Page 14 of Cloverleaf Station

“Not yet. That takes a lot of energy,” he said when Elenus frowned, “and I need to spare as much as I can for their thrusters and AI controls. We can start downloading data when we’re out in your ship. The probes have a hard time broadcasting through the station.”

“Big thick hunk of junk,” Elenus muttered. “Fine. We should be able to stay out for three and a half hours before we need to return and let Lizzie patch herself up. You help set the course, but I do all the flying.”

“Fine.” For now, at least. “Let’s go, then.”

“Ah, wait.” Elenus held up a hand as Kieron made to walk toward the ship. “First things first: a little safety briefing. It’s standard procedure before bringing on a new crew member,” he added when Kieron’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You think I’m going to break protocol and give you another chance to make a complaint about me?”

“It’s not like you couldn’t get me arrested the moment Cloverleaf Station is back in the shadows,” Kieron replied testily. “I think we’ve reached a détente, don’t you?”

“Still. This is a specialized safety briefing, and it’s very short, so humor me.” Kieron sighed but nodded. Elenus smiled brightly and rubbed his hands together. “Excellent! So, all the normal stuff, blah blah blah pressure suit, plus I’m the captain, and you do what I say, and also, there is a very specialized med kit in the Lizzie that will walk you through what you might have to do for me if at any point I go unconscious.”

Kieron frowned. “Why would you go unconscious?”

“I probably won’t,” Elenus assured him.

“Probably isn’t good enough.”

“God, you’re like a catterpet, gnawing a koi to the bone.” Elenus shook his head. “Suffice it to say, if for any reason I can’t communicate with you, the stuff in the med kit will stabilize me long enough to get me back to the revamped Regen unit in the clinic. All right? It’s nothing contagious, don’t worry about that. Now.” That devilish smile was back. “The longer we stand here arguing, the more radiation your little probes absorb, and the less use we get out of them before they shut down. So let’s make the most of the time we have, shall we?”

Kieron hated that he made a good point. “Fine. But this isn’t over,” he warned as he marched around the man and headed for his ship.

He almost missed Elenus’s low mutter of, “You’d better hope that it is.”

Almost.

***

Kieron didn’t do impressed, not anymore. Too many times, he’d been drawn into the larger world with the promise of something beautiful, something awe-inspiring, something that was meant to be special, only to be let down, sometimes violently. He’d long since stopped listening to people when they promised him things and had resolutely refused to allow his heartbeat to quicken when he saw something amazing. So what? There was plenty of amazing out there in the universe.

The Lizzie strained his own determination not to be impressed. Kieron was glad he was already wearing his greenie suit when he got inside so that the gasp he let out was shielded from Elenus. The ship was incredibly luxurious, despite its tight size, with surfaces that yielded just enough under his touch to let him know they were responsive, reactive to their surroundings. The furnishings themselves looked like old-world wood and leather, which of course was ridiculous—who would waste such things in a ship? And yet …

“You know, that suit is excessive in the Lizzie,” Elenus informed him as he slipped into the pilot’s seat. “She’ll more than suffice when it comes to your protection for the next few hours if you’d care to be more comfortable.”

“We’ll see,” Kieron replied, but he did deign to take his helmet off. The air smelled faintly sweet … some sort of floral aroma he couldn’t identify, but it was warm and spicy. The door shut behind him, and Elenus patted the copilot’s seat.

“Join me. You might as well learn the basics of operating her while we’re out there.”

There went his heart again. Damn it. Kieron sat, though, and pulled the safety straps over his bulky suit.

“Lizzie’s AI is perfectly capable of getting her in and out of docking, but I’ll show you how to do it manually,” Elenus went on, then turned and winked at him. “If you ever open up the doors, Sparky.”

Oh, right. Kieron used his tab to open up Docking Bay Five, and just a few moments later, they were sailing out into space. “That was fast,” he commented.

“Her propulsion system is based on old-school fusion reactors, combined with some of the latest in energy storage capability. Basically, the entire ship functions as its own battery, and the propulsion system is modified to adapt to that.”

“The radiation shielding too?” Kieron watched as Elenus’s fingers danced across the controls, picking out things he could recognize here and there—the outline of the ship was particularly elegant, color-changing to show which thrusters were responsible for what movement, with a radiation-sensing overlay that would gradually turn from green to white as the shields broke down. Currently, even though they were out of the shadow of the station now, there was no more radiation within the Lizzie than Kieron would have experienced in the regular sunlight back on Hadrian’s Colony.

“Exactly. So.” Elenus set them on a course toward the meteor field. “What do your little probes have to tell us? And please, just upload it directly to the Lizzie’s computer so she can incorporate their data into her mapping.”

“Let’s see how many get back to me first,” Kieron muttered as he accessed the probes.

Download most recent data?

Yes.

He got information back from ten out of eleven of them. The only one that didn’t respond was the one he’d sent farthest out, toward a cluster of mini meteors that had given a number of his miners problems over the last few years. They were full of heavy, valuable metals but almost impossible to work with thanks to their penchant for bouncing off each other and ships alike when even slightly disturbed. He marked that location with a red X, then input the rest of the data into the Lizzie.

“These are the closest to the station,” he said, highlighting five of them in blue. Potential paths forward appeared on the viewscreen in front of them. “They’re broadcasting from well-known locations. I’m leaving them static for the time being—they’ll last up to a month if I don’t drain their power too quickly. I’ve got them set to react to and record any unusual movement in the meantime. These next ones”—he made them purple—“are farther out, near targets that are still well-known but more dangerous. This is the usual limit of the distance that miners like to go. There are plenty of specimens to work on within this band of meteors for now. Once you go much farther, things start to get complicated.” He pointed to the red X. “I only had one mining ship travel this far out this season, looking for rare metals. They made it back the first time.”