LODESTAR GAZETTE | LODESTAR PROMPT

Passing Thru.

A market with a hidden secret.

The prompt was, It is in a sprawling space market where anything from across the galaxy can be bought and sold. You can create stories or poems about bizarre items, alien cultures, and intriguing characters that populate this market.

I’m Max, and I grew up on Passing Thru.

Like just about anyone else who made their living there, I never thought about leaving- until the day everything changed. That was when the decision was made for me.

Now all I want to do is get back.

Let me tell you about it.

Passing Thru is a space market, probably the biggest one in the Federation. A place to trade, where everyone rubbed along and nearly everyone made money. Those who hadn’t got rich worked on the theory that their fortune was on the next ship in.

The inhabitants called it the cluster; it was made up of a whole load of derelict ships welded together. There were battlecruisers, passenger ships, cargo freighters and just about every type in between. The wreckage of the Holy Wars, worn-out pieces of junk and ships that people had lost on a roll of the dice. Joined together to make a city, orbiting an uninhabited planet on the fringes of civilisation

If you had a reason to trade, whether you were buying or selling, you sent Passing Thru a message. They posted it and shared it around. If one of the traders based on the cluster fancied a piece of the action, they would act as a broker, guaranteeing payment and negotiating the deal, for a percentage. They might deal themselves, or direct you to someone else. It all depended on the risk and the reward.

It was very efficient, especially if what you had to trade was slightly dubious in origin; the use of a middleman kept you safe, removing the risk. Of course, the authorities kept their eyes on the cluster but they allowed it to function, it kept all the bad boys in one place, where they could be watched.

My father was a trader and an engineer, a fairly honest one, as far as I could tell. He bought and repaired worn-out ships. He could fabricate parts that they’d stopped making years ago to order. I grew up in a world of plasma fields, torque drivers and hypersteel, absorbing knowledge and listening to the stories about the good old days.

We lived on an old Corvette near the centre of the cluster; Dad had converted the munitions bay into a pretty good workshop, judging by the stream of customers and messages that he got. He had a docking port for visiting ships, ones that needed repair and we saw a lot of different people, all with stories and adventures to talk about. I learned a lot about the Federation, the past and the way to fix things by sitting quietly and listening.

Life was good, despite my mother not being around. She had left for the bright lights of the Federation long before I was old enough to remember her.

As I got older, we worked together more, I changed from being a simple carrier of tools to his apprentice. My life was all mapped out for me, I was happy to carry on the business. I loved tinkering with machinery and getting broken things to work again. What little schooling I went to was based on the niceties of trade, law and other useful stuff.

Once I was sixteen, I left school and worked for my dad full-time. I even started getting work of my own. It gave me a few credits and meant that I could pursue my own projects. If Dad knew what I was up to, he never stopped me. I repaired racing speeders for one of the cluster's poorer syndicates, managing to get enough extra speed and performance from their craft to move them up the rankings.

One day, I was exploring the cluster with a bunch of friends. We got separated, which didn’t really bother me. I was getting bored with their antics. I had a reputation to protect as a serious, trustworthy engineer, and they were still more interested in getting drunk and making a noise. There was a tentative offer from a bigger racing team that I had to consider, as well as the work I was doing with Dad.

I found myself in an alleyway I had never visited before. It was badly lit and dusty; the security cameras were inactive. All the access doors that lined it were welded shut, except one at the end, round a bend, out of sight of the main corridor. It looked like I had found an old ship. There was unbroken dust on the deck; nobody had been down here in quite a while.

There was nothing on the airlock that said it was private, no owner’s tag in the placeholder. The outer lock door was open and there wasn’t a keep-out sign. The gauge showed that there was air inside so I pressed the contact to open the hatch.

The airlocks on all ships had their own dedicated power supply; it was a safety thing. Whatever else was happening, if there were air, it would always open. As it hadn’t been locked, the ship was probably uninhabited. This was getting better. I’d been trying to develop a relationship with a girl called Hela for a while and somewhere private for a little alone time might come in useful.

Even so, I called out anyone there a few times as I plucked up the courage to go inside. The airlock camera was off, and all the interior lights were out. I tried a switch, but nothing. I pulled my torch from my toolbelt and shone it around. The nameplate, situated in the usual place by the lock controls told me that this was an old Federation Scout, a small, fast and lightly defended Navy ship.

I got interested; maybe it had seen action in the Holy Wars, perhaps it had even been at one of the big battles, like Jintao or Brethren’s Host. History was one of the few things that interested me, apart from fixing ships. If I could get power restored, I could have a look at the memory banks.

There was nobody on board; the ship was definitely unclaimed. I decided then and there that it would be mine, set the airlock to private and coded it to my birthday, before closing it up and heading home.

When I got back to the main branch, my wristband beeped. There were six calls, all from Dad.

“Where have you been?” he asked. I wondered about telling him of my find. I decided against it. “Out with Carl and the boys from school,” I said, “exploring.”

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Just around,” I told him.

“You dropped off the net, I lost your signal, you weren’t down the old branch, were you?”

The old branch was the place where the youth hung out, on the other side of the cluster to my find. “Yes, I was there,” I said.

“You need to buckle down, grow up,” he said, “if you’re going to work for Horrison Racing, they’ll expect a certain standard of behaviour. We’ll speak more about this later.”

As the call ended, I realised that it was the first time that I had ever lied to him.

To preempt a lecture, as soon as I got home, I apologised. I told him I had understood his concern and would sort myself out. It avoided any conversation where I might let slip what I was really up to. He seemed to be satisfied. “Fair enough,” he grunted, “we’ve all been young once.”

The next day, I was supposed to be working on a job for a man on one of the cluster's outlying arms. He had a client whose speeder needed tuning. When I arrived, he told me that he hadn’t turned up. He said he would call me when he showed up.

With nothing to do, I went over to see what Hela was up to. She had a free day, “Come with me,” I suggested, “there’s something I’ve found.”

“OK,” she said, “but I have to be back this afternoon.”

“That’s fine,” I answered; I was in no hurry to rush what I hoped was a developing relationship. I led her down the main corridor towards my find.

“Where are we going?” she asked as we left the branch. She looked worried as we walked through the dark and dusty corridors.

“Here,” I said as we arrived. I opened the lock and turned on my torch. Hela pulled one from her belt. “You’re joking,” she said as we went up towards the wheelhouse. “Is this yours?”

“Nobody else seems to want it,” I said, as we climbed the central companionway. “I found it unlocked and empty. As far as I’m concerned, it’s finder’s rights.”

“Can you get the lights on?”

“We’ll see.” We had reached the control centre, one deck down from the wheelhouse. I went in and pulled the panels open, looking for the main breakers. With luck, the ship would be connected to the station mains, and the power would come on if I could find the right panel. They seemed to be in the wrong order from all the other Scouts I had worked on. As far as impressing her went, this wasn’t my finest hour.

“It’s this one,” said Hela; she had been looking on the other side of the space; there was a clunk, and the lights came on. “Call yourself an engineer?”

“The panels are in the wrong order,” I protested. Then I saw that she was laughing.

We headed to the wheelhouse, and I checked the broadcast aerials, which were disconnected before I fired up the main computer. Logging on was a doddle.

I’d been breaking Navy encryption since I could speak; all you needed was a login from before the ship had been shut down. As long as the comms were off when you restarted the system, the software couldn’t check for updates or receive new passwords. It would assume it had suffered a forced shutdown, hadn’t been offline long and would accept any login.

I knew a few; it took the second one I tried, a Blessed Admiral’s, which was ironic. They had been the losers of the Holy Wars. This might have been one of the ships that had mutinied at the start of the conflict.

“Find out if it has any video logs, sailor,” said Hela, seated in the Captain’s chair, one long leg swinging.

“Aye, Aye Cap,” I said, joining in her fantasy.

The pages scrolled as I searched through the logs; there seemed to be a lot of recordings. A few of them were encrypted and copy-protected, marked as Eyes only.

“Play the latest one you can access,” she said. “Let’s see if it tells us why the ship’s here.”

“It says that it’s Captain Dror’s log, it’s the only entry with that name,” I said as I put it on the big screen.

“It looks like they’re taking off from somewhere,” said Hela as we watched the scene; in the space where we now sat, alone. There were ten or so people in uniform, outside we could see that the ship was leaving the ground.

It looked like a hurried departure; there were lots of shouted orders and evasive manoeuvres. I saw lines of laser fire flash past the ports, the ship shuddered a couple of times then they were in the clouds.

When the view cleared, the sky was turning black, but the lasers still bracketed the ship. Its corkscrew motion was reflected in the view outside; more ships were visible. It looked like a full battle was underway.

“We’re clear of the last of them,” someone off-screen said, and there was cheering and back-slapping. I could hear comments. “We did it.” “We should get a medal for this.” “Genius” was just some. An authoritative voice rang out “Alright gentlemen, that’s enough self-congratulation, we still have to get back to Fleet.” We could see the speaker, a big man in a Federation uniform. That must have been Captain Dror.

The planet was getting smaller as the ship raced away. There were more subdued snippets of conversation, but we could still see a battle going on; sparkles of light indicated shots and strikes. Suddenly there was a huge explosion, near the planet. White light blasted across the viewports, lit the wheelhouse in sharp relief.

“Enemy flagship’s been hit,” shouted the off-screen voice; it was probably the tactical officer in the control room, watching his screens instead of the scene through the viewport.

“Should we turn to assist, Captain?” asked the officer of the watch. “Negative, flight,” said Dror, “We need to get back to Fleet. What we have is too important, it could change the course of the war. Maintain course and speed.”

“The flagship’s caught in the planet’s gravity, going down,” said the voice, on the screen was a red blur of something striking the atmosphere.

“Nothing we can do for them now,” said Dror coldly as behind him, thousands died.

“Warning, E.M. pulse detected,” said the voice.

“Engage the…,” the screen dissolved.

“That’s it.”

“Did we just watch what I think we did?” Hela asked.

“It must have been,” I answered, too shocked to say much else. The destruction of the Blessed Flagship and its falling from space onto the city of Brethren’s Host was the culmination of the Holy Wars, the event that finally forced peace. Had this ship had been part of it? And what did he mean, what we have is too important?

“Play it again,” said Hela.

Before I could, the lights went out.

“What’s happened?” Hela said, her torchlight came on, blinding me for a second.

“Perhaps the breaker has tripped. Maybe you only turned on the reserve power and it’s been used. It’s unlikely that Power Central spotted the draw, we only powered up the lights and computer. If we had set off a security alert, there would be agents crawling all over us by now. If we want to do any more, we need to get the ship's own power working.”

“What’s your plan then?”

“We come back, with some portable lights, fix the power systems up, charge the tanks and see if we can’t find out what this thing that they had was.” I was thinking it might be valuable if it hadn’t already been removed.

“What can it be?” she asked.

“It’s probably battle plans or some secret communications, something that would shorten the war.”

“But Brethren’s Host was the end of the war,” she said.

“True, but they didn’t know that, then.”

She thought for a moment. “So it won’t be valuable now?”

I wasn’t so sure, “there are history buffs all over,” I said, “always in the market for artefacts or memorabilia. If we can find stuff that nobody’s ever seen before, from the battle of Brethren’s Host, they’d pay a fortune for it.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “best keep quiet about the ship till we know then.” Which was good in more than one way, we could search together and who knew what else we might get up to.

That night, I researched the battle of Wishart. There was nothing about any discovery of a superweapon. In fact, there was nothing to suggest that Captain Dror had ever been in the vicinity. There was plenty about him; he was one of the better-known of the Captains involved in the Holy Wars, but there was no mention of his being on this particular ship. Not only that, but he wasn’t on the Blessed’s side; he was Federation through and through.

According to the records, the ship we were on was lost with all hands, during the battle we had just witnessed. The records confirmed that Dror had commanded a ship called Moth and died in an ambush on a planet called Oonal, years later.

This raised several questions, as well as the one about its mysterious cargo. Why was it listed as lost when it wasn’t? How did it end up here?

And the big one. How could I find out without giving away what I was doing?

“Did you fix the Inverter?” Dad asked over dinner.

“No,” I replied, he wasn’t ready so I had a day off, I saw Hela.”

“That Svensen’s girl?” he said, “she’s a beauty, you good friends?”

“Yeah, we are,” I said, blushing. I wondered what was coming.

“Good,” he said, “you need to get away from my side all the time, perhaps she’ll keep you away from the losers you used to hang around with.”

I had an idea, there was an old man called Mostyn, he lived in a semi-drunken stupor but had been on Passing forever. The general opinion was that he had been in the Navy before drink had got him. Maybe he would know a little about the ship.

I found him in the old branch, where my father had assumed that I was hanging around. He was where the wasters and drunks congregated. “Hey, Mostyn,” I shook him awake; he tried to fight me off but was weak and uncoordinated.

“Watcha wan?” he asked his breath smelt of alcohol, his clothes of bodily functions. I backed away a little.

“What do you know about Wishart?” I asked. His eyes focused.

“Beer,” he said. I passed him a bottle; he drank half of it in one, belched and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Tell me, Danny Lensman’s boy, fixer of ships, why do you want to know about Wishart?” Underneath the booze, he was functioning,

“I’m interested in history,” I said. “People say you know about the battle of Wishart.”

“I was there,” he agreed, his eyes showed that, in what was left of his mind, he still was, in a way. “The blessed lost a ship and a city on Wishart,” he said. “And they lost something else, but it’s never been found.”

This was interesting; it tied in with Dror’s remark. “What else?”

He tapped his nose, “the Blessed were working on a secret project, they reckoned that they had found a way to win the war.”

“They still lost though,” I prompted him. “But what was it?”

His speech was slurring. “Who knows, you got another beer?”

I passed him the bottle. He drank, then started to speak, the words coming out in a rush.

“The rumour was that they had hidden it on a ship. Everyone assumes it was lost when the city was destroyed, perhaps it was all a lie, maybe it never existed.”

Before I could ask him what he meant, he fell asleep. However, I’d never heard anything like this before. It fitted with what Dror had said, but then, if they had possessed such a thing, where was it now, and why didn’t everyone know about it?

According to the video we had seen, they were well clear of the destruction on Wishart. Perhaps what my ship had were the plans for it. For some reason, the ship had survived but they had never been found or used.

As the days passed, whenever I could, I went back to the ship. Sometimes Hela came with me; sometimes I was on my own. I rigged up battery lighting in the control room, the wheelhouse and the engine room and started to work on the ship’s systems. If I could get it running on its own power, I could think about searching it properly for whatever secrets it might hold. I never mentioned what Mostyn had said to Hela, so I decided to wait and see what we discovered first.

The more work I did, the more confused I got. As well as the extra panels in the control room, there was a bank of grey equipment boxes in the engine space, connected to the power grid, but not ones like I had ever seen on the Scout’s power plants I’d worked on. Perhaps they were battle modifications, unique to this ship. I opened one, and it was crammed with electronics, circuit boards, and what looked like some sort of vacuum tube arrangement. I needed to study the plans; if I could find them online.

One thing was certain, they weren’t what was stopping the engines from working. The main couplers, that supplied fuel to the engine were fried, overloaded. It couldn’t have been from the E.M. Pulse that we had seen on the video. They were shielded against that. Something else must have happened. There was no way they could be repaired. I needed a new set.

Once I had fitted them, I would be in business; there was plenty of fuel still on board to run the systems. To get them, I needed to earn some money; they weren’t cheap. Dad might be able to get his hands on a set, but I didn’t want to involve him if I could help it.

Meanwhile, my relationship with Hela was progressing nicely, and the ship became more important for another reason. It was a place where we could be alone together. We would go to the wheelhouse and fool around, imagining that we were exploring the Galaxy together in our ship. One thing led to another, and we became fumbling, then more experienced lovers. Life was looking up.

Then my father revealed that he knew what was going on. “How’s the Scout?” he casually asked as we ate one day. I had been working with him on a big job he had. I hadn’t been to the ship in a few days and hadn’t seen Hela for a while either. I hoped she wasn’t avoiding me.

“You know about it?” I wasn’t really shocked at his knowledge, more surprised at the casual way he mentioned it.

“Of course I do; I think it’s good that you’re trying to get it flying; do you know who owns it?”

I shook my head, “no, I assumed it was just part of the furniture.”

“No, it belongs to the Khersonyets syndicate, they noticed that someone had been on board, working in the engine room,” he paused, “and maybe doing other things.”

“Oh,” I’m sure I went red. Khersonyets were big players in the cluster’s hierarchy. They were not too upset. “Do they want me to stop?”

He laughed, “Alex didn’t seem too bothered, he said that if you can fix it up, it’ll save them the bother. As long as you don’t try to fly it away or sell it. Anyway, you’re an adult now, it’s not my place to judge, just be careful,” he said.

I debated asking him about the converters but thought better of it.

I went to the ship the next day; I was working in the control room, trying to get one of the grey boxes open when Hela turned up, accompanied by a tall, spotty boy of about thirteen. “This is my cousin Jeklyn,” she said, “he’s staying here for a month or so while he’s on school break. I’ve been stuck looking after him.”

She didn’t sound very happy about it; at least it explained her absence.

He had to tag along with us, which slowed us down, but he was a nice kid and said that he was really interested in helping to fix up the scout. When you got talking to him, he knew a lot about engines and drives. Over the next couple of days, I showed him the grey boxes. Like me, he had no idea of what they were for either.

“Do you know about the battle of Wishart?” I asked him and his eyes shone. “Oh yeah,” he said, “it was amazing, all that destruction, the last desperate fight by the Blessed.”

“Have you heard any rumours about a superweapon?” He looked blank.

“There’s a drunk on the cluster,” I told him, “he reckons the Blessed had a superweapon, on some sort of ship. Apparently, it was destroyed in the battle; before they could use it.”

“Never heard of that,” Jeklyn replied; behind him was Hela, shaking her head.

“Don’t tell him anything else,” she said when he went to the heads. “Or show him that video log we watched. He might blab. I want him out of the way.” She put her arms around me, “he’s stopping us from doing more of what we did before.”

The next time we met up, Jeklyn said that he had an idea, “I’m going into the engine room,” he said, “I’ve been reading up about emergency procedures. You know, battle-tested methods of keeping damaged ships flying. I reckon if I cross-connect the Padget Inverter to the capacitors on the pencil buffer, we can jump-start the main engine, that way we won’t need new couplers.”

“The what buffer?” I said. I’d never heard of it.

“The pencil buffer, it’s a fuel reserve on these old scouts, for instant starting. It’s called that because of its shape, long and round, like a pencil. I’ve checked and it’s fully charged. All we need is a way of diverting the power, to bypass the interlocks on the main panel. That’s where the Inverter comes in.”

I understood what he meant; he was just using another name for what I knew as the R.T.U. Tank. It wasn’t a technique I’d heard of. It sounded risky; the Padget Inverter was the device that enabled faster-than-light travel.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It sounds a bit dubious to me.”

“It won’t fire up the light drive, the Inverters are not charged. I’ll disconnect everything. We just use its power conduits to get around the couplers.”

“You carry on,” said Hela; I think she was glad to be rid of him. “Max and I will just sit here and look at the stars.”

I couldn’t see how it would work, but it would keep him out of the way for a while. If it was that simple, surely it would have been tried before. I would have heard of it.

“He’s not a bad kid,” she said as he left. We made ourselves more comfortable.

Five minutes later, when things were just getting interesting, there was a scream and a crash from the engine room. The whole ship shook for several seconds, a sensation I had never felt before on the cluster.

The emergency lights came on, pale blue, casting shadows everywhere. In the background, I could hear the low hum of the main engine. Whatever Jeklyn had done, it had worked.

We ran to the engine room, Jeklyn was lying on the floor, his clothes were smoking. He was unconscious. He was several metres from the switchgear; an electric shock must have thrown him across the space.

Hela screamed and went to him. I went to the switchboard. Being careful not to touch anything metallic, I threw the service breakers open, tensing myself for a jolt. The main lighting came on, circulating fans blew dusty air. Hela was kneeling beside Jeklyn, her head on his chest. He wasn’t moving, we needed paramedics, what a shambles today was turning into.

“He’s breathing,” Hela shouted, “get help.”

I ran to the airlock, shut. It must have closed automatically when the engine started. I pressed the button.

The door remained shut. Perhaps the circuit fuse had been blown? I peered through the hatch and instantly realised why it wouldn’t open.

The alleyway was gone. The outer door was open to space. I could see stars through the viewport.

Hela joined me; she was crying. “What are you waiting for, if you don’t hurry up, he could die,” the words came out in the gaps between sobs. “Why haven’t you opened the airlock?”

“There’s nothing there,” I answered, “look.”

But she didn’t look. Instead, she grabbed my arm and shook it. “Stop messing about, I want to go home.”

“So do I. But I don’t know where home is.”

She finally looked out of the port. Like I had, she saw nothingness where the cluster had been. “The engines are running,” she said. “The drive must have been engaged.”

“Despite what Jeklyn said?”

“Maybe he didn’t check first. That’s what the noise and all the shaking was. We must have broken loose, moved away from the cluster.”

It sounded logical. “If the main powers online, the navigation computer will give us a fix, we can just fly back, we can’t have gone that far.”

Jeklyn was forgotten for a moment. I pushed the other button and the outer door slid shut. We went back to the wheelhouse, I flipped switches and the screens came to life. I needed to get back and reconnect to the cluster. I just hoped the docking ring hadn’t been too badly damaged; repairs could cost me a fortune.

Not only that, Khersonyets would be angry. I could see a lot of unpaid work in the near future. More importantly, Jeklyn needed urgent attention. I could use the radio and call for a medic on our return.

“Where are we?” asked Hela. “We can’t have gone far in a couple of seconds, thinking about it, there was no time for the light drive to have fired up.”

The screens cleared. What I saw was impossible. How could I tell her? I was having enough trouble with the readout myself. What it told me was confirmed by looking out of the ports; the familiar sun was where it had always been.

“According to the computer, we haven’t moved.”

She pushed past me and looked at the readout. She went very pale.

“Yes, we have,” she said, “look. According to the clock, it’s eighty years ago.”

That wasn’t possible. It was before the Battle of Wishart; before Passing Thru had even existed.

I’m Richard Dee and I write all sorts of stories. Find out more, join my mailing list and claim your free novella, the prequel to a Sci-fi series.

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