Black Ice -

CHAPTER 1

The stars turned slowly around a small, oblong cargo hauler as it made a wide turn away from Dlamini Station, an outpost of the Jupiter Rings. To the rest of the solar system, it was entirely unimportant, a tiny blip on a radar full of threats. To the people who lived inside, it was the Valiant, their home.
Captain Jake Steele sat in the command chair of the ship, deep within the compact halls and corridors of the vessel, his hands resting lightly against the handful of controls that came up from the armrests. His sharp eyes scanned the countless sensors in front of him, looking for any signs of abnormalities.

“Nothing showing up on scanners, captain.” Cara, the pilot, glanced over her shoulder. “We’re in the clear.”
“You can fool scanners a lot easier than your eyes.” Jake murmured. “Trust me, I know.”
“I know, I know. You tell me every time. If we had a fancier ship where we could actually see outside the command center, I’d trust you more.” Cara shrugged, a hint of a chuckle in her voice. “I’m just telling you, we’re in the black. We’ll be engaging our long-distance engines in five minutes.”
“Good.” Jake murmured. He wasn’t worried – He had been through too much in his life to feel too much fear for a simple run – But he knew that the moment you threw caution to the wind was often the moment that you regretted it for the rest of your life. Often, that amounted to only a few seconds. All around him, the walls felt close, close and protective. Bulkheads rested only feet from him, and everything was covered in blinking lights and flashing diodes. After a moment, he flicked a switch on his armrest, opening a com down to the engines. “Sojen? Everything good?”
“Engines are up and running, captain!” A distant voice echoed back through the intercom. Sojen was nothing if not competent, and she could fix up just about any of the many problems that the crew of the Valiant was always getting themselves into. “I fixed up the damage we took from that solar surge. Everything should be aligned again. If it’s not, I’ll let you know with plenty of time.”
“Very good.” Jake nodded. “Keep at it, then.”
“As always, captain.”
Jake felt a sense of satisfaction as he closed the line, then opened a final channel to the medical bay.
“Hwa-Young?”
Lee Hwa-Young’s voice came through a second later. She sounded annoyed, though not tremendously so.
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“I was wondering if you could run down and check on the cargo.”
Hwa-Young sighed. “I’m a little busy putting away all the medical supplies we just purchased. There’s a lot to sort through, and I don’t want anything to fall once we engage the long-distance engines. You were the one who secured it, I’m sure it’s alright.”
“Alright, alright.” Jake closed the line, then sighed and leaned back in the chair. “I’m just checking up on things.”
The stars continued to spin through the viewport, until, slowly, they came to a stop. Jupiter’s horizon could just be seen off to one side, glimmering against the very edge of the viewport.
“Alright, captain. Here we go.” Cara flicked a few switches. “Fasten your seatbelts, because we’re firing engines in three… Two… One…”
She hit a large switch, and with a roar, the engines came to life. The ship jumped forward, and for a moment, Jake was pressed back into his chair. The acceleration was equivalent to about a fifth of a g-force, and would last until they reached full velocity. How long that would take depended largely on how far they were going, and what they would be trying to do once they got there.
“And we’re off.” Cara nodded to him. “We ought to arrive on Mars in… Looks like the computer is charting us for arrival in about two week’s time.”
“Thank you, Cara.” Jake slowly climbed to his feet. The floor felt as though it was tilted, and in a manner of speaking, it was. The ship had been designed to work both at speed and under acceleration, and while it hurt your head for the first little while you were on board, it worked well enough once you got used to it. “I’ll be down in the cargo bay.”
“And I’ll be here, watching for the random asteroids and other anomalies that never show up.” She answered with a chuckle.
Jake nodded, then slowly made his way to the ladderwe’ve got a ships that allowed him to descend. There were two of them in that part of the ship, one on starboard, and one on port. He went to the port side, where, even with an odd gravity, he was able to climb down from Deck Seven to Deck Eight.
There, a small door opened into the cargo hold, which at that moment, was nearly filled with large crates. He stepped inside and took a look around, confirming that they were all in place, and that the straps had held. Once again, he wasn’t concerned all that much about them breaking free, but he hadn’t managed to last as long as he had by ignoring the obvious. If a tow rope came free, you’d better be able to get it latched back down, or you were going to regret it later.
His eyes scanned across the crates one last time. They were holding medicines, manufactured by some black-market producer out in the rings of Saturn. Medicine was in high demand on Earth, there was no doubt about that, but they wouldn’t be making the full run. Just a partial delivery, getting it to Mars.
Earth, like it or not, wasn’t a place that Jake had any real ambitions of traveling to anytime soon.
Once he had confirmed that they were still in place, he turned and slipped back out. All was well. The hard part was done.
Now, it was time to enjoy the rest of the trip.

Chapter 2

Jake had been on many a run through his life. The Valiant had gone back and forth across the solar system a dozen times over, from the mines of Mercury to the rings of Neptune. This was a relatively simple run, just straight in to Mars, and he expected that they would soon have payment in hand.
Four days later, he sat at his desk down in the Captain’s Quarters. It was on Deck Seven, like the bridge, with a door that opened directly onto the bridge itself. On that day, he had the door open between the two, and was busily working at his desk.
The desk itself was small, and folded up into the wall when it wasn’t in use. On that day, he was leaning over it, writing up a bill of sale for when he arrived.
“I don’t know why you bother with all that, Captain.” Cara called from the pilot’s seat. “We’re not going to be dealing with the law. Hopefully.”
Jake shrugged with a sigh. “Maybe not, but I still like things to be on the level. Firm.” He glanced up at a tattered, leather-bound Bible that he kept next to his desk. It was bound to the wall with a strap so it wouldn’t float away, now that they were cruising at Zero-G speeds. “Rigid.”
“That may be so, but I’m just telling you that you’re wasting your time.” Cara called back. “How much you think we can make from this?”
“Enough to buy fuel for the next run, and hopefully a few meals while we’re at it.” Jake answered. “I’d like to replace a few of the engine parts, Sojen told me that the-”
Beep!
The tone echoed loudly from the main computer, and Cara muttered something under her breath.
“What was that?” Jake took the bill of sale and stuck it back into a drawer, then attached the magnetic pen to its docking port. He then unclipped himself from the desk’s chair and floated up into the air, pushing himself off the walls to float into the bridge. “Something the matter?”
“If you ever had kids, you would be the worst helicopter dad ever.” Cara commented, even as her fingers pressed buttons and flipped switches. “And… In answer… Looks like we’ve got something on sensors.”
“What sort of something?” Jake asked. “The sort of thing that ends up with us dead?”
“The sort of thing that I haven’t had time to figure out yet.” Cara shot him an annoyed look. “Would you just sit still? Keep your shirt on, and I’ll have it for you in a minute.”
Jake sighed, nodded, and he strapped himself into the captain’s chair. After a moment, Cara nodded and glanced back over her shoulder.
“We’ve got a ship.”
“How far out?” Jake asked.
“Couple thousand clicks. Computer says it’s drifting.”
“How fast?”
Cara pressed a few more buttons. “Ahh… It’s at a constant speed… About half of how fast we’re going now.”
“Is it sending out a distress signal?”
“Nothing that I’m registering.” Cara shook her head. “I’m guessing that it’s dead.”
Jake thought for a few moments. It didn’t take long for him to decide.
“Match speed, and approach.”
“I’ll have to hit the thrusters pretty hard for that.” Cara cautioned. “We’re moving pretty fast, halving our speed will-”
“I know, I know.” Jake flipped a switch that broadcast his voice through the ship. “Everyone! Prepare for deceleration.”
He knew that the others would have questions about why, but he couldn’t answer them right at that moment.
“Immediately.” He added an instant later.
There was a silence that filled the cockpit as the coasting engines died, and then a low rumble as the reverse engines began to build up power. Jake didn’t know what they were about to find… But he had a feeling that it was nothing good. the years immediately after the war.

Chapter 3

It took Cara two hours to slow down enough that they were able to match speed with the drifting ship, but by that point, they had overshot it slightly. She matched its course, then slowed a bit more, allowing the ship to catch back up. Through it all, Jake remained on the bridge, watching. Hwa-Young joined them, though Sojen had to stay below in the engine room.
“We’re on final approach.” Cara murmured. “The ship is reading as a Saturn Ice Hauler, belonging to the Wang-Gan Syndicate.”
“Haven’t seen one of those in awhile.” Jake murmured. “Anything interesting?”
“Well… It looks like there’s power to the ship, but no life support.” Cara answered. “The atmosphere seems intact, it’ll just be freezing inside. You’ll want to wear suits when you go over.”
“We’re going over?” Hwa-Young asked. Her eyes were wide, and she looked back and forth between them. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” Jake nodded. “Best case scenario, we get to tow this thing in to Mars. Slows us down by a couple days, but it’ll net us a massive profit. Worst case scenario, we harvest a few parts that we can sell off once we get there. This is a massive score.”
“And it looks like we’re the first to get here.” Cara grinned. “I guess fortune smiles on us sometimes.”
“Do you need me for the docking procedure?” Jake asked.
“Only if you want to hold my hand.” Cara shook her head. “Go get ready. Are you bringing Sojen?”
“As long as you don’t need her.”
“I’m not planning on it.” Cara shrugged. “I’ll let you know if I see any other vessels on the radar.”
Jake nodded, and he soon made his way to the docking bay. It was, like all the other rooms of the ship, quite small. Quickly, he pulled off his outer coat and hung it on a hook, then started pulling on an environmental suit. Hwa-Young did the same. She wore a long, white coat that was ordinarily filled with an assortment of medical tools, all of them adhered in place with velcro to keep them from drifting away. She hung it on a hook next to Jake, and pulled on her own environmental suit.
Sojen was the last to arrive. Her eyes were dark as she climbed up, her hair pulled back tightly behind her head. She began to put on a suit wordlessly, and Jake nodded to her.
“You alright?”
“Of course.” She answered crisply. “I just want to get this done. It’s a valuable find, but ships don’t start drifting for no reason.”
Jake couldn’t disagree with that. As they finished closing up their suits, they all stepped into the airlock, peering through the strange, plexiglass visors that allowed them to see out. The inner door was closed, and Jake stepped up and peered through the small, outer window.
It was one of the only windows on the ship that looked out into the Void. It was so small that he couldn’t see much, though he could see a massive bulk of reddish iron slowly drawing closer and closer. Claws stretched out from the Valiant and snapped into large rings, and the two docking ports were drawn together.
Hisss!
“We have contact.” Cara’s voice echoed through the docking bay. “You’re cleared to enter.”
Jake pulled a lever, and the outer door of the ship hissed open. The two docking ports matched up perfectly, but of course, most ships were designed to be compatible. The docking port of the opposite vessel was closed, and Jake could see only darkness behind. He grabbed the external latch and pulled, and, after a moment of struggling, swung it open as well.
They were soon inside the drifting ship. It was much larger than the Valiant, that much was obvious even at a glance. They passed through a narrow tunnel to a main shaft that cut up through the ship, flicking on their suit lights in order to see. They were entirely weightless, and Jake pulled himself along via holds in the walls.
“No artificial lightning.” Sojen commented, pressing a button several times. “I don’t know if the power was cut, or if they just don’t work.”
“Cara said that the vessel does still have power.” Jake commented. He looked up the central shaft, and then down. “Which direction should we go?”
“Down.” Sojen answered quickly. “That’s where the engine and the bridge will be. We can learn a lot down there.”
Jake couldn’t disagree with that. They slowly started floating down the shaft, peering into each of the doors as they passed.
That said, there weren’t many of them. There was a kitchen area, and a few bathrooms, but nothing extraordinary or unusual. Finally, they came to the bridge, and Jake slowly swung inside.
The bridge looked almost exactly like the one on the Valiant. There was room for two pilots, but that was the only real difference. Jake frowned and swung into the captain’s chair, then reached out and pressed a small, red button.
It was the “connect” button, and would allow a secondary ship to connect to a damaged vessel. There was a short pause, and then Cara’s voice came through Jake’s helmet.
“I’ve got you.” Cara’s voice came back. “Connecting to the computer now. I’ll leave all other systems alone, until we figure out what’s going on here.”
“Thanks.” Jake nodded. “I appreciate it.”
He swung himself up and out of the chair. Suddenly, a loud scream cut through the air.
“Ahhh!” It was Hwa-Young. Jake launched himself out of the bridge and into the hall, where he found Hwa-Young floating a few feet further down. She was staring through one of the doors, and Jake pulled himself up to it.
“Come on.” Sojen snorted and elbowed Hwa-Young. “Haven’t you ever seen a frozen body before?”
The room was full of cryosleep pods, sometimes called Fridges. Jake hadn’t encountered one of those in years, but there they were.
“Is the crew dead?” Cara asked. “I’m still accessing systems.”
“Not dead, no.” Jake answered. “Frozen. I’m counting… Twelve.”
He drifted into the room. The pods all had large, glass fronts that allowed them to easily see the occupants. All of them wore clothing indicating that they belonged to the Wang-Gan Syndicate, and showed their assorted ranks. Their eyes were closed, their breath frosty upon the glass.
“Sorry.” Hwa-Young floated into the room as well. “I just… I wasn’t expecting this. Give me a second.”
She nervously floated up to a small computer next to the pods. Jake hovered briefly in front of the captain of the ship. It was an older man, with a grizzled beard covered in frost.
“Don’t open them up.” Jake murmured.
“Cryosleep takes days to pull someone out of.” Hwa-Young shook her head. “Even if I did hit the wrong button, I’d have plenty of time to reverse it. Now…” She paused. “Looks like eleven out of the twelve are still alive.”
“Which one didn’t make it?” Jake asked.
“The one down on the end. He’s listed as… John Silver.”
Jake floated down to gaze at the boy. He looked the same as any of the others, except that perhaps there was slightly less fog on the glass in front of him. He was just resting there, quiet and peaceful.
And now, he would never awake.
“How long have they been like this?” Jake asked.
“Hard to say.” Hwa-Young shook her head. “This computer isn’t saying.”
“I can answer that.” Cara’s voice came through the headset again. “According to the Internal clock, the ship has been adrift for… Three years.”
“Three years?” Jake murmured. “Incredible. Do we know yet why it’s been like this?”
“Still working on that.” Cara answered. “I’m going through the ship’s logs now. They launched from Saturn… Set a course for Earth… The whole crew entered cryosleep…”
“The whole crew?” Hwa-Young glanced over at Jake. “What about the pilot?”
“There’s an autopilot for journeys like that.” Jake shrugged. “At slower speeds, an autopilot can pretty much handle anything except freak accidents.”
“Here we go.” Cara suddenly spoke up. “There was something that went wrong with the autopilot, it’s looking like. The course was changed slightly, and it went into orbit around Jupiter. It was at a really distant orbit, just close enough to be caught in the gravity well, but escaped about a week ago. Maybe two weeks, the clock doesn’t seem to be perfect. Anyway, it wound up out here.”
“So what do we do?” Jake murmured. “Just… Put it back on track?”
“Maybe.” Cara murmured. “I’m still looking through some things. Keep exploring. There shouldn’t be anything on the ship that will hurt you.”
“Shouldn’t be. That’s comforting.” Jake nodded. “Alright, we’ll keep it up.”
Sojen was floating at the entrance, and she pointed down. “I’m going to go see if there’s anything that the engine can tell me.”
“Good.” Jake turned and looked upward. “I’m going to go see if I can figure out what this thing is carrying.”

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

It was a Saturn ice freighter. The natural conclusion, then, would be that the ship was hauling ice of some sort. Jake, though, had a suspicion that it wasn’t, at least not in its entirety. Cara hadn’t said much over the com, but he understood what she had been hinting at.
Ship autopilots didn’t just take people off-course. Yes, it was technically possible that something had glitched, but there was a far more obvious solution: Sabotage. Likely, someone had sent the command to the ship in order to make it go off-course. The question was who, and why.
Generally, when things went wrong in space, it had something to do with either the people or the cargo on board.
The ship, being designed for cryosleep, had far fewer amenities than the Valiant had, despite being much larger. The majority of its bulk was, indeed, made up of cargo space, and as Jake floated up to the level just above the airlock, he felt a brief flicker of excitement. He slowly pulled the door open, and then glided inside.
Inside was a glorious expanse of ice.
The cargo hold had to be two hundred feet long, if not longer, and was filled to the brim with carefully cut and stacked ice. Some of it was a brilliant and deep blue, some of it was green, some was red. It was stunning to look at, and Jake whistled. There were a lot of folks living in the inner planets that would pay top dollar for genuine Saturn Ice. They said it had lots of minerals and things that you couldn’t get elsewhere. Now, what most of them didn’t realize was that out in Saturn, people paid top dollar for Mars Dust or Luna Rocks, with much the same logic.
People were willing to pay for just about anything they didn’t have, regardless of how much they did have already.
In any case, the cargo hold was packed full, and unless there was something hiding beneath the ice (which was a certain possibility), Jake didn’t see much wrong with it. Hwa-Young floated up after him, and Jake slowly looked around for a manifest.
“What are you looking for?” She asked, as he drifted over to a small computer on the wall.
“I just want to see what the captain wrote about this stuff.” Jake answered. He pressed a few buttons, and after a moment, the computer lit up. “There we go. Let’s see here…”
It was hard to type in the oversized gloves of the environmental suit, but after a moment, he managed it. With a flicker, a small list appeared on the screen, and he scanned through it.
“Alright… Five hundred tons of ice… And that’s it.” Jake frowned. “Huh.”
“You expected to find something else?” Hwa-Young asked. “I mean… Even if there was something else hidden there, would it really be listed? Wouldn’t you want to keep it hidden from the law?”
“If you’ve been boarded, you’re already lost, and you don’t want gangsters shoving guns in your face because your manifest doesn’t show the stuff they’ve been promised.” Jake shook his head. “It looks like they really are just… Just hauling ice. Nothing more. You getting anything, Cara?”
“Something, yes.” She answered. “I’ve tracked them to Ice Outpost Nine, in Saturn’s Inner Rings. They were reported as departing, and then when they didn’t arrive on schedule, they were reported as missing, but given the relatively minor nature of the loss, no one dispatched anything to scout them.”
“Everyone is too busy getting ready to fight each other to bother with something like that.” Jake murmured. He frowned. “What about the command?”
“It was sent via an external device, about two days after they launched. Within hours of them entering cryo.” Cara sounded confused.
“I have the external device.” Sojen’s voice echoed through the com. “You’re going to want to see this.”
Jake soon floated down the hall to the engine room. There, amidst the mass of wires and gears and shafts, all of which were now quiet and motionless, Sojen floated. She was holding a small, black device that looked almost like a fork wired to a radio.
“I found it tucked in behind the modulators.” She shrugged. “I was checking to see if we could use the modulators ourselves. I don’t think it was meant to be found.”
“No dip.” Jake shook his head. “So then… The ship was sabotaged before they departed?”
“Someone wanted to be able to silence them without anyone else knowing about it.” Cara surmised. “You blow up a ship, it makes news. A ship vanishes? Meh, it’ll be found in a couple hundred years when technology gets a bit better.”
“True.” Jake shook his head. “The question is who did it, and why.”
“Does it matter?” Hwa-Young asked. “These are living people! We can get their ship back on course, right? We can set their destination again, right? They’ll wake up and wonder why they took so long to get there, but at the end of the day, they’ll be where they need to go. That’s the right thing to do… isn’t it?”
Jake nodded slowly. “You’re… You’re prFifteen minutes later, they had entered the Valiant once more, exited their environmental suits, and made their way onto the bridge. Jake pulled himself into his chair and strapped himself down, just to keep himself from drifting, while Cara hit a few buttons. Hwa-Young floated up to her medical bay, where she could run some tests on the ice she had brought back.
“So, I was digging through their computer…” Cara murmured. “And I found this.”
With a flicker, a large screen above her head changed, and showed a strange logo. It depicted the planet Saturn, with sword plunging through it. Water dripped out the bottom of the planet like blood.
“I’ve never seen it before.” Jake shook his head.
“I have.” Sojen muttered. “Terrorists.”
“What?” Jake looked back and forth between them.
Cara nodded her head. “They’ve been operating for a few decades now. Most of the ice from Saturn is harmless, but there’s a particular type of toxin that can only be found in the rings. It’s an organic compound that forms in the volcanos of Titan, and then gets spewed into the surrounding ice fields. The stuff is pretty nasty, and can kill pretty quickly.”
There was a crackle from the coms, and Hwa-Young’s voice rang up from the medical bay. “I can confirm that. It’s hard to say exactly what it is, but there’s definitely something here.”
“So…” Jake’s stomach flipped. “These are terrorists?”
He felt sick at the thought that he had very nearly sent the terrorists on their merry way.
“Yup.” Cara confirmed. “And… Here’s this. It’s a message that was beamed out about a week before their departure.”
A message appeared on the screen, and Jake leaned forward to read it.
“Operator, this is Captain Yize. We’ve been speaking for some time about a traitor in our midst, and I’ve learned their identity. It’s the boy, John Silver, he seems to work for NUN. I’ve arranged for his cryo pod to malfunction when we begin our next journey, so it’s nothing to worry about. Thought you should know.”
The message was short and to the point, and Jake sighed as he leaned back in his chair.
Very, very interesting. What to do about that? The traitor was dead – And Jake had no particular love for the New United Nations, or NUN, so he wasn’t going to mourn the loss of one of their operatives too greatly – but apparently that hadn’t been enough. The ship had been cut loose and set adrift, sent across the solar system on a doomed journey until the cryo pods failed, and the crew froze for good.
On one hand, the crew was helpless.
On the other hand… They were terrorists.
“Can we tell anyone about this?” Jake asked.
“Tell who?” Cara held up her hands. “United Earth? That would give them our transponder information. Same with NUN. Not to mention that anyone in their ranks who belongs to these terrorists would know that we know. We’d be painting a massive target on our backs.”
“Alright.” Jake held up a hand. “What if we make the ship broadcast a message, warning people. We send it on its way to dock, so that when it arrives, everyone knows it’s carrying poisoned ice. The terrorists get arrested, and no one knows it’s us.”
“Until they pull the computer logs.” Cara shook her head. “Doesn’t really matter how deep we try to bury it. There are thousands of computer systems on any ship you come across, and our fingerprints will be in it somewhere. It’s the same problem as before.”
Jake sighed and rubbed his fingers against his temples.
He didn’t consider himself a bad man. There was poisoned ice being delivered to Earth, and whether or not he liked the people running the planet, he had no particular hatred for the average person, and it was the boots on the ground that would be affected. He needed to get out a warning… But on the flip side, he had to take care of his crew, first and foremost. They were his responsibility. There had been active ice shipments for decades, so if NUN or United Earth hadn’t figured out how to stop it yet… That was really on them.
Finally, he sighed and nodded. “Alright, then. Cut the ship loose. Let it keep drifting.”
“Keep…” Cara blinked in surprise.
“No, not just drifting. Give it a boost of the engines. Make it look alive.” Jake sighed. “That’ll keep it going until it flies out of the solar system. Then… Take that image that you showed us, the one of the terrorists, and make it into a burst transmission. Oh, I know. Have their computer send out the transmission. We’ll receive and record it, and then we can pass it along at the next port. We say we picked it up in the Void, which is true, and that we wanted to pass it on. The authorities can take it from there.”
Cara gave a small nod, and set her jaw. Sojen let out a sigh, then slowly drifted out of the cockpit and down toward the engine room. A moment later, there was a clang as the ice hauler detached, and the ship shuddered as the other ship roared off.
“And… All has been done.” Cara nodded. “Just as you asked.”
“Good.” Jake murmured. “Set a course for Mars.”
The engines kicked on, pressing him slightly back into his seat once more, and once again, his eyes swept over the array of sensors.
The solar system was a dark place, these days. Everyone trying to kill everyone else, and the people who were just trying to make a living usually had to help someone or another do the killing. Such was the way of the stars.
Jake had no desire to take any part of it. The terrorists had been killed by their own people, he just hadn’t done anything to stop it. His own crew would get to keep eating and breathing for another day.
More than that, in the stars, was a luxury that he couldn’t even begin to afford.

Key Dates

2017 – Born
2053 – Jake escapes earth.
2054 – Jake joins the crew of the Valiant

Appendicies

The events of this story take place during the first season of Valiant.

AI Notice

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