The Lost Ship of the Tucker Rebellion - Marie Sexton Page 0,6

makes sense. Laramie, you can run point instead of Marit, if it’ll make you feel better.”

Laramie chuckled, shaking his head. “We both know that’s a bad idea.” It was how they’d done it before Marit had joined them, but it had always caused friction between them. Something about sitting at a control panel, having to use a radio instead of their psychic connection while Denver risked his life, made Laramie a bit crazy. They’d both been relieved when Marit had stepped in to fill that role. “So help me, though, Denver, if OPAL’s scans don’t confirm that whatever’s under there isn’t perfectly harmless, you’re not going at all. You’re not risking it.”

“Agreed,” Marit said. She and Laramie both swiveled their seats nearer each other, glaring at Denver, suddenly aligned against him. They clearly expected him to argue.

“Fine. You’re both right. Is that what you need to hear? Nobody’s going to do anything stupid over this.”

“That’s all I ask,” Laramie said. “If we don’t get a reading that’s of any interest to us, we’ll move on to the next debris site.”

“We can’t go too far,” Marit warned. Not arguing, thank goodness. Just stating a fact. “Our fuel’s low enough as is. If we don’t save enough for a straight shot back to Titan X, we’re looking at sailing it or trying to slingshot around the nearest gravitational object, and that’ll take weeks.” The sun sails didn’t just absorb the light, they could run off it too. Close to Sol, you could travel faster by sail than with regular engines. This far out, though, the impulse power was pretty weak.

Laramie grimaced. “We’ve barely found enough to make this trip worthwhile.”

“We haven’t parsed through OPAL’s finds from the last walk yet. There might be some rare metals in there. Maybe even—”

“Match found,” OPAL announced. “Filed under category: Hot Damn.”

Denver and Laramie shared a look. In over twelve years working salvage on the Jiminy, they’d never found anything before that merited a Hot Damn.

Marit scowled. “What does that even mean? Why can’t you people categorize things numerically instead of with swear words?”

“What fun would that be? OPAL, tell Marit the parameters of the category.”

“Definition of ‘Hot Damn’ salvage: priority metals, electronics, items commonly used for colonization, and/or biological life-forms. Energy signature is comparable, though not identical, to the standard on file for ‘pods.’”

“What.” Laramie couldn’t even make it a question. His mouth had dropped open. Denver was half tempted to tap him on the chin, but he wasn’t doing much better.

“A pod?” Marit shook her head a bit. “No. No way. That can’t be right. Do you know what the odds are of finding a pod?”

“Astronomical?” Denver suggested.

“Literally astronomical, yes. So outside the realm of possibility that I’d sooner believe in fairies. It can’t be a pod.”

“Why not? After all, by that logic nobody should ever find a pod, but it happens,” Laramie insisted. “Just because we never in a million fucking years thought it could happen to us doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

Here it came. Marit provided the pessimist’s side for every debate on board, although she always insisted that she was just being realistic. “Even ignoring the odds of finding a pod in the vastness of space, the energy signature is still wrong. See this line? The corruption here?” She touched the viewport. “This is more like what you’d see in a tracer. And look at the picture of it.” She pulled it up. “Do you see any red lights?”

Laramie sighed, but Denver played along. “Nope.”

“No, because whatever that thing is under there, it’s done the energy equivalent of eating them. The debris surrounding it? Dead tracers, and you know how hard those things are to kill.”

“There are ways to deactivate tracers.”

“Yeah, if you’ve got a laser array and are working from behind a force field. Or if you’ve got Li’Vin tech to neutralize them, which we don’t.”

“It doesn’t mean that the pod doesn’t have the tech, though,” Laramie said.

“Fine. Assume it does. What’s to keep it from draining anything or anyone we send out to reel it in?”

“We could sling it.”

Both Marit and Laramie turned to stare at him. Denver shrugged. “Hey, it’s no tractor lance, but it could work. I go out there, sling it, and we tow it a little ways out from the wreckage. Then we set OPAL on clearing away the tracers and exposing whatever’s underneath it. If she needs to back off, she can do that safely, and if she demonstrates that it’s safe, we haul it