The Belt Loop _Book One Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Belt Loop

  PART ONE: The Ship

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART TWO: The Worm Turns

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART THREE: The Early Birds

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART FOUR: Worms, Anyone?

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART FIVE: Help Is On The Way

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  PART SIX: The Smallest Hero

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  PART SEVEN: Crime and Punishment

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The Belt Loop

  By Robert B. Jones

  © 2011 by Robert B. Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be published in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover illustration by Christopher A. Jones

  To Brother Richard

  PART ONE: The Ship

  Chapter 1

  The warning klaxons roused Captain Uri Haad from his troubled sleep. He quickly deposited his feet on the cold metal floor and reached for his tunic at the same time. What was happening? “Captain to bridge,” he said authoritatively, masking the fact that he was still somnolent and not quite fully awake.

  “Skipper, better get up here,” a discordant voice said from his comm stack.

  “That you, Davi? What’s the drill?”

  “Got a ship off the port bow, maybe seven thousand klicks,” the emotionless voice replied.

  “Identify it yet? Markings?”

  “Looks deserted, skip. No identifiable beacons, no TP codes.”

  Haad stuffed his legs into his uniform pants and reached for his boots. “On the way. Kill the threat alert, go to General Quarters, activate the hull defenses.”

  “Defenses, aye.”

  Seconds later the jarring klaxon was replaced by a warbling tone, the sound ratcheting up to a peak and falling off rapidly, repeating every ten seconds. Haad finished dressing and went to the little head behind his sleeping quarters. After running a wet hand through his hair and smoothing out his eyebrows, he was ready. He looked at his image in the metallic mirror and chuckled to himself at what he saw.

  Forty-four, trim, dark eyes set deeply in a rugged face. Military neat hair worn high and tight, three long vertical scars punctuating the left side of his head from just in front of the top of his ear down to the hollow of his cheek. Souvenirs of the Belt Loop.

  Captain Uri Haad was younger than most fleet captains, older than his crew for the most part, and a seasoned veteran of the Belt Loop. His latest command was exactly three standard years plus seven days in duration. During that time he’d managed to accumulate his share of scars and barbs; almost as if the eagles he wore on the left sleeve of his tunic had somehow clawed their way into his id peacefully but left a physical sign of their passing on his face. Space was not a friendly place.

  He made his way forward and took the lift to the bridge deck, one level above his quarters and his ready room. The ratings he passed in the short passageway braced and stood aside as he passed. He slapped the control pad on the right of the bridge hatch and stepped through the opening.

  “Captain on the bridge!” his XO shouted as he made his way onto the bridge.

  “At ease,” Haad said. “What’ve we got out there, Mister Yorn?”

  Commander Davi Yorn was Haad’s Executive Officer and was second in command and had earned the title “Number One” which signified he was next in command after the captain. As was common among the Elber colonists, Yorn was tall and thin and was bald by choice. His demeanor was cool and calm, the perfect counterpoint to the sometimes over-revving captain. The shift rotations and Rules of the Boat dictated that one of the six “officers of the line” had to be on the bridge at all times. The two of them had served together for almost seven standard years and had built a relationship of mutual trust and respect. Davi was a few years junior to Haad but had been in the Colonial Navy longer. His disdain for command was the only thing that kept him from commanding a ship of his own. The CNS Corpus Christi — a corvette-class patrol boat with hardened weaponry — belonged to Uri Haad.

  “Don’t rightly know, skipper. No transponder codes, no signal that we can detect, no juice, no threat from this distance. From the looks of it, nobody’s home.” Davi Yorn was standing in front of the comm blister and talked over his shoulder, never taking his eyes from the display. On the blister was an image of a floating piece of hardware, listing to one side of its vertical plane, strange protuberances blurring its outline against the Belt Loop.

  “Helm. Take us in for a closer look,” Haad said. “Go to low-alert status.”

  “One-third AM pulse, come to three one seven degrees, down-angle seven, Mister Gant,” Yorn commanded. “Yellow alert.”

  No-no — short for Noname — Gant repeated the order and punched in the codes. The warbling tone was replaced by an intermittent low-pitched squawk. Lieutenant Commander Gant was in his thirties and had served the Christi since its push-back date. He was a slim unrestricted line officer with a no-nonsense approach to his job and he was an expert astrogator. A veteran of the Belt Loop and the Fringes, Gant was respected by the captain and crew. How he got the surname “Noname” was the subject of much debate in the crew lounge.

  “Is that the best view you have, Davi? What about IR and UV freqs?” the captain said.

  “Nothing past the visual, sir, nothing but what we see here. I ran the silhouette through the IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe) but nothing came up. It’s definitely not Varson.”

  Haad nodded and retreated from the blister to his console. The command deck of the Corpus Christi was not enormous, hell, not even spacious. The outer walls were curved and the extruded metallic glass was adorned with racks and racks of comm equipment, navigation hardware, plotting screens, AV displays, and various clutter consisting of environmental ducts, cable conduits, emergency lighting, comm speakers, weapons array, and so forth. The floor consisted of cross-hatched metal grates with access panels placed in strategic locations for the occasional times the tech jocks and comm ratings had to get into the guts of the control systems to trace out dead cables. A distant hum of enormous electrical power consumption filled the space and even with the staccato sound of the alert signal, the energy buzz was still audible.

  The entryway eased open and the Weapons Control Officer, Lieutenant Commander Blaine Diggs, arrived next.
Yorn briefed him and he retreated to the weapons systems alcove and began cycling up his defenses. The Christi was a fast-boat, not quite as large as a destroyer but larger than a frigate. Mister Diggs’ arsenal included electro-pulse discharges, heliospasm torpedoes, zanith-crystal lasers, and assorted close-quarters static grenades. He brought the systems on-line one-by-one and sent the ready light to the blister.

  “Weapons on-line, skip,” Yorn announced.

  “Steady as she goes, Mister Gant,” Haad said. He looked around the bridge for a beat or two before nestling into his command chair at the center of his console.

  Over the next few minutes, several lieutenants and junior grade rankings came onto the bridge and settled into their positions. Most of the ship’s crew had been on down-time, like the captain himself, and now that the communications officer and the science officer had joined the bridge, the complement was complete. Haad made a mental note to have the crew freshen up its response times to alert calls. Eight minutes was too long.

  “Captain, I flashed the target on all standard frequencies. No response,” Lieutenant Max Hansen said. Maxine Hansen was the youngest rating on the bridge and it was obvious from her appearance that she had been sharing someone’s bunk at the time of the alarm or she forgot to run a comb through her mane. Her hair was short and neat usually but now looked as if she had just disentangled her head from some serious groping below decks. In her late twenties, Max was not drop-dead attractive but in the Belt Loop, you took what you could get.

  “Understood. Keep on it. How about you, science?”

  Lieutenant Cain Washoe, Science Officer, said nothing at first. He was obviously not into the op yet and Haad had to repeat his query. He looked at his readouts and shook his head.

  “Got nothing, sir. This would be a first encounter of a vessel of this config. Nothing in the archives that’s anywhere close. Running the d-base now, sir.” Washoe was a tall man in the twilight of his career. Several years ago he was reduced in rank from O-5 to O-4 and finally to O-3. He had signed onto the Christi out of the Elber system; while not a discipline problem, it was reported that Cain Washoe had a substance abuse issue that had plagued his entire career. In keeping with the Colonial Navy’s policy of perpetual redemption, highly-trained restricted line officers were kept on duty as long as they were not considered security or safety risks. It was of no importance to Haad what Cain’s past was like at this moment. On the Christi he had proved to be a valuable asset and a willing worker.

  “Keep looking,” Haad said, “maybe go back a few centuries. What I’m seeing here looks ancient.”

  Cain Washoe assented and returned his attention to his screens. Max Hansen donned headgear and adjusted her seat at the comm console.

  “Distance three thousand,” from Gant.

  “Give me a better look, Mister Washoe. Start your probing,” Haad ordered.

  After a minute of furious activity in the science alcove Washoe said, “New visual on the blister, captain. Pings coming back in a second. . .”

  Captain Haad rose from his chair and looked forward. The target ship filled the viewscreen. It was elliptical in shape and quite long, had many appendages on its hull, and the center mass was surrounded by a striated band of material, like growth bands on some kind of huge earthworm. The surface was pitted and dull and it was obvious the derelict ship had been adrift for centuries.

  “Ahh, I’m showing life forms, got eleven, ahh, twelve life forms,” Washoe said in stuttering, clipped tones.

  “Comm, you getting anything? A beacon, distress call, anything?” Haad asked.

  “Negative. She’s dead on all known frequencies.”

  Haad looked at his communications ranking. “Then try all the unknown ones.”

  Max Hansen started to protest but thought better of it. “Aye, captain. Switching to global search, band-pass filters active,” she pronounced.

  “Helm, come right and put us just off her flank. I want a better look.”

  “New course at three two seven degrees, aye.”

  “Captain, what do you think this is, so far off the lanes?” Yorn asked.

  “That, Commander Yorn, we will find out in a few minutes. Kill that alert and assemble a search and rescue team. Have them stand by for my orders.”

  Chapter 2

  The Corpus Christi slowed its enormous bulk to a groaning stop some 1,200 meters from the flank of the derelict ship. Displacing 435,000 metric tons, the Christi was a lot of ship to move in any given direction and when the main anti-matter drive engine idled down its magnetic field and the boat shuddered to a complete stop, Uri Haad had the quartermaster send out a couple of drones and waited for the images to resolve on his console. So far, the derelict had told him nothing. In his years of service Haad had come across some strange sights out in the Belt. Generally, after almost six hundred years of manned exploration, of the 17,000 systems explored and cataloged, only eleven harbored any kind of indigenous life at all. Out here most of the planets — the ones orbiting the double- and triple-sun systems in the direction of Orion — were gas giants with hard radiation-scorched moonlets. Back towards Alnitak, the triple star system that represented the end of the Belt, and the Flame Nebula beyond, there were thousands of worlds that could have supported human existence, but none did. The small rocky planets were constantly buffeted by the harsh solar winds that scoured them clean of all life, stripped away their atmospheres and rendered them quite useless. Only one other planet in the Elber system played host to a rudimentary form of animal life and surely that life was not sophisticated enough to put together a ship capable of reaching star-gap distances. This had to be something else, he thought, something from the Fringes, something very old, but, then again, something very new. Maybe something coming under human scrutiny for the first time.

  Having only come into contact with one other sentient species, humans had carved out a nice wedge-shaped slice of the galactic pie; only the nomadic Varson race competed with Man for this arm of the galaxy and they were 2,200 odd light-years away.

  Space exploration in the Belt Loop was a lonely undertaking. The Colonial Navy Base on Elber Prime was home to roughly two million souls: military, miners, farmers, corporate interests and government agencies spread out on a planet four-fifths the diameter of Earth with six major oceans and four continents. The colony was an independent world and belonged to the loose Colonial Alliance of Planets that operated Elber as an administrative district subject to the jurisdiction of the military commander instead of the minders back on Earth. They had cut the colonies loose hundreds of years ago as being too expensive to control or contain.

  Elber Prime was the lighthouse in the inky darkness of space, orbiting a G-class star at the edge of the “Goldilock’s Zone” and after two hundred years of ferry boats and colonial expansion it represented the most distant colony Mankind had thus far established. It also served as the jumping-off point for the blue-giant Alnilam and the rich hydrogen fields beyond. Almost twice the distance from Earth as Mintaka and Alnitak — the two other prominent stars at the ends of the Belt — Alnilam spewed millions and millions of tons of light gasses into the surrounding void each second. And the bounty was there for the taking at distances a billion kilometers from its fiery core. Alnilam’s diameter was almost thirty times that of the Sun and it was sending huge gouts of its mass into space and shortening its lifespan. Plenty of hydrogen and other light gasses to be mined and, of course, hydrogen was the fuel of the universe, the fuel of the anti-matter star drives, the fuel of the Colonial Navy.

  Haad slid his hands over the controls of his console. Rapid-fire images started to flash by on his screens. He adjusted apertures and focal lengths and silently the derelict ship resolved.

  “Give me a scale, Mister Washoe,” he said.

  “Ahh, we’re looking at about 700 meters from bow to stern, 200 meters abeam at the centerline,” Washoe said.

  “Any idea what those arm-looking things are? Grappling arms? Antennae?”
<
br />   Washoe hesitated. “Nothing yet, sir. Could be any of those.”

  “Captain, Commander Yorn. S&R team assembled, await your orders,” the intraship comm link squawked.

  “Roger, Davi. Stand by.” Uri Haad looked at Max. “Anything, Mister Hansen?”

  She shook her head. “Negative. . . .”

  “Take us in, Mister Gant. Get close to that lateral band then light her up. I want to see what we’ve got.”

  “Aye. Closing to 500 meters. Venting waste gasses.”

  For small dockside maneuvering, the ship could vent unscrubbed carbon dioxide through vernier thrusters and nudge itself in any direction. The bridge was silent for the few minutes it took to ease the ship into its new position. “Five hundred meters, sir. Station keeping off her port flank.”

  “Light her up, Mister Gant,” the captain instructed. The helmsman slid his right hand down a column of flashing controls on his active display. “Lights on,” he said.

  The big display blister flared out for a second or two then steadied. After the image solidified Uri Haad said, “What the hell is that?”

  Once illuminated, the derelict ship seemed to be breathing, pulsing slightly, respirating at about twenty aspirations per minute. The circumferential bulge rippled slightly in the bright light. Was the ship alive?

  “Mister Washoe, what’re we looking at here? Is that thing organic?” the captain wanted to know.

  “I don’t think it is. I mean, it’s inert. It’s not registering as a life form. I’m still counting a dozen forms inside the hull, but as for the entire ship? Nothing.”

  Haad rubbed his hand over the scars on his face. “Very well,” he said in a solemn voice. He had two choices. Send a team to the derelict now and scout it out, look for a hatch or airlock and venture inside, or just dispatch a boat to Elber and await further instructions. He had four lifeboats at his disposal and he could bundle the video images of the ship with a dispatch requesting further orders. The jump to Elber Prime would take about seven hours real-time and Haad calculated how long it would take Fleet to come up with instructions, say another twenty hours. Then the return trip to the Corpus Christi. All-in-all about thirty-six hours for the second option. That was too long.