A clamor erupted from the gathered escapees as she announced the terrifying news, but she felt only a frisson of excitement. What if they had found a new system? Misjumps were not rare, and usually if one was lucky they simply delayed the journey to one’s destination, or dumped one in a nearby system on the same chain of Portals; if a crew were less lucky they would be dumped into a system with a distant Portal connected to the same network as the Portal through which they had originally entered the Dark Between the Stars, and only the very unluckiest of crews would emerge in a random gravity well in a system without a Portal. Saqr did not doubt her abilities, and was confident that if they were dumped into a previously unknown system with its own, undiscovered Portal she could realign their ship, use star maps and astrogation to figure out where they were, and reconnect them to the Third Horizon. The jump back would be risky, but maybe they could add a new system to the cluster. As she worked the controls to redraw star maps and identify their location in the galactic plane she began to dream grandiose visions of Saqr’s World, a new habitable planet in a new system brought back to the people of the Third Horizon by her, the pilot of this lost ship.
Sadly it was not to be. As Siladan worked the sensors to bring up basic information about the gravitational structure of the star system they had entered and Saqr produced star maps and orientation visuals, a message from the local Portal station appeared on the screen.
Salaam, travelers, welcome to the Errai system, gateway to the Sadaal route. Errai is a trinary star system, which makes astrogation complicated, so along with this message we attach a bundle of route maps you can use to navigate the system. If you are in transit and seeking orbital services please proceed to the Gravity Observatory around Cauldron, the system’s innermost planet, using one of the routes provided with this message. If you are trading in Erraian Honey or its derivative chemical products, please proceed directly to Asal, the secondary planet in this cluster. You are currently orbiting the binary star pair known as the Lovers, but if you need to trade with the Sadaal Free Skippers you may need to travel to the third star, known as the Stranger, a three hundred AU journey. We recommend you rest and replenish at the Gravity Observatory before attempting the trip. If you wish to proceed onward through the Portal immediately please be aware that the onward destination of Dziban is currently experiencing Portal instability. To arrange precise transit services, please reply to this message and a stationary worker will be in contact. Good wishes and peace under the Icons on your journey through the Errai system, gateway to the Sadaal route.
“Does anyone know anything about Errai?” Saqr asked them as the message began to repeat, raising her voice to interrupt their confused babbling and asking twice more before they calmed down and realized they were safe.
“We’re in Errai?” Al Hamra asked finally, and Saqr confirmed, flicking the system’s star map on screen and trying not to sound disappointed.
“That’s two jumps over from Kua,” Siladan pointed out, adding a map of the Third Horizon’s systems to the view screen. “We skipped Kua and Aiwaz and ended up at the start of the Sadaal route.” The Sadaal route was a loop of seven stars on the far edge of the Third Horizon, not a very lucrative trade route and populated at its outer rim by strange and wild people.
“Sorry,” Saqr apologized, trying again not to sound too disappointed. If only she could have discovered a new Portal! She would be one of the most famous pilots in the Third Horizon.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Olivia suggested. “Whoever organized the storm we just left probably isn’t waiting for survivors at Errai.”
“And we can sell our salvage ship here,” Siladan added. “The Gravity Observatory is a huge spaceport, the Sadaal Free Skippers are big group, and there’s probably sizable Nomad League operations out here.”
“I’ve heard that Errai is a kind of refuge,” Adam said. “There’s a saying isn’t there? ‘To jump into the Cauldron.’ It doesn’t mean getting into a big pot, it means coming to hide here, on the planet of Cauldron.”
“Yeah,” Al Hamra agreed. “I think they have refugees from Zalos and Sadaal, and people on the run from the Ice Emirates in Awadhi. Lots of people hiding from warrants on Coriolis or lying low from the Syndicate.”
“Isn’t there a show on the Bulletin about it?” Dr. Delecta asked, tapping her chin thoughtfully as she tried to remember the last time she had watched trash TV.
“Yeah, ‘The Wasp Factory’ or something, right?” Saqr vaguely remembered watching a few episodes, and giving up quickly because there was too much planetary activity.
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“We should expect some freedom of action then,” Al Hamra said. “How long to get to the Gravity Observatory, Saqr?”
She checked. “From here? About half a day. Should be there in about twelve hours. We can eat, wash up, and land ready to explore!”
“Not so fast,” Al Hamra interrupted everyone’s sighs of relief. “I want us to get everything sorted out before we go stationary. We just escaped from something nasty, that some vicious people want to keep secret. Let’s make sure we know what we’re doing before we land. Saqr, set a course for the Gravity Observatory, but give us a full day. Give us time to find out if anyone else in-system is looking for us. And keep our transponder off for the first couple of hours while Siladan scans the system.” That was unorthodox activity, but if they stayed out of sensor view for a few hours they would not attract too much suspicion when they did turn their transponders on.
Saqr nodded and flicked all the ship’s transponders off. As she did this, Al Hamra turned to Siladan. “You got the message logs from the Ghazali, right?” He asked, more a statement than a question, and when Siladan nodded he continued. “Could you decrypt them? I want to know what happened before we land.”
“I can try,” Siladan replied, frowning, “But it’s military standard encryption, I don’t know if I can handle that level of protection.”
“Probably no need,” Saqr said distractedly as she loaded course plots and ran calculations through the ship’s small computer. Not looking, she handed Siladan the captain’s tabula that she had taken from the Ghazali. “I took the captain’s tabula. It probably decodes encrypted messages from the Zafirah automatically. Just load it on and open it.” The captain’s tabula was the single weakest link in every ship’s security system, since it was designed to be carried by the captain but to be accessible by other members of the crew, or by emergency responders, if the captain died. It was essential that this single tabula not be secure, a design flaw that usually did not matter since it only left the captain’s side when someone had already stormed the bridge and killed the crew.
Siladan took the tabula and set to work. Within a few minutes he had transferred the emergency messages from his own tabula to the dead captain’s, and as Saqr had predicted he managed to open them without effort. “Thanks Saqr,” he muttered as he scanned through them. “They’re mostly just transit data,” he told everyone, and then, “Ah!” He opened a window on the main view screen and flicked the transmissions up where everyone could see them, began scrolling through. “These are automated,” he told them, parsing numbers and obscure syntax for them. “See there, that’s the telemetry instructions being successfully processed after entering the Portal, there’s a standard notification that systems are functioning and there’s no need for an emergency Portal exit, then there’s a couple of minutes of regular system updates…” He highlighted more scrolling syntax. “Standard engineering system reports, all green. But what’s this …” He paused the feed at a particular set of obscure notifications. “This is the ship’s sensors notifying it of a proximity alert. Something nearby.”
“In the Dark Between the Stars?” Saqr asked, and Siladan nodded. “Like a beast?”
They had all heard the rumors, of creatures that lived in the strange space inside the Portals, and like every pilot Saqr regarded them as the ultimate terror. Had the Zafirah been torn apart by some monster the size of a mountain?
“No,” Siladan said after a few moments of suspense as he read the messages. “A ship.”
“A ship? Was it a collision?”
“No, an attack.” Siladan put up some more messages. “Here the Zafirah registers a weapon strike, no warning so it must have been some kind of energy beam. And then here the automated defense system activates.” He scrolled further. “That’s it. This notification is the failure of life support systems and catastrophic damage. Looks like a reactor event. It initiates an emergency Portal exit, but the final message here is a huge explosion. I think the reactor failed before they went through the Portal, but the ship was already broken in half.”
“So the Zafirah initiated an automated Portal exit while it was under attack, the reactor started to fail, it broke in half, the bow part exploded, and the stern part was ejected through the Portal along with the reactor explosion?”
“Maybe slightly the opposite order. I think the ship broke apart after it set an emergency course for the Portal, the stern section was already falling through the Portal when the reactor in the bow exploded, there was some kind of energy surge through the Portal as it happened, and I guess that energy surge hit the Ghazali as it was approaching the Portal, just as the last crew members were preparing to head to their stasis chambers. But as the stern fell out of the Portal it broadcast all the information it had to the Ghazali, as part of its automated defense protocols. I guess it must have done that as soon as it exited the Portal, and the energy surge was a couple of seconds later.” He scanned through sensor readings, pasting some relevant readings on screen. “Yeah, maybe a seven second delay between Portal exit and energy surge. I guess when it broke up in the Dark the bow fell away but the stern stayed on course through the Portal. Then the bow blew up just after the stern section passed through, and the reactor failure was close enough to the Portal to disrupt it. Some sort of chain reaction that converted the nuclear explosion into a multi-spectrum energy surge in real space.”
“Baga…” Dr. Delecta whispered. “That’s horrible.”
“I think everyone on the Zafirah died before they woke up,” Siladan told her. “So maybe better than it was for a lot of people on the Ghazali.”
“What kind of ship could do that?” Saqr wondered, staring at the largely incomprehensible system reports on the view screen.
“Wait …” Siladan scrolled down the feed some more. “There are drive signatures and a video.” He looked around to the others and, seeing nods of general agreement, sent the video to the main screen.
“It’s beautiful!” Saqr whispered in awe when the Zafirah’s doom appeared on the screen. “But … what is it?”