Sayeeda drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair, thinking.
"It would be a pretty poor system for a pirate attack," she mused. Mu Cephei was hardly ever visited, its existence on the charts owed more to ships stumbling onto it when the tides of the RIP were particularly abnormal, than any economic motive. Pirates often used such transmission to lure in good Samaritans but it was highly unlikely in a system so unfrequented. Plus as Neil pointed out it had started ten hours ago long before anyone had any reason to expect the Highlander of any other ship. A slow smile spread over Junebug's face, she hadn't spent her life savings on a ship just to haul cola around.
"What is the transmission source?" she asked, glancing sideways at Taya who had climed into her own console and was furiously typing away.
"Second sattalite form the binary, habitable but not note worthy," Taya reported breathlessly.
"Lonney whats our time on a sub light burn?"
"Aboot Three Heweres Capm," the computer brogued at her. She pulled up the projected course on her tactical display. With a few quick keystrokes she bought up the RIP data from the last jump and ran the Van Owen plot, compairing real space position to the currents coarsing through the RIP.
"What is your estimate if we microjump?" she asked with a frown. Neil was running the same projection on his console and shook his head.
"We are almost dead against the RIP, we would have to arrow in, three or four jumps maybe," the pilot replied. The RIP behaved like an ocean current in some ways. Arrowing was similar to the tacking technique that ancient sailing ships had used to move into the wind, but the process was complicated by the three dimensions spacecraft had to negotiate. There was no point in risking three or four jumps on their current fuel status, it wouldn't save much time after they calculated and recalculated the jumps in any case.
"Alright Neil, light her up," she ordered and Neil lit the sublight engines. The ship shuddered slightly as he poured on the power but the gravity dampers prevented her from feeling in her bones the way she would a ground vehicle. They were on their way.
__________________
"Something is wrong with the transmission," Taya said. There were only a few minutes out from the unnamed second planet where the distress signal was originating. Sayeeda, who had been relaxing, sat up at news the situation had changed. She turned her attention to the read out of the planet. Breathable atmosphere, earth like gravity, no terraforming or native Terran bio-markers. It looked like a blue marble with a single massive continent sitting at the north pole.
"What is wrong with it?" Junebug demanded, echoing the girls display. A graph of the transmission, still cycling the same words, played over and over, but now there was a continual but irregluar distortion every few seconds or so.
"I've never seen interference like that, do you suppose that is why they haven't been responding to our hails? Trouble with the sending unit." Sayeeda shared a grim look with Neil. Both she and her first officer were veterans of modern combat and the distortion was a familiar as rain.
"It might be why they aren't responding, but it isn't trouble with the sending equipment. That is the RF noise you get when you fire heavy caliber plasma weapons close to radio gear."
By the time the Highlander was burshing the upper reaches of the atmosphere Sayeeda had donned her armor and gathered her plasma rifle from the armory. Her submachine gun was stowed in a hip holster Taya had bought for her at some point in their chaotic stay at Beckett's node. She buckled on her webbing belt, heavy with grenades and equipment, it never hurt to be prepared.
"Visibility isn't good," Taya stated and bought up a picture on the main screen. A massive storm was raging down below, thousands of feet of grey cloud with sleeting rain and wind. The Highlander's sophisticated sensors could pierce it with a combination of LIDAR and thermal imaging and generated a composite. The ship, easily recognizable by electronic signatures, was on a broad rocky peninsula perhaps three kilometers long. Individual crew members were recognizable as thermal blurs but there was something else. From the end of the peninsular hundreds of blurs were swarming through the digital display, each too big and too hot to be a human. The computer mapped the flashes of heat as plasmabolts leaped from the ship into teh approaching blurs.
"It looks like a battle," Sayeeda mused as she fiddled with the image. She pointed to several cooling blob that remained motionless.
"And I think they are losing."
@POOHEAD189
