Chapter 16

"Quadrant Command, this is Whiskey Tango Four Zero, over."

"Roger Four Zero. What's your status?"

"All green, QC." Captain Chen replied, sounding as bored as he felt. "Not a peep, not a whisper. We've swept out past Jupiter, including last known locations. Can't find a spook anywhere."

"Roger Four Zero. Don't get sloppy. They don't call 'em spooks for nothin'."

"Roger Command. I'll stay on my metaphorical toes, but it's been three months." Chen answered. "I think they've gone to find somebody else to play with."

"You could be right, Four Zero, but if you're not, and you let your guard down, we're all in deep doo-doo."

"Roger that QC. But I still say they've picked up their marbles and gone home."

"Same story from all patrols, Mr. President." The Secretary of Global Defense said, concluding his report. "Nobody's seen hide nor hair of the spooks for almost six months now. We've even sent scouts out beyond Pluto's orbit without catching even a whiff of their drives. Our analysts believe that gravitic surge we detected several months ago was the spooks leaving the system."

"You could be right, General," President Ramirez said thoughtfully, "but we can't afford to let our guard down. They may have left, but there's nothing saying they won't be back. Either way, if they show up again, we must defeat them once and for all!"

"Of course, Mr. President." The SGD replied. "I daresay we'll have a few surprises for them, should they return, Sir."

"See that we do."

"Come to zero-one-six mark zero-zero-tharee mark one-one-seven." Miko's voice reflected her boredom. She loved the life of the asteroid prospector, as much for the solitude as for the fact that it had already made her and her partner millionaires several times over, but the times between strikes were still the same: endless hours of boring electronic sweeps ending at some unknown point in adrenalin pumping action as the sensors detected a metal-rich rock.

"That's going to take us further out, Miko." Her partner and lifemate, Hermione Sanchez cautioned. "We don't want to run up on any spooks out here."

"Yeah, yeah." She replied. "You know as well as I do the damn spooks don't fuck with non-military vessels, and nobody's seen 'em for months, anyway. I just want to check out this blip I got, then we can head over to the next quadrant."

"Just because they never have don't mean they never will." Sanchez watched her partner with affection as the small Japanese woman concentrated on her computer screens. The numbers and graphs had never meant anything to Hermione. Navigating the Solar System was her specialty, and she was very good at it. It had been mere chance, no, incredible, fantastic, wonderful fortune that had thrown the two of them together as partners in one of the first asteroid prospecting ventures since the advent of the grav-drive.

"Just a few more... HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GOD!" Miko exclaimed, slamming backward into her seat.

"What the... ?" Hemione, who knew her lover to be a lifelong Buddhist, couldn't help but wonder at her invocation of the Catholic icon. "What's happening Miko?"

"I've just had the biggest damn spike in readings I've ever seen!" Miko almost whispered. "If there's even a fraction of the metal out there that these sensors are indicating, we've hit the friggin' motherlode!"

"... Or a goddamn battleship..." Hermione muttered under her breath, checking and re-checking her own sensors for signs of another grav-drive in the vicinity.

The Santa Maria nosed slowly over the large asteroid, jagged peaks and deep crevasses slipping beneath her hull, starkly outlined by the sunlight coming from almost directly astern.

"It's not the asteroid, My." Miko told her, using her pet name for her lover. "Something... something in the shadow... Hit the floods, will you?"

"You sure you want to give away our position like that?" Sanchez asked nervously. A former fighter pilot, she had a great deal of respect for the capabilities of the spooks, and their deviousness.

"You got anything on sensors?" Miko asked irritably. She could get more than a little short when on the trail of a find, as Hermione well knew.

"No, but... Oh, what the hell! Here goes..." She flipped the switch for the forward floods then slammed back into her own seat "HOLY SHIT! Strap in, Miko! We got to get the fuck outta here!"

Sanchez cursed the clumsy prospecting vessel for not being one of the sleek military killers to which she was accustomed, and the lack of discipline that allowed her lover to sit cross-legged in her accel seat, without harness, while working.

"Wait." Miko said, getting her first glimpse of one of the alien motherships, then, as Hermione continued flipping switches and checking displays: "WAIT, MY!"

Sanchez paused in her preparations for emergency flight to see what her partner was up to.

"It's not emitting anything." Miko said quietly. "And there's an open hatch."

Hermione, still on edge, stared at the alien ship, then at her own displays. Sure enough, the ship showed no sign of having noticed them, or of having anyone aboard. The drives were powered down, as was almost everything else aboard, according to her sensors, and lo and behold, one hatch stood open, it's cover casting a shadow along the vastness of the alien hull in the glare of the floods.

"I don't know, Miko." Sanchez shook her head. "My mother always told me, 'If it sounds too good to be true, it's too good to be true!'"

"Carolina is a very wise woman, My." Miko, said, heading for the rear of the cabin. "I, on the other hand, am not. I'm going to take a look."

"You're not serious!" Hemione watched in disbelief as her lover began donning a scuffed, scratched and patched, but still serviceable vacuum suit. "You're NOT planning to board that thing!"

"Yes, I am." Miko gave her that secretive smile that had so captured her heart on the L5 station a few months back. "I don't know why or how, baby, but somehow I know it's safe. You should probably send a capsule and back off a ways, just in case."

She won, of course.

"You don't think I'm about to let you just walk into the mouth of the lion alone, do you?" Hermione bristled, realizing that she, too, felt it was safe, though she couldn't say why.

"Now, we've been through this before, dear." Miko said sweetly, "You're a tough broad, honey, but I can still kick your ass if you get in my way."

"I know that! You also know I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to you, so move over and hand me my suit!" Sanchez' gruff manner, intended to hide her softer core, had always been transparent to Miko, who stood quietly aside and helped her partner suit up. As Miko had known she would, Hermione grumped and muttered to herself the whole time she was donning her suit.

"Well, if you're going with me, you might as well just land us near that hatch, My." The black-haired young rockhound chided.

Her lover bristled at the thought of putting her precious ship in even more danger, but realized that if anything happened to the two of them, the Santa Maria was just so much scrap anyway. Grumbling even louder, she deftly steered the vessel to within a few yards of the hatch. Hermione set the grav drive to low power and the auto-pilot to hold them on the surface of the vessel.

Miko, as usual, was first out of the hatch, and when Sanchez' boots hit the alien hull beside her, she could feel the slight vibration through the soles of her boots. The suits, intended for exploring, among other things, asteroids with high iron content, came equipped with variable strength boot magnets, which Miko turned on when she felt herself drifting a little away from the hull. To her surprise, the magnets had no effect, but the suit drifted slowly back to the hull of the alien craft, anyway.

"This thing's big enough to have its own gravity, My!" She told her partner excitedly.

"Yeah, but it ain't much, so keep your boots down and don't go bouncing around, Micky." Sanchez held the beam torch like a weapon as she scanned as much of the surrounding area as she could.

Miko hated having the 'o' in her name replaced with a 'y', so naturally, Hermione did it whenever the smaller girl pissed her off.

Using a shuffle-step they had perfected for moving across bodies with very low gravity, the two advanced on the beckoning hatch. It looked like a standard UE manufactured outer door for a single person manlock, the kind used for maintenance access while in space.

Without waiting for Hermione, Miko stepped into the opening, and drifted slowly into the interior of the lock. As soon as her boots touched the inner door, the outer door closed, and she could feel vibration as air rushed into the lock. Gradually, the sounds of rushing air filled her ears as enough air entered the lock to carry the sound, until a green light came on at her feet, and the inner door popped open, dropping her softly onto a metal platform. Miko hit the standard lock control without thinking, and the lock recycled, pumping air out to allow the outer door to open.

Since her guages showed the air to be breathable, and detected no biohazards, Miko popped her helmet and placed it on the platform beside her. Freed from her initial preoccupation, Miko looked around her for the first time as the airlock cycled inward once more. Lights were coming on throughout the vessel as if spreading out from her point of entry and the young prospector stared in amazement at what she saw. The entire enormous hull was open and filled with a complex web of cables. Wherever two or more cables came together, a transparent, spherical bubble was formed, as if cables and bubbles were made of the same material and the cables somehow extruded from the bubbles. Some bubbles were large, some small, and some, like the one in which she stood, attached to the outer hull. There were double diaphragm entry points in each bubble next to each cable anchorage, suggesting that whoever crewed the vessel traveled hand over hand along the cables between bubbles. One would have to push through both diaphragms to get to the interior of the bubble, but it looked as though the diaphragms could withstand a great pressure differential.