“What’s this? I remember seeing one like this in a museum once but I can’t remember what it was. ”, Rishi asked holding a small but thick square of metal.
“Ahh, that, yes… I don’t know exactly.” Akira replied.
“You don’t know? I thought that you had gathered specific artifacts to help you remember the epic stories of old and not just some random stuff.” Rish asked, with both humor and intrigue.
“Who says there isn’t a story in your hands?”
“Ohh, in that case, I choose this one for today.“, a big smile grew on Rishi while he sat on the armchair. He had been intrigued by that piece of metal since the first day and wanted a way to force his grandfather to tell the story, otherwise, he might only know it months in the future.
“Ahh, I see. I think you got the better of me, you are getting smarter by the day.”, Akira sat down and smiled, proudly. “Well, Daisuke Maldoran it is.”
***
“Tool prices are through the roof again.”
“I guess.”
“Nothing that should trouble an explorer such as yourself.”
“Oh?”
“Daisuke Maldoran, at your service. Let me start by saying that I mean you no harm. I have a business proposal.”
“You are probably mistaking me for someone else.”
“Sure, you may not be Bullet, MUD Captain of The Club but in that case why are you wearing their insignia on your jacket? And I’d hate to tell the real Bullet that his Calico Hero has been stolen. I work at Pearce, at the research division, and as I said, you have nothing to fear.”
“Fine, I’m the one you are looking for but I’m not sure why I’m the one you want.”
Walking slowly away from the central plaza where a lot of ears could be way too close for comfort, both exchanged credentials and pleasantries.
“So this business thing, what are we talking about? And, is it legit?” Bullet asked.
“Worst case scenario, we waste your time but you get paid anyway. In the best-case scenario, you get paid a lot more. It is all legal but we would still like to ask for absolute secrecy.”
“I like it but it does sound a bit too good to be true.”
“Not so fast, we would have to go into uncharted territory, which makes it next to impossible to predict the dangers we could face.”
“We? I prefer to work alone or within The Club, strangers are not really welcomed when I’m risking my ship in the process.”
“Understandable, but it is essential that I go with you on the mission, and besides, your engineer slot is free and I happen to be a skilled one myself. If you accept the job, you can choose an escrow service of your choosing and a deposit will be made for the entire value of your ship plus 15%. If all goes well, we get our money back, if all goes to shit, you get your ship back and even profit from it. So, win, win?”
“You said you worked for the research department, right? It means we will be looking for something for you to research. Say we get there and find what you are looking for, you research it and make an obscene amount of Atlas selling it, I think it’s fair a 0,5% royalty for me and the boys, what do you say?” Bullet asked.
“Sure, alongside the presidency of Pearce itself? So humble of you. It’s true but unfortunately, getting things back may still lead to nothing, the research could take years, and even after everything is researched, there is a possibility that no viable product comes out of it. The only thing I can say is that I’ll make sure you will be happy with the payout, regardless of what we do with it in the future.” Daisuke replied with a smile.
Bullet was finding the deal suspicious but then again, the risks were mitigated, the employer was one of the biggest shipbuilders out there, it all seemed to check out. One last question to put his mind at ease.
“After all you said, one thing keeps bothering me. Why doesn’t Pearce just order one of their in-house fleets to do the mission?”
“As soon as the first ship left the dock, all our competitors would be launching their own fleets to keep an eye on what we were doing so a discrete explorer with a small crew will not raise suspicions. Are your concerns properly addressed? Or should we keep wasting everyone’s time? I have a feeling that you have already decided.” Daisuke said, confident that when you give explorers something truly new to explore, it is a hard opportunity to pass on.
***
The journey to the edge of Medium-Risk Zone was quick and uneventful. Daisuke had even arranged for a third party cover transport in a Calico Guardian right up the border but as soon as they undocked, Bullet ordered to push the semi-new warp drive to a destination that could not even be introduced in the navigation computer as it was outside the available coordinates programmed into it.
“How trustworthy are your pilots?” Daisuke asked.
“I’ll tell them anything you tell me so you decide for yourself.”, Bullet replied.
“Very well, I promised the rest of the briefing when we reached the High-Risk Zone, and here we are. We are searching for something that no one knows what it is.” Daisuke said. “It appeared on an experimental long-range sensor as a small blip but a few days later, it appeared again and never left. The energy signature is unlike anything we know.”
“New tech?” Bullet asked.
“New, experimental, old, alien, forbidden, you pick. What we do know is that we can’t scan it with any of our current sensors, apart from that experimental one.” Daisuke replied.
“So that’s why you want to lay low. If anyone noticed a full Pearce exploration fleet going nowhere, it would raise more than just questions, you are afraid of competition reaching it before you.” Bullet said, remembering that he would get paid a lot more if successful, he joked, “I guess I should have pushed for that 0,5% after all.”
***
The sound of metal stretching and giving in was the first sign. Soon after, the warp field that enveloped the ship collapsed and they found themselves in normal space. Alarms were going off from everywhere, from life support to fuel, from scanners to shields.
Bullet ran from his room into the ship’s bridge, stumbling around, battling gravity changes.
“What happened? Are we under attack?”
“I don’t think so, sir, we just dropped from warp and instantly everything went to shit sir!” the co-pilot replied.
“Ok, priorities…” Bullet said, thinking of how to cope with so many problems at once.
“I can help. I told you I’m an engineer. Shields and Fuel mainly.” Daisuke alerted.
“Fine, go check the shields, and you, get to life support, we need to be alive to need the shields. I’ll work on the scanners.”
Arriving at the shield generator, Daisuke connected his tool to it, an all-green screen appeared. It didn’t make sense but everything was working at full power. Same with life support. Scanners, on the other hand, revealed what had happened. The alarms were the ones with the problem, not the systems themselves. Something was interfering with the main source of ship telemetry so all systems that used it were malfunctioning.
“Could it be the object? Some kind of defense mechanism?” Bullet asked.
“Highly unlikely. I’ve seen this type of interference before. Can you check for a black hole nearby? This is an uncharted space, the safe routes are not mapped in the navigation system yet. Maybe we bumped into one.” Daisuke replied.
“Sir?” asked the co-pilot.
“What?”
“I’ve been going through the last records before we left warp and there was not one, but two black holes.”
The two black holes were in the process of merging together and that was causing so much disruption in the region that sensors weren’t able to cope. After a few tweaks, the shields were able to reduce that effect to a manageable level. After this, the scanners became operational again and a broken asteroid was found nearby that was the source of the anomalous reading.
“We should turn back, we’re not prepared for this.”, Bullet said.
“But we are so close.”, Daisuke replied and insisted. “Everything is working, the shields are holding strong. Why not just go in, grab what we need, and leave?”
“Sir, we could all use a big fat payday, even you.”, the pilot said, and he was right. A couple of new ventures that had yet to yield any returns left Bullet’s war chest severely depleted. In fact, it was exactly to avoid having to take these types of unknown jobs that we wanted his bank account to have its liquidity back.
“Alright. But I’ll pull the plug at the first sign of trouble, you hear me?”
“Couldn’t agree more but at least we will try.”, Daisuke replied.
***
Approaching the asteroid, it became clear that a debris field on its surface was a crashed ship and a simple removal was not possible as it was half-buried. Since the situation seemed controlled enough, a manual extraction could be performed and Daisuke volunteered. Going through the scattered remains, the hand sensor pointed to a small casing as the source of the reading.
“It’s this right here. It should be easy enough to set free and then you bring it up with the tractor beam.” Daisuke informed.
“Roger that. Standing by for tractor beam engagement.”
While cutting the connections, several inscriptions appeared. They seemed Photoli but they were still unreadable except for a few words.
“It’s probably malfunctioning, never seen the tool not recognize the Photoli language, even regional dialects that derived from the main language.” the pilot said.
“Maybe it’s a root?” Bullet asked.
Daisuke, still cutting conduit by conduit, commented on the matter, “I believe you are right. This is probably an ancient Photoli ship that got trapped in the black hole’s pull, eons ago. I can only theorize but I believe that the merger reached the point where it acted as a lens that both distorted and amplified the energy reading enough for us to detect it. Don’t get me wrong, ancient but not outdated in any way, this is by far the most advanced technology I’ve seen in all my years as a researcher. They’ll have to accept me back after this.”
“What? Who?” Bullet asked.
“No point in hiding it anymore, sorry for deceiving you. I discovered the signal some time ago and brought it to the attention of my superiors. No one listened. I’ve been ridiculed to the point of expulsion. But I was right, you see? It really was here.”
“Goddammit, I knew I didn’t like the smell of this, now you’ll tell me that the NFTs if you gave as a guarantee are fake and aren’t worth shit, right? I know I should have checked the contracts.”
“No, I got several loans and the guaranteed money is real. It was a gamble but only for me as I had nothing else to lose. If there was nothing here, I’d be in very deep trouble to repay the loans. I truly am sorry but it doesn’t matter, it is here.”
“Wrap it up then, I just want to get back to Bar Aria.”, Bullet replied with a tired voice. He was disappointed with himself for not seeing through the charade but he also understood that after coming all this way, might as well finish the job, get paid, and never look back.
The casing was now free but when the tractor beam engaged, a sudden spike in energy output triggered a warning in the ship. Soon after the warning turned into an alarm, the energy kept climbing, the power regulators had been one of the disconnected cables so now it was out of control. Quickly identifying the danger, the pilot directed the tractor beam to push the casing away from the ship at a very high speed. However, the explosion was so massive that the shock wave blew up the asteroid and pushed the ship’s shields almost to the point of failure.
“Is everyone alright?” Bullet asked, and the pilots quickly replied affirmatively. “And you Daisuke?”, no response was given.
“He is probably dead. We should leave before anything else explodes.”, the pilot said.
“We can’t, not yet. We have to look for him.”, Bullet replied.
After some time and just before giving up, Daisuke was found, floating away, alive but unconscious. The blast had thrown him from the asteroid alongside a big metal plate that had protected him from the radiation.
“Sir, maybe we should bring the metal in, it may still be worth something.”
“You are right, bring him first and when we clear the dock, bring the metal plate.”, Bullet replied.
Daisuke was laying down, still in his spacesuit, with the life support system still working. The scanners showed he was fine and probably just needed rest. With the ship on autopilot and very near the Medium-Risk zone, Bullet and his pilots stared at the metal plate, now secured in the cargo hold, and discussed how they would have spent the money they were promised but now seemed so distant.
***
“It’s done?” Bullet asked, standing near his ship.
“Yes, I’ve requested a pickup for the plate. After sending a preliminary report on the material, it was immediately accepted. The shielding potential of the material is immense, I should have died but it protected me. And after that, I would still have died if it weren’t for you. The guys told me you insisted on searching for me when they wanted to leave. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it, it was the right thing to do. But if you want to thank us by paying the ship’s repairs though, I’m not gonna say no.”, Bullet replied
“Already taken care of. Repairs and upgrades, on me, already spoken to the mechanic. Also, for proper payment, I’ve been authorized to give you 3%, and another 1% for each of the pilots, for the first five years of sales from the new shields in return for keeping all of this quiet while we develop the technology. It’s the minimum I can do.” Daisuke proposed.
“Sir. So, it all turned out alright?”, the co-pilot asked.
“Well, that’s a first.”, the pilot replied and both started laughing.
“Hey!” Bullet shouted.
***
“And this is part of that plate?”, Rishi asked.
“After sending the plate for analysis, Daisuke took his spacesuit to be checked out and repaired. Lodged in it were several small shards of the metal. Shards that he used later in his life to prove that he was the original discoverer and live off the royalties himself for years. That was the last one, kept as a symbol of his dedication to his work and a testament to the triumph of will.” Akira replied.
“I see. Going so far on faith alone.”, said Rish looking down at the small token.
“Indeed. And that Bullet fellow, it wouldn’t be the last time he would cross paths with our family but I’ll leave that for some other day. An old man gets tired very easily, you know?”