Chapter 11

“So, Captain, I heard a little rumour that you were a biker?”

Chris started and then chuckled, “You know, if that’s what is in those crates, I’m going to have to insist on being in on a scouting party.”

“You may be the ship’s Captain, but you are also an important member of my team. Lee said this ship had a cloaking spell, so when it’s in orbit and just in observation mode, we will probably only need to leave three people aboard and two if it’s grounded. I fully intend to use all of my team,” Dusty replied.

Chris couldn’t fault this logic and helped Dusty, Que and Beanie, who were unpacking one of the crates. Dusty chuckled at the oohs and aahs as the long-elliptical machine was revealed. It looked like a silver pod on wheels. The top half was clear and revealed the enclosed short handlebars and the seat.

Dusty touched the side, and two-thirds of the top slid back and folded into smaller sections in the short back section at the back. Two other sections slid back on the sides to reveal the footboards at the bottom so you could swing your knee over the seat and get comfortable.

“This is a Moo-Two Space Bike. They are an all-terrain vehicle, which includes space travel. The twin rear wheels give it great traction and stability on land. The combination of the main motor for speed and the lift motors allows space and air travel.”

“They seat two, and you can retract the dome if in the atmosphere or in emergency ejection mode when in space. Once you have engaged flight mode and lifted more than a metre off the ground, the pod forms around the wheels and seals it airtight.”

“It has an air recycler that’s good for about a day but draws in fresh air if it’s detected outside the Moo-Two. It can handle an atmosphere entry but only in an emergency, and it can go underwater.”

“Those boxes near the front contain the ammunition for the two guns.”

“The guns can be controlled by flipping up that cover on the handlebars. The covers slide back to reveal the barrels. They can be toggled up to thirty degrees in any direction from the centre and pushing down on the toggle fires it in short bursts of three slugs,” she told them.

“Where on Earth did you get these from, and how did you get them on such short notice?” Beanie asked, loving the Moo-Two. Chris and Que also took a decided fancy to them.

“They were confiscated when we broke up a recent smuggling operation. The company that made them was negotiating their return with UNSEC, so they were still here on the station. I twisted a few arms, and they sent them to us,” Darcy told them.

She didn’t mention that the Watsons owned the company that made them.

“Their loss, our gain. They will be great for getting around on a planet with no roads,” Chris observed.

The others all agreed, and they moved to help unpack the other seven bikes and get them stored. They decided to keep the compressed carbon-composite crates, as they could put them through the recycler.

Nothing is wasted when you have a recycler.

They finally left Armstrong Space Station at 15:00 hours on the third of January 2098.

The whole crew watched the Earth and Luna grow smaller from the bridge. The bridge had five seats at the consoles that surround the raised Captain’s chair and two chairs for guests set near the doors and above the short ramps to the consoles.

The rest of the crew were each attached to a chair or sat on laps to witness them leaving Sol. Pat was driving, and Darla and Beanie were at their stations as the navigator and the gunner.

The ship also had space for a dedicated comms officer and a chief engineer, who normally had a second engineer who was the drive specialist and located in the engine room.

Tale and Kola had seats in engineering as well, but no one believed they would have a problem leaving the station. Bella had claimed the engineer’s seat to keep tabs on the alarms and watch the readout.

Que had sat in the comms station, and they let her take over as the operator. Kola stood beside Bella, and he kept an eye on the readouts with her. Tale had joined Que. James and Aaron had the back seats with Dusty and Bindy in their laps.

Pat had released manual control back to the computer once they were well clear of the station and locked into the shipping lane that had been established for traffic going to Terra.

The station had warned them that a freighter and a settlement ship carrying two hundred souls had left that morning. A second settlement ship was supposed to have left the day before, but it had been delayed due to failing a mechanical inspection three days before.

It was expected that it would take another two weeks to get the settlement ship up to specifications for its trip. Due to the delay, the company stopped bringing the settlers to the station.

Hence, a lot of the fresh food stores that the company had purchased weren’t loaded on the ship as they would go to waste. That was how Dusty had picked them up cheaply and put them in her ship. She suspected that they would come in handy.

Striker-One was a relatively small ship with big engines. It could get up to speed a lot faster than the bigger ships ahead of it. Also, being smaller, it could micro-warp while in the system a lot sooner. Striker-One never saw the other two ships because she had passed them while in micro-warp.

The big ships caused too much energy and radiation backwash in the system when they formed their wormholes. If they were too close to a strong gravitational influence, then the wormholes wouldn’t form. They had to fly to the edge of the established planetary plate and no closer to the sun than Mercury’s orbit before they could jump.

The bigger ships take about thirty days to arrive in the first of Tres Estrella’s systems, Uno. It then takes them about ten days to traverse through the tri-planet systems due to the slower speed required for the micro-jumps, and then twenty-odd days to get to Terra.

The Striker’s crew learnt on the first day that the estimated twenty-five days this class of ship should take to make the trip to Uno could be reduced to eighteen days thanks to Lee’s improvements. They could slip through the three systems in four days and would only need two weeks to finish the journey.