Preparing for the Plunge

[Joe Manning 0]

In the dim lights of Joe's quarters, the holographic display of the Hyades cluster shone brightly over his ODRI's emitter. It was like an exploding light well caught in perpetual freeze-frame, the stars packed close enough together at the cluster's center to appear nearly like a solid globe, then gradually fanning out toward the edges until they were as thinly spaced as most of the stars in the spiral arm. The ODRI was tapped into Qob's navigational computer, so the starmap was a precise real-time display that neglected no details and reflected the arduously slow paths of the cluster's 350 suns. Near the cluster's edge, a red dot periodically radiated rings which expanded and quickly faded away. Approaching said flashing dot was the predictably green dash that represented the Bird of Prey. No more than half of a light year now separated the two position indicators.

 

Joe's fingers dove into the controls near the bottom of the display. Rays of light reflected off his fingers and back to the ODRI's emitter, instructing the device to zoom out the starmap. The Hyades cluster transformed from a dazzling light show to a dense mass within an otherwise even field of stars. On the expanded map, Joe recognized the borders of the Klingon, Tholian, and Federation territorities -- the farthest reaches of Bull's Head's more civilized frontier settlements. In those distant regions, the map was not so accurate; Qob's computer was only capable of so much data storage, and accurate, detailed starmaps were among a computer's more notorious memory gobblers.

 

Opposite the borders of neighboring civilizations there was the edge of the spiral arm, where the distances between stars continued to widen until naught was left but the void -- the Hydran Expanse. Those thinly spaced stars were the known bastions of assorted raider bands, and the Expanse was all that divided Bull's Head (raiders, explorers, and settlers alike) from the Gorn Hegemony of the neighboring spiral arm. These were the first two reasons that those territories which lied rimward of the Hyades Cluster had a terrible reputation.

 

Fortunately, the Expanse was not Qob's destination. At another tap of the controls, the map bloated one of the rimward stars into a clearly visible blue dot. Zoalus was only 23 light years distant from the star cluster, a 16 day voyage at Warp 6. Still, it was far enough away from the cluster and isolated enough from any trade routes to place it in dangerous territory, territory which the Guardians could not envelop in their protective net and which the Federation outright ignored. Joe had never been to Zoalus, but he know that the world was dangerous, as dangerous as any of the rimward worlds this side of the Hydran strongholds.

 

 

Several hours later, the call from the Bridge summoned Joe to the Captain's chair. The viewscreen already showed two vessels that were clearly of Gular Consortium manufacture. Dominating the view was the massive sphere-shaped Verbistul, a Gular science freighter nearly five times the size of Qob. Since it possessed no armaments, Federation regulations had not restricted its construction. A domed viewport marked the ship's command center and its forward facing, but there were long narrow viewports spread around the sphere's surface, observation areas for each of the ship's science departments. The airlock seal of an extendable docking arm was visible on the starboard side; Joe knew that another would be on the port side along with a small shuttle bay at the stern. Warp nacelles bulged awkwardly out of the dorsal and ventral surfaces. A clumsy ship, though well-suited for its job of scientific study, it would make an appealing target and a limited helper in a fight.

 

The other ship was 3/4 the size of Qob, a standard Gular Privateer. Its general shape was not much unlike a Bird of Prey's, with more angular downward curving 'wings' that supported a pair of pulse cannons. Its body was more smooth and solid, like that of a Starfleet runabout. Its mauve tritanium hull was unpainted save for the crudely drawn lettering on its starboard side that spelled out (in a red that disturbed the eyes) Lucky Hand. Joe noticed that the letters had been painted over the Gular Consortium symbol -- a stylized talon clutching a gold nugget -- that was stamped on the hull of every Gular vessel. Joe didn't believe in luck. He believed that the only 'lucky' people in Bull's Head were people who were willing to cheat others out of whatever they wanted. Naturally, he found it hard to trust any Captain who would name his ship the Lucky Hand. But then, these days, there were few mercenaries he did trust.

 

 

Five light years away, while Qob and its convoy was preparing to depart the Hyades cluster, another Gular Privateer entered the Xorax system. This one's hull had been painted white with black highlights. Where the talon and nugget had been painted over, there was instead the symbol of a bull's head inside a silver star. Good intelligence had indicated that Qob's crew would be on Xorax accepting a job, but the hours that the crew of the Guardian starship Rushmore would spend jumping through the colony's bureaucratic hoops would be just enough hours for them to be too late to catch up with the mercenaries.