Alacritous Regress

Installment 14: The Worst of Both Worlds

I look around the bridge. Everyone is at their station, ready to go. The warp engines are running idle, ready for an imminent jump. If any ITA ship catches us on their scanners we would appear to be pirates lying low. No one is looking though, because we're the ITA ship patrolling this section of space.

"Ship come in perimeter," Rivan tells me.

"Hear that, we got one," I tell the rest of the crew. "Take us to warp."

The stars outside the ship blur and stretch as we make the jump. "Warp achieved," Tail declares.

"Bring us alongside."

"Yes, captain." It take mere seconds for her to maneuver into place. "Rendezvous achieved, captain."

"Good. Rivan, current readings?"

"Internal warp engines," she reads off her consul. "Power readings indicate top speed seven Kc, size of up to 90 meters, and unstable cargo."

"Unstable cargo?" I ask.

"Large quantities of destabilized iron fuel, food synthesizer tablets, entropy inverters, entangled mass; that sort of thing."

"How much are we talking?"

"At least four tones of intensely unstable matter."

"Ok. Quick, open communications with them."

She taps her controls once. "Done." She looks at her screen. "They claim to be T2434, a Kelpie 4 shuttle. Their manifest says they're transporting a load of superconductors. That doesn't match Rivan's readings though."

"Supports her readings actually," Blue pipes up. "Superconductors are made from destabilized electrum, thus as little as three tons of it can cause disruption in warp fields."

"Disengage and return to patrol point," I tell the crew. The Alacritous pulls away from the other shuttle and drops out of warp at our previous location.

Everybody goes back to their previous activity. The screens that just seconds before were filled with tactical displays and navigational formulas are switched back to the distractions that they had been previously running. Rivan and Tail are currently binge watching some old TV series, Quick is playing some sort of first-person shooter, Arron is futilely attempting to beat Al at chess, and Blue is reading through the manual for some new addition to the ITA fleet.

I sigh and pull out my tablet and continue reading my book. Our current mission is to crack down on illicit activities happening in our space lane. This means a lot of down time as we wait for ships to come rushing through the checkpoint we've established. So far we've turned up nothing.

We established the checkpoint two Terra days ago, and since then have had only five ships pass through. An active space lane will have near 30 ships pass through any point of it daily. Our space lane barely counts as a space lane.

"Shooting." I look up at the intercom speaker. "A data packet from Terra has arrived. It has information on the ships we've encountered, so far all the information checks out."

"Even the last one?" I ask.

"Let's see, did they send us information about a ship we have yet to inquire about? No, no they did not."

"Well get a data packet ready. There's a two hour..."

"Captain," Rivan attempts to interrupt.

"...wait time so we need to..."

"Captain."

"...stay on top of..."

"CAPTAIN!" Rivan roars.