Chapter 12

“How do you know it’s a bomb?”

“It was wired into the motor startup system, really crappy job.” He looked into the cockpit and reviewed the switch positions. “Ok, here’s a fun exercise for you. Switch over to the navigator’s side.”

“Ok, I’m there,” called Eileen. She’s a tiny woman, so moving from the pilot to navigator side was easy, which kind of annoyed Alan. He takes a good five minutes to squeeze his way over without throwing a dozen switches by bumping into them.

“Now find the MMC select switch and set it to rescue.”

“MMC?” asked Eileen.

“Mission Mode Control, top center of the navigator’s main control panel.”

Eileen found the switch quickly. “MMC to Rescue. Oh wow. Half the switches changed names.”

“Yep, you’re now a tow truck. Ok, keep your hand off the throttle until we’re hooked up.” Alan drifted over to his fighter and reached up between the engines, opened a panel, and a long cable spilled out. He grabbed the end of the cable and pushed off to float over to the derelict. He opened a panel on the very nose of the derelict and connected the combination power cable and tow cable to the derelict. “Ok, find a switch labeled tow cable or umbilical or something like that.”

“I found one marked Tow Umbilical,” said Eileen.

“Good,” said Alan as he eased himself into the cockpit of the abandoned fighter. He checked several switches and said, “Tow Umbilical to the Tow position.” When she did that, the pilot’s instrument panel lit up. He was getting power from the lead fighter. He set a few switches, then said, “Nice and easy, fly back to the Peake.”

“Ok,” said a nervous Eileen. She eased the throttle forward, and the fighter started moving, but soon she felt a jerk. “What was that?”

“Me. You’re towing me behind you,” said Alan.

“I’m not going to be able to count this as a solo flight?”

That made Alan laugh. “No, sorry not this time.” He was interrupted by a scream from Eileen. “What’s wrong?”

“The other pilot. He’s over there ... to your right.”

Alan saw a frozen body in space far off to his right. “Mark the location on your map and we’ll come back to get him.”

“K-kay.”

“You’re doing good, just keep the Peake in mind, it should be on your screen any time now.

“What do we got here?” asked Pandora. As usual, when there was a meeting or gathering, Alan was in charge of the gathering, but Pandora was his spokesperson. They found that her asking the questions allows him to concentrate on the answers that they get.

A body lay strapped to the exam table in medical, another body floated in a corner, wrapped in a sheet and trussed up for a funeral in space. “Mystery guest number one, the pilot, is an Earther,” said Dr. Sing, the ship’s entire medical department. “DNA info came back naming him Fredo Spenalzo, he’s linked to the Eastern Bloc but there’s not much information on him. Mystery guest number two is Risto Pärn...”

“I knew him, he was a Lunar and a command pilot in the 33rd fighter squadron on the Grissom,” said Chief Cernan. “He was their instructor pilot for the new F-733F models.”

Pandora looked at Alan, but he didn’t twitch when the Chief identified the corpse.

“I knew him also. He was a hot shot rocketeer, but he wouldn’t share his information,” said Alan. “We wanted to know more about the F models, but he wouldn’t say a word about them. Even Colonel Radcliffe, his commander, ordered him to brief us on the F model F-733 and he refused to do it.”

“Besides spacing, are there any other injuries these two gentlemen may have on their persons?”

“Both of them have several stab wounds. It appears that they didn’t like each other very much. This knife matches the stab wounds in Mr. Pärn and still has traces of his blood on it,” said Dr. Sing, holding up a large hunting knife. He passed it around to the gathered officers and finally the knife reached Alan’s hands.

Alan knew that knife, it was a standard issue Katran (mud shark) knife. Thick flat black steel blade about twelve inches long and nearly an eighth of an inch thick along the spine. The pirates and Eastern Bloc military men (there were no women) all carried these hateful knives. The jimping along the spine of the blade was used by his torturers to gauge how deep they were pushing the blade into his body ... then they would twist the blade to add to the agony.

This is the blade that took his eye, the blade that slashed, cut and stabbed him, and the last time he saw Robert Best, the traitor, he was carrying his Katran knife. Alan only saw it for a moment because the door of the escape pod slammed shut and he was thrown against the thick cushioning of the pod’s back wall as the pod blasted away from Venus Prime moments before Pandora swooped in and obliterated Venus prime. “Is this the knife that killed Risto Pärn?” Alan asked.

“Yes,” said Dr. Sing. “The stab wounds that killed Mister Spenalzo are from a different knife, a much narrower blade.”

“I’m going to keep this,” Alan said as he slid it back into the sheath that he removed from Fredo Spenalzo’s environment suit. The knife blade that killed a traitor was something he felt a need to hold. “Master Chief White, Chief Cernan, you’ve been over the derelict that I dragged back, what did you find?”

The two petty officers looked at each other, trying to determine who goes first when Master Chief White said, “You start.” Since Chief White had the rank, Chief Cernan started. “It’s in good shape, not a scratch on it. We looked it up and it was assigned to the 33rd fighter squadron, but when we looked up the serial number it came back as ‘destroyed in the battle of Venus Prime.’ Also there were several other bombs, you found the big bomb. There were two smaller ones, one was tied into the throttle circuit, the other was tied into communications circuit. If you tried to start the internal power unit with the throttle in the idle position the bombs would arm, but when the batteries died, the logic circuits for those bombs died also.”