Chapter 2: Starry, Starry Night

Much as I hate to hear that, it also gives me hope. We need to find out more about this little ship we are in. Doesn't appear to have a spike drive installed, which means, we aren't leaving this system in it. But we may be able to install a spike drive in it if the hull can withstand it. The radio silence from Brabus most likely means both sides lost. We may be able to salvage a spike drive, or, a complete spike capable ship from the aftermath of whatever happened there. There is also a remote research station in the system. We will want to find out if that is still manned or if it too is abandoned. We will need to find salvage for our own needs before we can take salvage for profit. Not many places to sell stuff for credits in the Santell system."

Hunter refocuses on the controls and readouts in front of him and attempts to plot courses to Brabus orbit and also to the research outpost, Tabor 7.

Dr. Holmes: "Spar? I've never done that before. I suppose I can try. If you promise to go easy on me? How do we start?"

Samar does not know whether to believe Dr. Holmes or not. Nor does she care. She is not fighting to win or lose. She is fighting to fight.

"No weapons. We just try to knock each other down. If you get a free punch or free kick in, so be it. We should keep our guard up. When someone goes down, we stop. Reset or quit. Ready?"

"Ready."

Growing up with 4 older brothers, Samar had lost her share of brawls. But she did not always loose.

Samar dove at Dr. Holmes to begin. But it turned out he meant it when he said he was ready. He dodged and fended her off with a sure if not sharp kick in the side. Samar absorbed the impact as she could by rolling away. She found her feet again a safe distance away.

"Ready?" she asked. Doctor Holmes nodded.

They circled each other now. Samar faked a direct punch to the face, but then went with a low kick to sweep the Doctor's legs out from under him. In the lower gravity, the Doctor hopped over it easily. He countered with a fist to the eye, but Samar ducked her head, so his fist met her skull - which was not comfortable for either one. Going easy on the Doctor meant passing up an immediate retaliation, so she spiraled away. She reestablished eye contact.

"Ready," the Doctor said, before she could ask.

Samar did not circle this time. She approached the doctor directly. She probed his defenses with a couple kicks, which he parried. Samar lost her patience then and burst in to tie up the Doctor's arms, attempting a throw. But when Samar crashed into the Doctor, it threw off his center of gravity, which obstructed her throw - she basically caught him from falling down. He surprised her with headbutt, which bloodied her lip a little. She could have kneed him in the crotch, or punched him in the gut - but the blunt impact of the headbutt sharpened her awareness: It reminded her of their predicament -

The Doctor broke her hold and was throwing both arms around her to take her to the ground. Samar threw her arms up and fell in the direction he was taking her - cartwheeling out of his hold.

"All done. We should find the others before one of us lands on the stiff." Samar salutes the Doctor and indicates he should lead the way.

"Well, that was interesting? Exhilarating? Thank you for not damaging me too bad. Lucky I didn't break my fingers on your head, though. Anyway, the hatch to the lower hangar is just this way." Dr. Holmes leads Samar to the hatch and heads down. She passes the medical cases down to him, and then he leads her to the shuttle. Dr. Holmes searches around and finds a suitable place to store the food. As he packs them away, he thinks about memories that are starting to come back to him. He was not lying about never having sparred like that before. Although it was not the first time he had been in a fight. Well, fight might not be the right word. Dr. Holmes prefers to attack from a place of advantage and suprise. fights are so much easier when the prey doesn't know it's being attacked. That was exhilarating though. And man can she fight. She did hold back some too. She passed up a couple of opportunities where she could have really hurt me had she wanted too. See Henry, that's why it's better not to let them see you coming..... Henry sits and gets lost in his memories for a time. Slowly flexing the fingers on his right hand so they don't get too stiff from the hit to Samar's forehead. Wondering if he should have done that. Let too much slip about himself. Ruined the facade of the weak doctor. stupid...stupid. can't drop the mask like that Henry. No good will come of it

Once finished with his packing away of food and medical equipment, Dr. Holmes climbs the ladder, looking for the others. "Hey, Hunter, Weigel. What do you think? Tell me this is our way off. I've already brought on some food and medical supplies. I don't want to stay here any longer than necessary."

Talking about food, and bunks makes Hunter realize that he is both hungry and tired, and not just a little.

" Speaking of kichens and beds, I could really use both right now. Let's see if we can find a comfortable room to eat in, share what information we've gleaned and not taken the time to share yet, and then get some sleep. I am comfortable in thinking there won't be anyone coming after us. "

A cursory search of Santell Wanderer quickly yields results. The small hallway running from port to starboard has two doors. One leads to another short hallway that opens into the cargo hold. The other door opens to the ship's galley, pantry, and food preparation station.

The narrow passage leading to the rear of the ship ends in a door, a rather sturdy affair with a wheel used to secure the hatchway -- a common practice among the shipbuilders of early space-faring ships. It seems that the engine room, for whatever reason, was occasionally subjected to hard vacuum, and without a traditional armored airlock, a thoroughly-secured hatch on the bulkhead was essential as a last bastion against total decompression. Passing through the hatch gets you to a circular iris, which opens automatically as the hatch shuts behind you. Here you find the ship's engine, as well as the vents that presumably go to the various thrusters used to position the ship during docking maneuvers. The design isn't the prettiest, as early designs rarely are. It's built for function, and the engineers probably found it beautiful in its functionality.

Aesthetics aside, if there had been doubts about the ship's ability to travel out-of-system, those doubts are now laid to rest. The engine is older than the ones used to propel Socrates into orbit, and it would take a complete structural overhaul to bring it up to the standards needed to survive the rigors of metadimensional space. Santell Wanderer may be a great boat for system travel, but would fold like paper during a spike drill.

The crew came to understand, then, that they would be going nowhere fast - that is to say as quickly as they arrived in the system.

So after Wynne and Holmes brought a share of the food and the medical supplies, and after they toured the Wanderer with Varyu and Weigel -  the crew, meaning the four escaped convicts, returned to Socrates. There they had a meal around the galley, used the head as needed, relived a few of their shared memories, pondered at their lost shared memories, and found their way to the bunks.

She reclined there with the others for a while, but for her part, Samar Wynne couldn't sleep. As unlikely as it seemed, she wasn't about to lose her (relative) freedom as soon as she had gained it. She informed the others of the tablet computers and the credits she found - along with the gear. They appreciated it - but could she shut up already?

With that, she bid them rest while she catalogued the foodstuffs. "Two years....?" Periodically, Samar checked on Whitey and "Nathaniel Hawthorne" - the name she had invented for the corpse. She just wanted to make sure they didn't wander far off on their own accord. "I served two years....?"

Hours later, it was Hunter who woke first. She updated him on the supply tally, and then she made off for the unused bunk - one of the top ones, of course, but she preferred it that way. Weigel's snoring reverberated through the room. The snoring did not jostle her; on the contrary, it reminded her of her brother. It soothed her and lulled her to sleep.

Hunter made his way to the bridge and began digging through the capabilities of Socrates.

Samar spends several quiet hours cataloging Socrates' onboard supplies, and she notices two things acutely. First, there are a lot of supplies. Dehydrated food packs could have fed six people on the station for a year, at least.

And then, there is the quiet. Her specific memories of Dorset may have faded, but what remains is a general sense of hustle and bustle. The exact pitch of the steam whistles has faded, but she remembers them, now replaced by the hollow emptiness of space. Empty, except for Nathaniel Hawthorne, of course, and Nathaniel doesn't seem to be too talkative these days. She finally lays down, her mind settling into the rhythm of Weigel's snoring. Sleep catches up with her almost immediately, where she is confronted with a series of powerfully vivid dreams.

Hunter's own dreams had been especially vivid, and he realizes on waking that those vivid dreams were his own memories returning. The mere act of waking stirred an emotional experience, each memory powerful as if the events had just occurred. He wakes with an overwhelming combination of angers, loves, losses, compassions, fears, every emotion he's ever felt. He wants more of it, while wishing it would just stop -- and within seconds, the immediacy of those feelings have faded. What remains is a sense of completeness, a sense of self. His memories have returned, some of them that had even faded over the years had returned like a photograph that had been restored. Even the sad memories bring him a sense of peace, hugs during moments of grief, a wake for a friend, the day his dog died when he was a kid. The memories return like an old friend, and he welcomes the good and the bad equally -- building blocks of his personality all settling back into place where they belong.

Back on the bridge, Hunter goes to work on the station's systems. Socrates proves to be a relatively simple device, as space-faring ships go. The computers only carry software for launch control, stabilization through Brabus' atmosphere, orbital insertion at Exeter, and for maintaining a stable orbit. It was designed to carry out a specific set of astronautical calculations, the calculations that deposited the station in orbit around Exeter.

Out of curiosity, Hunter leaves the bridge to head back to engineering. He navigates the airlocks, nods a silent greeting to Nathaniel Hawthorne as he passes, and powers on the engineering computer.

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The last time he saw this screen, he was a wayward resident of Dorset, but this time he has the full faculties of a pilot with engineering skills. It takes him very little time to find the technical specs of the plasma boosters. Within minutes, he discovers that the AD-1G plasma boosters were designed for single use, and built for ground-fueling operations only. Not what he wanted to see, but better to know now rather than later during an ill-advised attempt to fire up the boosters for interplanetary travel. One surprising thing he finds is that the boosters were designed to be cannibalized for parts in an emergency.

He switches on one of the other computers, and finds information about fueling and basic light-duty mining operations. The biggest surprise here is that he finds specs on the Solar Flair Shipyards Model 3200-S 'Mule' Mining Tender. Hunter looks at the picture of Mule 3200-S and smiles, recognizing Whitey on the screen.

Dr. Holmes sat in his borrowed bunk, thinking of the memory template machine. Could it be reprogrammed? Could it be used to download knowledge directly to the brain without overwriting memories? Which one of the others would he have a better chance of talking into trying it on? You're getting ahead of yourself. First things first. Sleep.... And he drifts off to sleep. He dreams of experiments. He dreams of his friends, comatose, drooling from their mouths. He, stuck here, all alone with his comatose friends,  feeding them, they inevitably shi....Dr. Holmes bolts upright. Smacking his head on the bunk above him. He gets up, takes a piss, showers, and wanders off to get something to eat.

Dr. Holmes to the same emotional rush that Hunter had experienced, his proclivities leading to dreams that leave him in a rather agitated state. An overriding feeling of completeness gives him a sense of satisfaction, and his nagging feeling that he had been living the wrong life seems to evaporate.

His trip to the head takes him past the decaying corpse in the vacc suit, to whom he doffs an imaginary hat, wishes him a good morning, and passes through the airlock. The shower and reconstituted food from one of the packs rejuvenate his sense of adventure, as much a "get me off this station so I can find some real food" as anything else. The prospects of real food seem a bit dim for now, given the expected time of travel to Tabor 7. He vaguely recalls decent food from the planet's surface, but he's hard-pressed to recall what it was like.

If there is one thing that interests him on this station, it's the very same equipment that had imprisoned them for two years. The doctor returns to the lab, prepared to pore through the details. Even the most perfunctory of perusals convinces Dr. Holmes of one thing, that they have found a piece of maltech, a truly naughty piece of technology. Such technology is the purview of dictators and despots, and its mere existence threatens humanity as a species.

It is also worth a lot of money to the right buyer.

Hunter documents the specs and capabilities of Whitey and thinks about the two two ships they have at their disposal. Which is faster, Wanderer cannot make landfall at all, With the two workshops on Socrates, could they install better seating in Whitey? Do they want or need to? It's a mining tender, is there a "barge" vessel it is supposed to work in tandem with? "Every discovery brings more questions."

He hears that others are beginning to rise, closes down the workstation, and goes to see what whomever it is is up too. Looking forward to more rations for breakfast, glad that there won't be any bacteria ridden fresh food like they had to eat while planetside.

Samar remembers a man with close-cropped hair, and a form-fitting white jacket over a pale blue leotard. And the bullet -

It's not a bullet that wakes Samar, rather the sound of her own snoring. But she closes her eyes and returns to the image of the printed bullet firing from the printed gun - the detonation in her palm traveling through space to the detonation in her victim's skull. Revenge. Her husband's hand guiding her aim. She walks up to the traitor's prone, splattered face and spits hard on it, sealing her sentiment.

Samar opens her eyes - so many memories flooding back.

She still hears Frtiz's snoring, but Henry and Hunter are gone. She climbs off her bunk, gathers the tablet computers and a pair of the corresponding sense receivers (headphones), and begins digging through others' memories. Who were these miners? What were their stories? What music did they listen to? Where did they go? Maybe she was living with one of them down on the planet. This one, with the erotic pictures. Or this one, with the ugly pets.

Samar searches through the tablet computers, one at a time, sponging up the identities - the digital mRNA -

But she hates them. She doesn't want their memories. She doesn't want their life. Samar wants her life back. She wants to finish the job and return home a hero to her family. The one that kept them safe. She wants to escape and finish the job -

But it's been two years. Perhaps her home has been destroyed as well, like the closest planet. Perhaps her child, her husband's child, has been lost. . .while she piddled around doing who knows what.

Where she's from, children are awarded their name at the age of 2. Samar doesn't even know her child's name. Samar wasn't there to name them.

With all of her own memories flooding back, Samar begins to wade into the memories of others -- the memories of six miners, to be exact. Probably not surprisingly to her, the details seem mundane. What does a miner working in space have to talk about besides the loneliness and isolation? Communications to friends and family on Brabus, increasingly fearful about the deteriorating political situation on Brabus, mark roughly one year's time.

They had taken over for the previous mining crew that had done their 2-year stint on Socrates. References occasionally creep in regarding the increasing number of visits from Brabus, ships sent by Federated Colonies' Penal System. "Expensive way to handle prisoners. Just throw them in a hole and be done with it" seems to be the general consensus among the miners. They don't dwell on it, and for some reason, they're usually away mining when the prison ship comes through.

Only one reference is made to Whitey, that Samar can tell. Long before this crew's rotation began on Socrates, the mining tender had been lost in a storm on Exeter. "I've been on these mining mules before", she writes, "and I'm so glad it was lost. Santell Wanderer is WAY more comfortable. I don't give a shit that we need a pilot to use Wanderer. Efficiency is for the bean counters, they don't have to fly in that cramped POS. Wanderer has a freaking bed I can use, and I'll take that any day."

Much that she finds is meaningless, though she does find references to minor refining operations on board, apparently to create fuel for spike-capable ships. Samar pauses as she reads this, knowing that Santell is a system without spike capability. References on other tablets indicate that the miners occasionally tended to refueling operations as spike-capable ships occasionally passed through Santell system.

On each of the tablets, references are made to a trip to Tabor 7 with Santell Wanderer, carrying a load of mining materials to the scientists there. Each of the miners was quite excited for the trip, except for Martina, who had to stay behind to tend to the station. Later entries express disappointment in their welcome from the 'egghead scientists', though the two military guys were cordial enough.

Baron Aurr. The good news is that they all wanted the Baron dead.

The bad news is that they had collectively botched the job, and they were now stuck on a ship together in the far reaches of the universe with no one to blame but each other.

As their memories returned, the silence grew. They should have formulated some kind of plan, whether it be to destroy the prison planet or to make their way to Tabor 7. But first they had to talk about it. (Or to agree to not talk about it. Did they have to talk about it?)

"Martina." How many Martina's were there in the universe? More dead than alive, given history's wake. Judging by the miners' digital journals, Samar guessed that the rotting corpse in the suit was the same Martina who always got left behind on the crew's trips. No more Nathaniel Hawthorne.

But Martina - the other Martina - had also been her partner in revenge. The bodyguard. Hunter couldn't have known about her psychic friend. How they had schemed to get her into the employ of the Baron. Psychic bodyguards were neurally leashed to their principal. So Samar knew to wait for Martina's self-inflicted poison to kick in, and then in the confusion to dispose of the Baron. Of course, she only knew because she had helped establish Martina. But in doing so, she had inadvertently foiled Hunter's plan.

Hunter couldn't have known, so he had presumed he had an open shot. No one could move that fast. Unless they knew to move ahead of time. Having exposed their position (admittedly superior to her own), Hunter and Weigel came under fire. When Samar couldn't follow the Baron, she traced his man, only to stumble upon Hunter, Weigel, and Doctor Holmes instead - and into the arms of the police.

At least that was as much sense as she could make out of it without talking to them about it.

It was on the third day of silent brooding when they all found themselves in the galley at the same time for breakfast.

Instead of eating, Samar told them, "I think her name is Martina." And then she told them about the other Martina. And why she wanted to kill Baron Aurr for inciting the terrorists who imploded her brother and her husband's mining business. How she had caught up with the terrorist herself. Avenged her husband in a legal duel.

"I want to go after the Baron. But from what I gathered from the miners' tablets, there may be an unhealthy security detail on Tabor 7. Or maybe the war took care of that. Maybe they don't care who we are anymore.

"We could also make our own spike fuel, according to the tablets, and hope to hitchhike or barter our way out of here. If nothing else, it wouldn't hurt to have something of value to trade. Unless we want to go mining ourselves, but it's not the safest job for amateurs like us. I know enough about mining from my husband's business to know it's a dangerous hobby."

After a long pause, Dr. Holmes responds to Samar. "Our first priority is to get off this station. How do we do that? It sounds like neither of the ships we have will do that. ​Do we dare get on the coms and see who might be listening? Whatever we do, we need to act. I feel like we've just been sitting here for a month now. Let's get our shit together.  Figure out a plan and get to it."

Feeling like it has been 3 months since he ate last, Hunter enters the galley where Samar and Holmes are gathering a few ration packs for the meal. Sitting with his own meal, he listens as Samar tells her tale.

"I'm concerned to go too near Tabor 7 just yet as I don't see the profit in it. I believe our 1st move should be to either attempt communication with the research station, or to travel to it. It seems to be the path with the least amount of peril and the most likely to grant us further light and knowledge about what has happened in this sector while we we incarcerated and not ourselves.

Have you found any information in those journals that might help with that? Past dealings with the researchers? Docking protocols?"