Tech Scavengers [Humorous, Action-Packed Space Opera]

Negasi tried really, really hard not to pee his pants. The S'ouzz got up to light speed so quick that the planet and the pursuing ships simply disappeared behind them. The system's sun, the other planets, and distant stars all distorted and bled along his field of view.

For a long moment, Negasi cringed in his turret.

They didn't die. The Antikythera picked up speed.

"We're going to make it," he breathed, his voice coming out as a whisper. "We're actually going to—"

The Antikythera jerked, the stars stopped smearing across Negasi's vision, and the crash webbing tightened around his chest, cutting painfully into his flesh.

Negasi gulped for air to refill his deflated lungs. Blinking and disoriented, he looked around. The stars seemed normal except for a strange pulsing red glow.

A moment later, he had reoriented himself enough to see the glow came from the control panel.

It was the ship's schematic, which in addition to the various other damaged areas now showed a blaring red light on a straight line through the ship. The words "DOUBLE HULL PUNCTURE" blinked on and off right next to it.

"MIRI, what happened?"

"We struck something," the AI replied. "Emergency override cut off the FTL drive. Automatic sealants have temporarily secured the hull breaches."

Negasi struggled out of his webbing and ran downstairs, each breath painful. He had probably cracked a rib or two.

He didn't have to go far to find what he was looking for.

In the middle deck, the air circulator was working double time to replace depleted oxygen. The double hull puncture and the speed of the ship must have acted like a wind tunnel, shooting air out of the interior. Negasi felt immediately short of breath and stopped next to a ventilator, holding onto the wall and breathing in the air it blasted in his face.

Then he saw it.

A little hole the size of the pupil of an eye in bright light. It ran right through the nearby bulkhead. Negasi followed it. The next room was the kitchen, where the hole had punctured the stove and gone through the pantry next door. Boxes of food leaked fluid on the floor. Beyond that lay another storage room for electronics, all covered in fire suppressant and smelling of burnt circuitry.

Beyond that lay Aurora's room. Negasi remembered she usually strapped in there during transitions to light speed.

Swallowing hard and trying to steady his breathing, he knocked.

Aurora's voice warbled from the other side. "I-I'm all right."

Negasi let out a long, slow breath, leaning his forehead against the door.

A moment later, the S'ouzz's voice came over the ship's comm, jerking him to attention.

"We have made it thirty trillion kilometers, taking us to 27 million kilometers from the inner edge of the Oort Cloud. We appear to have struck a micrometeorite. I apologize for the inconvenience."

Negasi giggled. A strange reaction, but there it was. Giggling was better than dying.

"Everyone all right?" he asked over the comm.

"We're fine on deck," Nova said. "Mason?"

"I'm in navigation," the boy replied. "We're both OK."

Aurora's door opened. The girl looked pale.

"You OK?" she asked him.

"Just peachy. Why?"

"You look pale," she said.

"How can I look pale? I'm Sino-African."

"Still, you look pale."

"Almost dying is bad for the complexion. How are you?"

Aurora turned, shaking, to look back in her room.

The flight chair had been pulled down from its niche in the wall. The hole went right through the edge of the headrest. It must have missed her by millimeters.

And when the air had gotten sucked out of the hole at gale force, her lungs would have collapsed. She would have been gasping for air, panicking, thinking she was about to die.

Negasi slammed a fist into the wall.

"I've had it!"

He stormed down the corridor, ran up a flight of stairs, and burst onto the bridge.

"Enough already!" he shouted at Nova. "No more secrets! I want to know what's going on! I want to know what's so cacking important on that memory chip that you've dragged us and your kids across half the Orion Arm and nearly gotten us all killed!"

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Nova, her side soaked with half-dried blood from Negasi's friendly fire, eyes glittery from the stims that kept her conscious, ignored him. "Navigation. Can you take us at sub-light speed to the Oort Cloud?"

"It is possible," the S'ouzz replied, "although we need to make repairs immediately."

"We will as soon as we can hide behind a large asteroid or comet."

"Our light will not reach Jua Six for a few days. They cannot trace us. I took a zigzag route to take into account this possibility."

"Good. Take us there anyway. We can repair en route."

Negasi flailed his arms around. "Another danger! Don't you know anything about ships? I am not, repeat not, getting into a spacesuit and going outside while we're shooting our thrusters."

"Fine. We'll repair when we get behind some shelter," Nova said.

"Which is a risk too. Have you seen the ship's schematic? We're doubly punctured! We hit anything else, no matter how small, and we risk the entire ship collapsing! And the autoseal won't last long."

"We need to get to shelter," Nova said in a tone like she was explaining something to an unruly and rather simple child. "Our mission is too important to risk detection."

Jeridan, who had been sitting grim-faced and silent throughout this interchange, hit the bridge override with his fist and took the Antikythera to a full stop.

"We're not going anywhere until we get some answers," Jeridan said.

Nova turned and glared at him. "I gave you an order."

"I'm the captain."

Nova turned red. "And I'm the ship's owner. I'm your employer. Get us going!"

"No."

Jeridan glanced at Negasi. The gunner's heart skipped a beat but he nodded his support.

"This is mutiny," Nova rasped.

"Under Article Five, Section Twelve of the Standard Ship's Charter, a crew may disobey direct orders if they entail unnecessary and unwarranted risk to the ship and crew," Jeridan recited.

Nova snarled, then said, "Navigator, get us going."

"No."

That single word, coming through the translation program from an alien they hardly ever saw, somehow had more impact than all of Negasi's and Jeridan's shouting.

Nova let out a slow breath, clenching and unclenching her fists. After a moment, she seemed to relax. Or perhaps she was just worn out by her wounds and the battle.

"All right," she said after a moment. "Maybe I should have told you before. I think I can trust you at this point."

After saving you and your family more times than I count, you're damn right you can, Negasi thought. But can we trust you?

She hit a button on the console and brought up some files, routing them to the navigation console so the S'ouzz could see as well.

"This is what's on the Imperium data chip," she said, bringing up a schematic.

Negasi and Jeridan leaned forward. The schematic showed a large space station of an old design, far too big and complex to be anything made these days. It looked like a research station, complete with labs and a massive computing system. Nova hit a button and brought up a summary of specifications.

Negasi never got to read them. He got stopped at the title. "Jump Gate Design and Support Station No. 45."

For a moment, silence reigned on deck.

"These are the stations that built the jump gates," Negasi whispered.

Nova nodded. "That's right."

She clicked through a series of schematics. All detailed, all uncorrupted.

"Damn," Jeridan said. "Look how complex it is. A high-tech planet could learn so much from this. And pay even more! Why, the circuitry alone would bring us forward in tech a hundred years."

"It's worth more than that," Nova said. "This isn't a historical artifact. For us, it's a guidebook."

She hit another command and brought up several mid-range photos. An identical station hung in space next to a jump gate.

"Is this a historical photo?" Negasi asked. Everything looked intact.

"My husband took this shot three years ago."

"Noooo," Negasi and Jeridan said together. It was like Nova claiming to have met Santa Claus.

"Look at the time stamp," she said.

They did. Neither spoke.

"Where is this?" Negasi whispered.

"An empty region of space. Very remote. I'll tell you where when we're ready to go there."

"It's intact?" Jeridan asked. "But that means we can learn how jump gates are made. That means we can bring the technology back. We could … we could help the primitive worlds. We could reopen all the trade routes! We could get rid of all the petty wars and make a peaceful Imperium again!"

"And we can fight that alien menace on the Outer Rim," Nova said. "They move faster than us. That's why we're losing. We can't organize. We can't combine our forces. But with jump gate tech, we can run circles around them."

Negasi stared at her. "You're not talking about selling this, are you? The Antari Syndicate knows what it is and wants to steal it because they can turn a massive profit, but you're doing this for political reasons."

"Don't worry. You'll get paid."

Negasi studied her. "You're not a tech scavenger, are you?"

She looked away. "Not exactly, no."

"Then what are you?"

"I'll tell you when we get there."

"Look," Jeridan said. "We've fought for you, saved your kids, taken a million things on faith, but we need to—"

"My job is classified," Nova said.

Negasi's eyes narrowed. "Classified by who?"

She looked at him. "Classified. Now do you want to sit here on the deck arguing until the Mantids catch up with us, or do you want to go repair the hull so we can get the hell out of here and change the course of galactic history?"

Negasi turned to Jeridan. "Changing the course of galactic history sounds pretty good."

"I've never been good at history, but it does sound better than becoming lunch."

"You've never been good at anything."

"I can repair a hull breach faster than you," Jeridan said.

"In your dreams."

"Want to take me on?"

"Hell, yeah. I'll take the prow, you take the stern."

"You're on."

They sprinted to the airlock anteroom. Aurora was already zipping up her spacesuit.

"I'll check for tracers and make some repairs while you get the hull breaches," she said.

"Good!" Negasi said. "Set a timer so you can see me whoop Jeridan's ass at sealing a hull breach."

"Do you guys have to be such dorks all the time?"

"We're not dorks, we're heroes," Negasi said. He hit the shipwide comm and said, "Navigation, get ready with that course calculation. We're going to want to get out of here as soon as the repair crew gets back inside."

Instead of the S'ouzz, Mason got on the comm. "I'm working on it."

Negasi smiled. "Of course you are, kid."

"I am! G'rahzz'kk'l is tired and we have some time so I'm doing it. My dad's helping me."

Negasi turned to Aurora, who got a pained expression and quickly put on her helmet.

"They will have the course set within half an hour," the S'ouzz said.

Negasi decided not to ask. They had too much work to do and not enough time to do it in. Whatever those two were talking about, it would take too long to figure out.

The repair crew made a final check on their spacesuits, picked up their toolboxes, and walked into the airlock. The inner door closed, and the air cycled out.

An intact jump gate and design station. That would change everything.

So no, Negasi wasn't going to question the strange boy in navigation, or press too hard on the woman on the bridge with far too many secrets. He had a hull to fix, a bet to win, and the mother of all ancient tech to retrieve.

Because if he did that, all of them would be richer than half a dozen inhabited worlds put together. They'd be famous, go down in the history books.

The airlock opened, and he shoved past Jeridan to get out first, moving as fast as he could for the hull puncture in the prow.

Yes, they'd be rich. They'd be famous.

And maybe, just maybe, they would save the galaxy.