Piper (English version)

Piper (English version) Chapter 1: The Knife

1. The Knife

Sunday, November 21, 2202 - that was the day that changed everything. Even if hardly anyone knew about it. My name is Müller. Harry Müller. And I am one of the few people to whom at least a piece of the mystery has been revealed. At that time, I was a cook and purser on the DREADED, one of the five corvettes of the Piper Deep Space Navy.

"Dreaded" means "gefürchtet" in German, and it's really a terrible name. It doesn't work at all. But it does in English. In English you can say a lot of things that you can't say in German without blushing. And since English is the common language at Piper anyway, we'll just leave it at that.

Be that as it may, imagine a 60-meter-long cylinder with a diameter of 20 meters and rounded ends, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the ship. Corvettes at the time were equipped with an anti-spacecraft gun and two catapult cannons as standard, plus the double-stacked energy shield and the admittedly rather thin nanocomposite armor. All in all, quite impressive, I can assure you. You wouldn't have wanted to mess with that thing.

Piper had the scout ship CAREFUL and the construction unit HELMET in the system of Alpha Centauri at that time, and we, we flew escort. Just in case something happened. Anything.

When I say Alpha Centauri here, I mean, of course, Alpha Centauri A, whose third planet would later become known as Delphi. The planet we initially considered our designated first colonial world. Delphi, or AC A3, as it was abbreviated at the time, is comparatively small, about 9000 km in diameter, and the gravity is only a little over 0.6 g. Compared to Terra, Delphi is somewhat cooler, and as far as I know, eggheads are still arguing about whether this is the result of an ice age or, on the contrary, a warm age.

Either way, it's undoubtedly warm enough in the tropics and subtropics, and that's why the AC A3 research project was pushed enormously at the time, on the assumption that we would colonize the planet very soon. But that was before we really realized the dangerousness of the murderous flora of this world, and so AC A3 initially developed into the place of our first defeats – and had to give up the position of the first colony to Jangala. But I won't tell you about that. You know all that anyway. I want to tell about the knife.

The DREADED has a standard crew of 30, around the clock in three shifts of ten men each. My shift is from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, with a subsequent half hour for handover.

As I said, I'm a cook, but of course I don't cook myself. Except on special occasions. Still, most of the time I stay in the galley. Technical checks, planning work, taking random samples from the cooking automats, hygiene checks, reviewing the logs of the other two shifts, and so on, and so forth. With that, a workday usually flies by.

This day, this Sunday, was to be quite different. Outside in the mess hall, the early shift was making noise over dinner, and I had just started looking at next week's menu when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around on my stool in annoyance - I don't like people hanging around the galley who have no business being there. Behind me stood the skipper.

"Come into my cabin, Muller. But for God's sake don't cause a fuss. I'm leaving now, and in a few minutes you'll follow me."

Normally, I liked Commander Young. She exuded calm competence, which can't be said of everyone. And I thought it was cute how she always called me Muller on official occasions. Because she couldn't get the "ü" right. Usually, of course, I was Harry to her, too. With this order, she therefore gave me quite a fright. Something had happened, that much was certain.

So I followed her after a while and was just about to press the entry button next to the cabin bulkhead when she opened it. The sensor had apparently already registered me. She pointed to the desk, above which a hologram was hovering, and said instead of a greeting, "There - look at that!"