Chapter 10: Rendez-Vous With Ton

January 13^th, 2279

It was time to leave for Gliese 832’s gas giant. He chose to only bring Nocks, as Feterni and Perlas were direly needed in getting the work on the ship back underway soon. Nocks for her part dreaded being stuck with the talkative captain for hours on end on a slow barge. She was relieved when she bumped into one of the science officers she had requested to come over from Epsilon Indi. It was the generalist. She had arrived early due to being on leave nearby, taking her vacation to escape the dreary survey after she realized she saw rusty rocks when she closed her eyes. She was as talkative as the captain, so Nocks hoped to get some work on the security drones done. She had an idea how to improve them towards the latest threats she had just witnessed – it was just not that easy to get to work. Shortly after departing the station, Basil received the message that Nasz’s investigation had concluded. It appeared the ill-fated engineer himself had knocked the distributer loose in the narrow corridor and made a mistake whilst reinserting the piece. Basil chose not to share this information unless someone asked, and no one asked him, at least not for a while. He was wondering about the cui bono of the whole thing. It was clearly not directed at him personally, there were better ways to get rid of him, even more so since the random accident death of a captain would surely raise more eyebrows than the death of an engineer working on energy systems – especially so shortly after Hays’ demise. No, it was simply a successful attempt to slow them down, potentially putting the Rubicon in legal limbo, as a ship not really in the fleet and legally owned by RND. If this happened, it might take months to clear it up and would very likely result in the ship just being taken over and tested by RND before sent to reclamation once more. Perlas and Feterni would now have to concentrate on the absolute basics of the ship to get it to shakedown, further being hampered by the paranoid security measures of the half-cyborg, whose name was so unfittingly boring that Basil had to look it up once more: Fred Mellir. Mellir was now in charge of his colleague after winning the coffee cup as well as in charge of the marines, setting up entrance protocols, jamming of any non-essential frequencies (the drones now bumping into things more, which caused another, albeit smaller accident which again injured Perlas’ legs), scans at each entry of the ship and whatever else he felt like coming up with, enjoying his freedom. He was now also carrying a large rifle, the marines mocking him for it. Nocks had left some further instructions, none of which made sense to Mellir.

The barge had a QES drive, but by far the worst quantum drive available. It was nimble and quick to get up to speed with the regular Ion spool drive – as one would expect from a barge mostly used to maneuver around a space dock or station, but as soon as the bright white quantum entanglement field shot out into infinity from the engine’s transmitter plates above and below the hull, acceleration was but a third of even the old Antares Basil had served on before. As they were being pulled along, sailing the physical trickery that had made the galaxy a much smaller place just a few centuries earlier (Earth being ignored for some of them), Basil decided to check how much he remembered from the Herzog Academy. The science officer was a freckled small woman with bright, wavy hair that looked different each day and a friendly, round face. Her full cheeks and eyes were mirroring the same shape, only one of her eyes being a clear replacement unit and a cut on the lower lip indicating a previous accident. Her name was Marta Korolev, another one of the average ranks designated for the Rubicon – a lieutenant. When she first spoke, Basil thought her voice and general attitude belonged more behind a microphone, teaching the Ether in science comms than on a grey, cold warship. At least, she was small enough to consider the space on the Rubicon favorably. She was holding a fresh coffee cup with both hands, as the barge was still heating up – Nocks liked it colder, as did Basil – but they had noticed her white knuckles and paling lips and quickly turned up the heat in the old trash taxi.

- So, I hear you just did a survey around Indi? How’d that go?

- Pretty much a waste of time, if I am honest.

- Found nothing?

- Plenty of life! Just nothing indigenous. We found some funny microbes in the asteroid belt, but it turned out they came from a crashed Catanian ship. Then, we found some weird transmissions. They were just squatters, building a hub on one of the moons. We also thought we had found some Astrozoans in the gas giant, but again, it was just a ship that had been ripped apart and pulled in, likely carrying foodstuffs, now some of the bacteria are streaking around there.

- Astrozoans?

- Yea, you know, those energy-based things.

- Ahh, the space fish?

She chuckled like a patient preschool teacher whose children had just accidentally made something funny without knowing the meaning.

- Yes, the space fish. We still don’t know where they are from, though. And how they spread.

- Have we ever managed to catch a live one?

- Nah, they just dive.

Basil had not spent much time with Exobiology, as he thought life always followed some basic rules, and if he knew those, most things would make sense.

- Dive?

- That’s what we call it when they just disappear somewhere. We can observe them, but that’s it. They seem to be able to hop over into another plane of existence, but none of our instruments can catch anything. Seems to be above our understanding so far. That or they are just a very strange illusion.

- Heard of the collision theory?

Basil was going into the realm of conspiracies to have anything to say.

- Do tell me, sounds enticing!

- Ah, let’s say the proponents of this theory don’t exactly do a good job at presenting it. Or themselves. But basically, they dig up a few cases of creatures appearing out of nowhere or which are clearly not carbon-based and conclude that our reality or something like that is colliding with some other reality, that’s where the space fish come from.

Korolev was very amused by the fringe theory her captain just described. Strictly speaking, such theories belonged more into the field of Sociology, as they mostly explained how humans – and other races – explained the unexplained to themselves, seeing patterns in unrelated events, simply because they were unaware of what else lay in-between such events. Her absolute favorite were some flat earthers who – back when the Catanians set up the first FTL-rental on Earth – had pooled their resources to rent a ship and finally take a good long look at Earth from above. They were sorely disappointed when they reached orbit and Earth indeed seemed round, until one of them found a simplified planetary display in 2D on the ship, concluding that the Catanians must be in on the conspiracy. They recorded some proof, sent it out into an uninterested Ether and promptly went to prove their theory by passing under the disc, ignoring the simulated sphere and crashing into the Pacific Ocean, killing a few whales. The Catanians denied any responsibility and updated their terms of use.