"Distance to target?"
[Four point seven klicks.]
"Switch to RCS."
[Roger that.]
"Begin scanning."
A long pause, then, [What for?]
"What?"
[What am I scanning for?]
"How should I know?" Another pause, then, "Some anomalies."
[Aha! Now I know why you're not squadron leader!]
Although they were made in jest, Jo's words stung Sam. Her natural shyness and introverted personality made her overly sensitive to such teasing. Jo realized it right away when Sam made no reply, and tried to mitigate the damage. [Just kidding, Sam. You know me, what a kidder....]
"Yeah...."
[Good. I'm starting the scan.]
Sam switched on her own short-range scanners now, looking for anything noteworthy on the orbital shipyard complex she and Jo were approaching. When the Mullurans had abandoned the Nipron system, they had left behind this large docking/repair/storage facility, and it was their job to inspect it now.
The main shipyard structure was quite extensive -- a rectangular grid about a kilometer long and half a kilometer wide composed of thick girders and connecting tunnels. At various points around the grid, at the junctions of major tunnels, were clusters of modules in all sizes and shapes. These were evidently the habitat areas, the warehouses, the machine shops. Sam concentrated her scans on these.
There were no life signs anywhere on the station, and the machine shops appeared inert, but there were some peculiar readings coming from several of the nearer storage units. She switched back over to the comm circuit. "Jo, check your readings on that large storage bay directly ahead."
It took a couple of minutes for Jo to realign her sensors and study the results, but eventually she signaled back to Sam. [You're right. That is a little odd. Should we check it out?]
"Yes. That's what we're here for. Follow me in." After Jo's jab, Sam was determined to 'act' more like a squadron leader.
[Right.]
Swiftly and nimbly, guided by their reaction control thrusters, the two Banshee craft slipped in and among the beams and girders of the shipyard and approached the storage module in question. The module was equipped with a small pressurized hangar bay, ostensibly for the loading and unloading of materials, and was large enough to accommodate both fighter planes.
Jo was the first to hop down out of the cockpit of her plane, and the first thing she did was walk back towards the large hangar entrance where their planes had entered. There was no door there -- the crescent of Nipron II was visible outside -- but neither was there the faint sparkle of an atmospheric forcefield. She reached out her hand to see if anything would stop it, and right where a forcefield would have been, her fingertips did indeed encounter a surface of some kind.
She raised both her hands now and ran the palms of her hands over the invisible surface. Intrigued, she called over to her partner, "Hey Sam! I think I found an anomaly!" When Sam arrived at her side, she poked the invisible membrane and said, "What do you make of this?"
Sam trained her cybernetically enhanced vision on the barrier and inspected it in minute detail, commenting as she worked. "This is incredible! I've never seen anything like it." She began running her own hand across the mysterious wall, analyzing the readings that came in from her cybernetic fingertips. "It's not composed of energy or matter, but like something in-between; in a continual state of flux."
Meanwhile, Jo had taken out her tricorder and was scanning the wall herself. She whistled appreciatively, and said, "We know the Mullurans are a little ahead of us technologically, but this barrier is a real piece of work! It won't let our hands penetrate and it's keeping the air in, but on the other hand, it let our ships through. How can a solid wall do that?!? It'll take me a month just to figure out these readings."
"And I thought you were supposed to be the smart one!" remarked Sam.
Jo's eyebrows went up in surprise. "Ouch! Touché!" she said, smiling.
Sam grinned in return. "Let's go find what we came here to find," she said.
"Right."
Together the two women walked back into the interior of the hangar bay, past their Banshees, and toward the large double doors leading into the rest of the storage module. The doors parted smoothly -- maybe too smoothly for a space station that had been abandoned; or maybe it was just another testament to Mulluran technology: doors that never wore out -- onto a wide corridor leading straight ahead. There were five large double doors on each side and one at the corridor's far end.
"Storage rooms?" asked Jo.
Sam's cyber-eye didn't pick up anything to dispute that assumption, so she said, "That would be my guess." She walked over to the nearest left-hand door and pushed it open. Her eyes automatically adjusted to the low light level, revealing the room's interior as well as if it were bright daylight inside. "Looks clear," she said, and pushed the door open the rest of the way and went in. Jo followed, humming tricorder still in hand.
When they entered, the room's sensors detected their presence, and the lights came on. The place was filled with row after row of shelves, racks, bins, lockers, boxes, barrels and crates. Jo looked up from her tricorder and said, "This is where the energy readings were coming from, all right." They split up, Sam inspecting the room's contents with her cybernetic senses, Jo with her tricorder.
They opened every locker, every bin, rummaged around on every shelf and in every crate, all the while calling back and forth to each other what they were finding: self-sealing stembolts, phase inducers, rubindium crystals, bales of ceramic alloy, heisenberg compensators, magnetic bottles, collimators, several cartons of schplict, raw magnesite ore, sacks of polycrete, plasma coils and several boxes of duotronic circuitry.
Finally, Sam stood before the last unopened locker. She activated the latch and the door swung open. Inside were neat stacks of miniature power cells -- hundreds by the looks of it. "Here's the source of the energy readings," she called to Jo.
Jo came over from where she'd been sniffing around the schplict cartons and took a look. "Batteries?!? All this fuss over a pile of batteries?!?"
"Mmm," replied Sam, feeling disappointed herself.
"Oh well," sighed Jo, snapping her tricorder shut. She started back towards the door, then stopped abruptly. She stood there for a second, then spun around and looked at Sam. "Wait a sec!" she said. "There's something about all this stuff."
Sam looked around the room, but had no idea what Jo was thinking. "What?" she said.
"All of these items, taken by themselves, are just harmless stuff. But with a little ingenuity and time, they can be manufactured into very effective energy weapons."
"What about the schplict?" joked Sam, not entirely convinced Jo was on the right track here.
"A very effective machine lubricant," answered Jo, wrinkling her nose at the memory of her one and only encounter with the noxious beverage.
"And if all the store rooms in the shipyard contain this same basic inventory...."
"Then that's a whole lot of disruptor rifles!" finished Jo ominously.
Sam thought for a second, then said, "This is all pretty circumstantial and speculative."
Jo nodded. "Still, we should report it asap. There may be more going on here than meets the eye."