Pax Galactica - A Space Opera

Chapter 35 - Mirages

Helios' Partisan-class Escort, The Cat's Pajamas, emerged from hyperspace as close to the planet Home/Click-*-Click-*-Click-Click as was safe. The tiny silver dot began to make its way towards the shimmering globe. The planet almost looked pretty from this high up.

It took about five standard minutes before the ship was caught by the passive sensors of the planetary defences. They came online immediately. The natives weren't in a position to identify friendly starships so they just shot at everything.

High-speed surface-to-orbit missiles began to slam into the defence field of the Cat's Pajamas. The primitive weapons barely coerced so much as orange sparks as they detonated. The ship was almost entirely unaffected.

Eventually the Cat's Pajamas broke into the atmosphere and the bombardment ceased. It came in for a landing in an area of yellow, rocky desert. The four rangers emerged from the ship already suited up. Their backs bulged with packs of supplies and their cloaks draped behind them.

"You're just going to leave your ship out in the open like this?" asked Aranarth.

"Sure," replied Helios. "Why not? With the engines off and the cloak engaged it's basically a sensor ghost. Even if someone knew it was here somewhere looking for one Partisan on a planet is like looking for a needle in a haystack factory. Anyway if someone does find it it's programmed to flee into space. If that happens it'll come back once a week to meet up at pre-programmed rendezvous locations that are impossible to predict without the encrypted program in my implant."

"Oh," said Aranarth.

"Remember I've been doing this stuff for months while you were off doing Tellus knows what," Helios teased. "We're not just hiding from the gug-gug-gugs or even the Old Ones down here. What we're really hiding from is the Parliament. I'm not too keen on the Successors of Inxon showing up in some kind of two dimensional triangle and blowing us all to theoretical particles. So, yeah, I've got it covered."

"I get it, I'm an idiot," said Aranarth.

"Well just as long as you get it."

With Helios leading the way the group began to trudge through the uneven desert towards a resistance safe house that she knew about. Usually higher gravity worlds like this made Decker feel sluggish but the suit compensated fantastically. He barely noticed the difference.

Helios parked her ship quite a ways away, so as not to give away the location of the safe house. It took the better part of the day for even the suited rangers to make their way there. By the time they arrived it was pitch dark.

The safe house was accessed by a hidden stairway covered with rocks. Helios moved these out of the way and then replaced them once the group had entered. Sometimes the low-tech solutions were the best ones.

Decker was shocked by how long the stairs were. The safe house needed to be quite deep underground to confound enemy sensors. There didn't seem to be any air shafts, apparently the alien air was replenished with a life support system of some kind. This deep underground it didn't really matter what kind of tech you ran, nobody was going to detect it without at a minimum 5d hyperspace sensors.

<Hey Suit,> thought Decker, <Do you have hypersensors?>

<Well naturally,> replied the Suit, a note of pride obvious in its voiceless voice, <My sensors are literally located in hyperspace. I can see into a 3d shape like it was so many lines drawn on the ground. Presuming of course that nobody with equivtech cloaking technology is trying to stop me.>

<Good to know,> thought Decker.

Finally they came to the bottom of the staircase.

"Gimme a sec," said Helios, in front, "These people do love traps."