Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 7

When the response came, it was negative, as he’d expected. He was just about to start digging into the files again when a section of one of the scanner’s displays caught his eye. “Aru, what’s this?” After a mere 2 years, he still had plenty left to learn about the subtleties of shipboard operations.

“Scanners have picked up an object anomalous to the surrounding terrain. Current scanning resolution is insufficient for a more detailed analysis.”

That he could fix. He adjusted the scan parameters and the image on the display resolved into more detail; Corwin sucked in a surprised gasp. “A ship! And it doesn’t look like an old wreck, either.” There’d been traces of other ships; the place had seen enough battle after all. This one looked small but intact.

“It’s warm, too. Definitely not old then.” He stopped poking around at the controls. “Well Aru, so much for hanging around up here for another day. I’ve gotta get down there right now.”

In response, Aru sent several small portage chassis bearing cases to him. Opening the first, he found a military grade pistol with several reloadable capacitance charges on a belt clip.

Corwin frowned. “Thanks Aru. I’ve never actually trained with anything like this though, you know. I’d better not shoot my foot off.”

“There’s no time to learn like the present.”

“Thanks,” he groused. He was tempted to ask where the weapons—and it was weapons, the other cases revealed other small arms, including several slug-throwers—had come from, but he didn’t have to. “You expected something like this, didn’t you, Sobol …” There was no other reason for her to have sent weapons along.

Checking the last case revealed something other than weaponry. Instead, he found several data chips. “Any idea what these are?”

Aru was non-responsive for several moments. Corwin assumed he was assessing the chips in some way.

“They are adjustment programs for each of the weapons.”

Corwin whistled. Those were rare indeed. Madeline had been concerned. “We’ve had these on board all this time and you don’t give them to me until now?” he exclaimed, aggrieved. They would have been incredibly helpful in learning to use the weapons. They adjusted the mind, not the weapons themselves; it was a form of rapid learning technology. “We’ll have landed within an hour. There’s no time to use these now, I’ll have to do my best with them untrained. Remind me to slot these into my bed for the trip back.”

Adjustment programs only aided the acquisition of skills, they didn’t impart skill outright. They were used in conjunction with practice, reinforcing and helping to correct learned patterns while the subject slept.

He selected the first pistol he’d found, and one of the slug throwers, on the theory that if he ran into something one of them couldn’t handle, the other might do the trick.

He strapped the weapons to his waist, wishing he felt as natural wearing them as his childhood heroes had always looked. Instead, they felt heavy, awkward and cumbersome.

The ship was descending rapidly. He eased off on the descent a bit, fine-tuning their course to arrive some small distance from the other craft, leaving it between them and the ruins of the old colony dome. “Ready or not, here we come,” he said. He wasn’t sure if the warning was for the owners of the other ship, or for himself.

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 6

They exited transit and within a few hours had burned across the system to settle into orbit around the planet.

It was a small world, but with a large, dense core that provided gravity that was just about standard for humans. That was about the best you could say about it though. It was far from the system’s star, and featured a broken, jagged, rocky surface with no atmosphere to speak of. Worst of all, it was dry, though the system contained plenty of ice asteroids. Several of them had been brought to the surface by various of the world’s inhabitants over the millennia.

A small, perfect ring shape stood out against the craggy terrain. “That must be the site of the original colony.” He hunted and pecked among the controls for a moment before a screen leaped in, focusing on the ring, showing a bulky foundation that still bore shattered traces of the dome that had once kept the inhabitants breathing.

“So now we know it wasn’t popular for the scenery and ease of life,” he remarked as he adjusted the final orbit. The files had already said as much, but the reality was far more eloquent.

He sat in the cockpit, a cramped space that surrounded him with instrumentation and controls that all vied for his attention. He ignored all of them, staring at the stark, almost majestically hostile environment below.

“Who’d have thought it’d be such a mystery that people would stop trying to live HERE of all places,” he finally commented again. He paused and sat up straighter a moment. “Aru, maybe that’s it. Why is this place so popular? Is there anything in the records about why it was settled?”

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 5

Over the next three days he’d worked hard to finish off his responsibilities for his regular job, a task that fully occupied the first day. After that he was free to spend the transit following up on Aru’s investigation of their destination.

Unsurprisingly, it was tough for Aru to find information on the motives of the original colonists, people who’d lived thousands of years in the past. Records were scarce, and those that did exist painted a picture of a hardy and determined group who’d inhabited a single colony site for at least several generations.

The pirates were somewhat easier to get data on. There were far more records to retrieve, largely culled from the files of various militaries that had operated over the centuries, and most ended with the assertion that the pirates’ occupation of the ancient colony site had been ended, mostly by force.

That left gaps though. A casual browsing of the records left the impression that there was nothing special going on, that the colony had simply failed long ago and pirates had moved in time and again and been wiped out by military action. A more careful analysis showed showed several sizable pirate occupations that ended abruptly, with nothing to say why.

None of the records Aru had produced gave any insight into why the location remained unsettled these last several centuries, either, after so many thousands of years of attempts to claim it.

Corwin poured over the reports, taking notes on the weak areas and compiling a list of more in-depth inquiries, giving each new avenue to Aru. Aru was cut off from the galactic data-stream while they were in transit, so he stored the requests.

Finally they neared their time of exit from transit. “Aru, nothing in the dossier specified a time limit on this task. Think we can afford an extra day or two to research?”

Aru sent his text-only reply to a screen in Corwin’s quarters. “I expect they’d prefer that you did.”

“Yup, my thoughts too. Give me what you’ve got on those queries as soon as you can then.

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 4

Aru chriped an affirmative and Corwin set course. He’d never been technically inclined, but his lifestyle change had made him learn; he was starting to get the hang of this star ship pilot thing. He punched in the last of the coordinates and kept an eye on the readouts for an estimated course calculation time.

“She’ll be ready for Transit in … 15 minutes, Aru. I’ll be in my quarters.”

The hardest thing Corwin had encountered in getting used to the space-faring life was how incredibly slow it was. He’d grown up on tales of glory and excitement where heroes zoomed around the stars and Transit took only seconds, and interplanetary explorers could find wonders on a half dozen planets in a week. The truth of it was quite different.

Corwin’s inner twelve year old had been very dejected to discover that even the shortest Transits generally took a complete day at a minimum, and travel times of between one and two weeks weren’t uncommon.

He was lucky that this relatively unknown world he had to visit wasn’t complicated to reach; he’d be Transiting for about three days. Three days which he would have to spend catching up on paperwork for his job at the university. “Yup, it sure is a glamorous life,” he said aloud. Aru twittered inquisitively. “No, nothing, just talking to myself Aru.”

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 3

“Just tell me what you know then,” Corwin said.

She actually sighed a little. “Very well. There are more details in the dossier you’ll be receiving shortly, but in short, this time we want you to acquire the artifact in question, not just examine and appraise it.”

Corwin tapped his fingers on the console in thought. That was outside his usual line of work. “I don’t know anything about archaeology, Ms. Sobol. I don’t have the training or the equipment for it, fascinating as the subject is. And I don’t know anything about the world this artifact is located on. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”

“Nonetheless, that is what they wish of you. You are, of course, free to refuse.”

Free wasn’t the word he’d have chosen. Twice in the past he’d turned down assignments that had conflicted with his duties at the university, and while there had been no overt action taken against him, the distance between the burden of his debt and the progress he’d made in repaying it had almost magically seemed to widen. It was a subtle but effective message.

It sounded ridiculous, so he was tempted to refuse on the spot. He schooled himself to patience though. “Okay, fine. I’ll check out the information and transmit my decision.”

“Excellent. And, do be careful, Captain. Sobol out.” Her holo dimmed to nothingness.

He leaned back, staring at the cockpit ceiling until Aru alerted him with a chime that the info-pack had finished transmitting. “One of these days I’ll be able to afford a new vocalization module for you, Aru,” he said. One of these days I’ll own this ship and Aru with it, and maybe then I will indulge my interest in archaeology, he thought with a mental sigh.

The dossier in the info-pack was almost as skimpy on detail as Madeline had been. Several facts stood out in his attention; the target world had been the site of a failed colony more than a thousand years before, had been used as a base of operations by pirates numerous times in the time since, and had been utterly abandoned for the past two centuries.

Most notable at all, there were no details about what kind of artifact it was he was actually seeking. Instead, the dossier used words like “rumored” and “alleged” to describe some sort of information store or database.

“Well Aru, at least this doesn’t sound terribly dangerous,” he said aloud. Aru already knew the contents of the dossier, of course. “Though I do wish there was more on what caused the colony to fail and why the pirates stopped coming back. Can you see what you can dig up about that?”

Untitled Captain Koell Adventure - Day 2

The response gave Corwin pause. It wasn’t like Madeline to be coy like that when the subject was business. “Just how far outside my usual area of expertise are we talking?”

“Perceptive as always, Captain. I’d tell you more, but … well, I’m afraid I just don’t have all that much to tell you. Naturally we have people who usually check these sorts of things out for us, but there are those in the agency who are most impressed with your resourcefulness. They’re of the opinion that you can handle this.”

“But you have your doubts.”

“I do have some reservations,” she said.