Uninhabited system
Mejis Sector, outskirts of Sovereignty space
The
Heart of Gold nosed silently into the orbit of one of the border system’s minor outer planets. It was an iceball so insignificant it didn’t even rate a name, so insignificant in fact that its owner, a middle-sized interstellar resource extraction company headquartered on Alpha Centauri, hadn't bothered to actually do anything with its property in over three centuries.
Curiously enough, the same was true for every other planetoid in the system, as well as for the three nearest neighboring systems. Everything in the immediate region had been explored, tagged, cataloged and sold over five centuries ago, but none of the owners had ever deigned to show up.
This, of course, was not unprecedented. Quite frequently entire worlds and systems were bought and sold by large mining companies in bulk deals that left whole planets untouched for exceptionally long periods of time. One did not, after all, buy an entire world on a whim – in the 3rd millennium resource extraction was a patient man's game, investments were solely long-term propositions, and company business-plans could correspondingly span centuries.
Granted, the odds that none of several dozen corporations would ever show up to do anything with four systems worth of property in five hundred years were long... But then it was a big galaxy, so the odds were bound to be beaten every once in a while. And besides, what other explanation was there? That someone had orchestrated the purchase of an entire patch of space through dozens of companies over the span of several centuries? What possible reason could anyone have to do that?
On the bridge of the
Heart of Gold, Sidney Hank smiled. What reason, indeed.
At the time of its construction the luxury yacht had been one of the largest private ships ever built by its owner, Ferrari Drive Yards. That company had long since gone bankrupt however, and the ship was an ancient relic by most standards. Unlike more modern Sovereignty designs it still employed a traditional neutron-ion reaction drive but it, like the rest of the
Heart of Gold had been extensively modified over its long seven hundred years of service. Those modifications were the reason it was still space-worthy after all this time, and the fact that its owner had chosen to go through with them instead of just buying a new ship betrayed a mind of some sentimentality and almost infinite patience
But then, it wasn't hard to be patient if you were immortal.
Unfortunately not everyone was as patient as Sidney, as evidenced by the noisy harrumphing of Jason Chandra. The mercenary had crossed his arms and was looking out the wall-sized window of the sleekly furnished bridge with an unimpressed look on his face. Sidney smiled at him. “Anything the matter, Mr. Chandra?”
“Actually yes,” the tattoo-festooned mercenary replied. “You still haven't told us why you're taking us into the middle of the boonies on this anachronistic rustbucket of a ship.”
“The
Heart of Gold is most emphatically not a rustbucket,” Sidney frowned. “She is an elegant ship for a more civilized age. And you're here because I want to show you something.”
The 'you' he was talking about was not just Chandra, but to the Wild Geese as a whole. They were a handful of hand-picked men and women, recruited as much for their exceptional skills as their absolute trustworthiness. Officially mercenaries, most of them had been in Sidney’s employ for over a decade. They had proven themselves to be dependable to a fault, which was why he was taking them out to see something only a handful of people in the galaxy had any knowledge of.
Sirocco Montague brushed a lock of raven hair out of her eye and raised an eyebrow at him. “What could possibly be here that's worth showing to us?”
He felt the familiar, playful brush of her telepathy slide off his mental defenses. Sidney smirked a little. He had more than enough high-end gear stuck in his head to make him impossible to read and damned near impervious to forceful mental breaking-and-entering, something the psion knew very well, but Sirocco liked to remind him of her abilities all the same. “Well, then allow me to demonstrate,” he said and strolled over to the bridge's primary command console, a sophisticated computer with sleek, dark wood paneling, and brought up a hologrammatic view of the surrounding system. The sophisticated sensor suite of the luxurious space-yacht could detect no sign that anyone had ever set foot on this barren rock, much less that a settlement had ever been constructed. The ship's controlling intelligence – yet another of Dionysus' cloned imprints – had settled the yacht into an elliptical orbit, where it had waited until its sensors had determined that no-one had followed them here.
Sidney walked his fingers across the ship's command console – designed and built in the days before the ubiquity of man-machine interfaces – and told the ship to pulse an active transmission on a specific, prearranged data-channel.
The reaction came nearly instantaneously. The bridge of the
Heart of Gold lit up with warnings as its threat detection systems picked up the first pulses of ground to orbit targeting TADAR, yet simultaneously failed to detect their point of origin. Then tight-beam transmission – again from a seemingly undetectable source – struck the ship, tersely demanding identification codes. The transmission didn't specify the implication of failure to provide the correct codes – however the targeting beams had made those consequences abundantly clear.
Smiling at the way the mercenaries clutched their gear, surprised by the sudden threat, Sidney put another command into the computer and pulsed the identification code demanded of him. The targeting beams disappeared as suddenly as they had come, and instead a set of coordinates scrolled across the hologrammatic screens. The
Heart of Gold lit its engines and left its orbit to swoop down toward the planetary surface.
The icy ground in all its cratered glory drew nearer and nearer as the ship descended and still there was no sign of civilization or any kind of habitation at all right until, at some point only a few dozen kilometers from the ground, it seemed as if the
Heart of Gold passed through a set of curtains. As their ship slid through the dense scatterscreens the handful of people on the bridge were treated to their first sighting of the vast facility that rose from the planetary surface.
The construct mushroomed through the thin and icy atmosphere and off into space, a bewildering tumble of hab-domes, sensor pods, force field projectors, landing pads and various high-tech protrusions that a layman could only guess the function of. Small drones flickered around the facility, and none of the mercenaries missed the heavy autolaser batteries that tracked their descent toward one of the landing bays. They remained silent however, and the
Heart of Gold finally slid into a docking bay several hundred meters from the ground. Tremors passed through the hull as docking clamps engaged and electrical cables automatically attached themselves to the proper ports in the ship's hull. Sidney turned toward the handful of mercenaries, beaming. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome to the Grid Works.”
