“Strike?” the Captain snorted.
“Their defense systems are barely running. We should strike now. They’re an easy target,” Morgan smoldered.
“I’m afraid you have our ship confused for another,” said the Captain, “Our registered freighter designation is a cover for scrapping, not raiding. You want us to land on Neptune to reclaim parts from their big battle with Drogan? Let’s do it. We don’t strike. Don’t need the people paying us to slap us in cuffs the minute it’s convenient for them.” Morgan’s piston-legs pumped her over an inch from the Captain.
“You’ll hear this once. Strike the Arcadia now. They’ve betrayed my clients by letting Drogan slip away. You’ll be betraying them too, if you don’t help me get to the bottom of this, and you don’t want to do that. The Arcadia crew might be working with him, but I can’t exactly ask them,” Morgan ordered, “I don’t think I need to stress how much bigger than you this is.” The Captain made the mistake of leaning forward to meet her challenge.
“No,” he said. Morgan’s mechanical arm flipped around the spinning joint of her elbow. It locked with the fuse-rifle on the other end facing out. She jammed it in the soft meat under the Captain’s jaw. A pulse of Chrysum hollowed his skull out, into the air. His body hadn’t hit the ground before every scrapper in the room drew on her. Most of them couldn’t decide where to aim, on the mostly mechanical monster of a woman.
“My name is Morgan, with the WCC Outerworld’s Task Force! I hereby commandeer this ship under their authority! Your Captain all but outed this ship and its crew as illegal scrappers!” she announced to the room. Gun-tips began to dip one by one. “I give you all a choice. Like your Captain, you’ll hear it once. Redeem yourselves by helping me take down the Arcadia, or rot in a Martian prison for your crimes.” One by one, the guns dropped completely. But, by the time she turned back to the ship’s viewing screen, the Arcadia was well out of range. The SkyLine had flung it for Saturn. Morgan’s arm flipped back to mechanical fingers, so she could clench and slam a fist. “Follow it!”
It took until the Captain’s body was disposed of for the trance to lift from the last of the crew. The pilot activated their jets. He steered their scrapper ship into the crystal blue jetstream with two shaking hands.
Chapter Twelve: Icy Rings
“Captain, we’re approaching the deceleration zone,” Alice’s voice filled the bridge. Dawn shifted and sunk back into the throne of cushions - the Captain’s chair. She still hadn’t adjusted to sitting a few feet higher than everyone else in the room, but Miller had insisted. You’ve got the badge and the burden, you get a right to the chair, he told her.
“Very good, Alice,” Dawn cleared her throat to say, “Slow us down to orbiting speed. Ride the outside of the rings, I want to assess the damage.” Distant stars slowed from bright streaks to sparkling sequins on the eternal black quilt outside the SkyLine. The Arcadia’s hull cut through the nanomachine tunnel that marked the edge, and broke free.
“Woah… six, seven stations dark?” Wagner murmured, when he saw it. Dawn tallied them up too, bewildered.
“Nine,” she counted while the Arcada drifted along the fringe of Saturn’s outermost rings. So close to the gassy mass itself, its rings appeared as they were, rather than the illusory solid bands visible from a distance. Enormous hunks of rock and ice hurtled around Saturn in speeds and patterns that made going any closer in the Arcadia a fool’s errand.
The mining stations Dawn and Wagner counted and the outer ring dock were the extent of human development on Saturn. With nothing solid to develop a colony on, there was no reason to explore the planet itself. It was the rings that were rife with precious fusion mineral, after all. Construction of the mining net had started throughout them when Tim’s father was young. Thanks to the intergalactic corporate race to provide the best SkyLine service, the net now spanned more than half of Saturn’s spinning rings. Countless polyhedric steel shelters lit the icy disks, connected by long enclosed walks for mineral transport. Strings and knots. It really does look like a giant fishing net, Dawn marveled from her throne. Parts of it were still damaged or completely severed, floating loose in the rings. Long strings of transport halls were scorched. Dawn and the crew watched tiny maintenance pods gather debris with long, articulate steel arms. They glided and dipped around flinging masses of cosmic ice to deliver them where they belonged.
“Alice, take us to the outer ring dock,” Dawn ordered, when everyone
was sufficiently shaken by the work of Drogan.
“You… can go out to question whoever you want, I suppose,” said the outer ring manager to Dawn and Howard, “The people who could tell you the most about it are… resting in peace.”
“I’m sorry,” Dawn prefaced. She spared a moment of silence for the fallen of Saturn’s rings while Wagner and a few others hopped from the open hatch of the Arcadia behind her. The outer ring station wasn’t much for accommodation, but a perfect leg stretch after three days ripping through the SkyLine. In minutes, her crew wandered from snack machine to magazine rack to news-blasting screen in a massive, carpeted steel atrium. The most interesting thing about it was the view of the inner rings, ever slowly spinning, through a wall-wide viewing window. “How many casualties were there?”
“Only two. Eighteen others were… scorched too badly for treatment here,” the manager told her, “A third of our security team.”
“Your security force totals sixty?” Dawn followed before she could rein in her surprise.
“And our workforce only doubles that. Saturn’s not much, sweetheart. It’s not exactly easy to get here, either. Shooting all the way out to Neptune to slingback? It’s a serious time and resource investment. We don’t expect to be raided often,” the manager explained. Dawn could see from the whites around his irises that he still hadn’t recovered from the shock - not quite.
“But you know why we’re here, don’t you?” Dawn prodded, “You weren’t raided by some outerworld scrapper. It was someone a little more high profile than that. Anything you could tell us about this could help it from happening again.” The manager’s eyes sought escape in the Chrysum-ripe rings between the station and Saturn.
“I didn’t see what happened,” he withdrew. The wrinkles in the corners of his eyes said differently. But Dawn had seen it herself. She couldn’t help but understand.
“There are… no witnesses still with us?” she tried instead. The manager’s breath trembled all the way down his throat.
“You could try… Carl. Everyone thinks he’s lost it, but I guess crazy information is still more than you’ve got now.”
“I can work with crazy. Where is he?” said Dawn.
“You’ll have to wait for him to get back from his shift,” the manager shook his head, “He’s working the rings and I’ve got no slots to spare.” Dawn nodded, though the hint of a smirk had already taken root on her lips.
“How about mining pods? Got extras of those?”
“A few,” the manager told her.
“Good. I’m itching to fly something.”
It had been two years since Dawn’s training in small craft astronomics. Even if she’d just been in the classroom yesterday, navigating Saturn’s rings would have been a challenge. Another pilot, one who had taken social calls to get away from her training a few nights, might have shattered the pod already. Dawn, while no less lonely, hardly had a few tiny cracks in the glass front of hers. She wiggled her arms, shoulders to fingers around the twin joysticks that controlled her one-woman craft. Tightening up was a rookie mistake she wasn’t about to make twice. This time, when an icy mass swung into her peripheral vision, she hardly muttered “Woah,” and swooped her pod beneath it.