colony when he had noticed their shuttle being chased. He had made contact with the other ship, which had made a hasty retreat. Aleksandrov offered to escort them the rest of the way.
As they approached Bala’s Colony, the North Star broke away from them and maneuvered towards the main docking port, which, given their current orientation, was “up”. The Colony consisted of a roundish, large asteroid, or a small planetoid, that had a man-made shaft piercing through one end of the celestial body, traveling the length of its diameter, and exiting its opposite side. The side of the shaft that was “down” from them stuck out for about a quarter of a mile and had a habitation structure attached to it by long cables.
Bradford thought the habitation structure looked like one of the long, curved hotdogs he used to eat on Fourth of July picnics back on Earth as a boy. Its length was about twice the diameter of the asteroid, and it spun about the shaft with the cables attached to the shaft in such a manner that they could freely rotate about it without wrapping up. He could see the occasional puff of gas being expelled from the sides of the habitat to maintain its rotation, which provided centrifugal force to the people living inside. “Above” them, he watched as the North Star oriented itself with one of the ports extending perpendicularly out of the central shaft that was opposite the end the habitation structure was attached to. He noticed that a number of the docked mining ships were being fitted with weapons systems –as if they were being prepared for combat. Things would soon get out of control if the upcoming Conference of the Colonies couldn’t find a solution to this problem.
#
“Cigarette?” Captain Jones of the Bala’s Colony mining ship, the Vulcan, asked before lighting his own.
“No, thank you.” Bradford said from the guest chair of Jones’ office. The habit had come back into fashion with the perfection of organ cloning and medication that could break the addiction at any time someone wanted to stop, but Bradford avoided all mind-altering substances. “You were saying?”
“We were carrying a haul back from a mining operation when our radar picked up an approaching ship.”
“Did they identify themselves?”
“They claimed to be a patrol ship from Alpha Colony, but we weren’t sure.”
“Why weren’t you sure? Weren’t they flying their flag?”
“Those are spoofed all the time.”
A ‘flag’ was just an electronic signal that gave the name of the ship, and the colony it had a docking contract with. If a ship was part of a colonial patrol, then that information was also broadcast with the flag. A corsair ship could easily fake, or ‘spoof’, the flag of a patrol ship. Flying a flag had come into general use by most of the major colonies spontaneously, as a means of identification, and it worked reasonably well as long as everyone was honest, but criminals weren’t honest, and they rarely flew the Jolly Roger.
“Haven’t you ever been stopped and searched by another colony’s patrol in the past?”
“Yeah, sure. All of the major colonies have roughly the same laws and everyone knows that you will get treated fairly by any of their Patrols, so it was never a problem until the corsairs added lying to their repertoire…Honestly, I don’t know why you’re here. You have my report regarding the incident.”
“Just indulge me, and tell me what happened.”
“Well, like I said, we were carrying a haul back…” Captain Jones paused for a moment to tap his cigarette over an ashtray.
#
Complete Story Available here: https://www.amazon.com/Come-Read-Stories-Outside-Space-ebook/dp/B07D6FXKLT