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October 28, 2999

Federated Suns

Crucis March

Cholis

Morten Estate

Taran Lee sat behind a table in the interrogation room again, though to be fair there was hardly any 'interrogation' happening, at least as far as he understood the word. All they'd been doing was asking him questions. Either they were warming up to the coercion part, or these people didn't understand the first thing about squeezing information out of a subject.

He wasn't cuffed, but he'd been placed on house arrest ever since getting off the damn dropship. Taran hadn't even been able to speak with the other prisoners. He'd been kept in comfortable isolation the past 8…or was it 9 days? He couldn't remember, and didn't bother to try at this point. His mind was already slipping, and had been for some time now, but he'd started to feel a little better since getting back on solid ground again. And at least the food here was much better than the pirates had given him.

Actually, the meals on the dropship had been better. The food here was excellent, despite the lack of meat. What civilized society didn't serve meat? Regardless, the past few days had been almost restful, and aside from the nightmares, he was waking up well to find himself away from Captain Sheridan.

But where he was and what was going to happen to him was a mystery. He'd been asked questions, while his own had not been answered, since arriving on this planet. The only thing his new captors had told him was that he had been rescued by House Morten.

He'd never heard of them, and aside from a few brief interactions onboard their jumpship, he hadn't seen what their people were like or who they were affiliated with, but it was clear they knew no Chinese whatsoever, for all his interrogations were in English.

The solid door cracked open again, and in walked the man he had seen on three different days. Security Chief Penstrife, or so he claimed. He was all muscle and his accent smelled of the Federated Suns, but he wouldn't divulge any information to Taran. He kept wanting to know more about the pirates and how he had been captured, nothing about the Capellan Confederation or Maximilian Liao, which was odd.

But today someone else walked in behind him. Someone dressed far better.

"Good morning," the man said, sitting down across the table from Taran as Penstrife stood beside the table watchfully. Clearly he was guarding this man in case he lunged over the table to do him harm. That meant he was more than just an interrogator. Finally he was getting to someone in charge.

"Do you have a name?"

"Stephan Morten. I'm head of state for the Morten Protectorate and also First Lord of House Morten."

"Which faction does your House serve?" Taran demanded.

"Not the Capellans," Stephan quipped. "We were originally part of the Federated Suns, then we got politically burnt and relocated to the Periphery. We have a love/hate relationship with the Davions, and you're currently in our embassy estate on their border world of Cholis, but I can assure you that we're not turning you over to them. Rather, we intend to send you home."

"I've never heard of Cholis either."

"Outer edge of the Crucis March. I assume you've heard of that?"

"Don't be patronizing, young man."

"Don't be grumpy, old man. We saved you, after all. Isn't that worth a little gratitude?"

"I'm still a prisoner, am I not?"

Stephan winced. "Sort of. But I didn't think you'd just want to walk out on a Davion world either. Or was I wrong?"

"I haven't even been allowed to walk outside to see the sunlight."

"There's a reason for that, and it involves your capture. You still have no idea who took you?"

"As I told your man here, I went to sleep one night with a lovely young lady and woke up with a bag over my head and my wrists and feet bound. I know nothing."

"We found you a couple hundred light years away on an uninhabited world the pirate Captain Sheridan was using as his person den. We'd been hunting him for a while because he's been hijacking dropships and jumpships in our new area of influence. We didn't expect to find you or any other political prisoners, but we did learn who it was that most likely captured you, or at least had a hand in it, and that's why you're being kept out of sight at the moment."

"The Davions of course."

"No," Stephan said firmly. "It was Comstar."

Taran's face scrunched up in confusion, then a look of understanding washed over him, but he wasn't about to explain anything to Mr. Morten.

"And you don't want them to know that you stumbled onto me?"

"Not yet, anyway. You deserve to get home, so we're going to make sure you get there regardless, but we can't just send a message via Comstar to get someone to come pick you up. You might not make it back in that case."

"I suppose not."

"So I'm arranging for two of my jumpships to carry all the former prisoners back to their former homes, but in your case I won't be sending you to Sian. My jumpship would most likely be impounded and my crew tortured to death because of our association with the Davions. So no, we're going to drop you on one of your outer worlds and let you make your way from there. Comstar shouldn't even be looking for you yet, because we aren't announcing the takedown of the pirates. So as far as they know, you're still their prisoner."

"And what would you like in compensation for this service to the Confederation?"

Now it was Steven that frowned. "Nothing. Ian Davion is a teenage brat with a temper at this point, and any 'compensation' from your realm could cause trouble for me. We're independent, and his father recognized that independence, but Ian doesn't seem to care for it and I don't want to give him any excuses for trying to take over my worlds."

"Then why not just kill me and spare yourself the trouble?"

"Because unlike House Liao and House Davion, we have scruples. We don't just kill people because they're inconvenient."

"Given my current situation I won't argue the point."

"I know your Chancellor would in my place, but that's why you're the bad guys…though I'm not naïve enough to believe everything I hear from the Davion propaganda machine. And because I know you'll be questioned when you go back, let me explain this to you. We're not a subsidiary of the Federated Suns, and my military is not going to help Ian invade your realm, nor are we going to defend his. The only exception would be if you hit some of our neighboring systems. We might intervene to help them, but the rest of the Federated Suns is not our concern. We're not taking sides. We just ask you to leave us and our neighbors alone. Can you give that message to Maximilian when you see him again?"

"I can," Taran said simply, starting to feel more like an ambassador than a prisoner again. And if Comstar really was behind his abduction, he was going to have a long chat with his former pupil concerning that fact when he got back to Sian.

"It'll be a few more days before your dropship leaves. I apologize for the lack of sunshine until then, but there's a Comstar facility on this planet plus who knows how many Davion spies keeping an eye on us. I'd rather they not have any additional chances to snap a picture of you on one of our terraces."

"I understand the politics of the situation quite well, thank you."

"No, you don't," Stephan said ominously as he stood up from the table. "But just so you know, Captain Sheridan and all of his pirates died fighting rather than be captured. Comstar no longer has his services because of us, and whatever blackmail they were trying to accomplish with you is about to be undone when you return. And I do believe they're the type to hold grudges."

"I'd be more worried about that rat on the Federated Suns throne."

"I worry about him too. I'll have my tailors create you some more appropriate clothing before we return you home. It wouldn't do for your people to shoot you thinking you were a Davion agent, after all."

Taran didn't get a chance to reply, for the slippery little man left the room as he was uttering his last words, so he looked up at the Security Chief.

"Back to my cell then?"

"Back to your quarters," he said, indicating for Taran to get up. "Our cells are nowhere near as nice, but if you'd like to visit one for the remainder of your stay, I can arrange it."

Taran huffed, but didn't otherwise respond as he was led back to a secure facility via an underground tunnel to the dormitory where he had been kept since arrival on this world, whatever it was they had called it. Some backwater spec that probably wasn't even worth invading.

When he was let inside the door it closed and locked behind him, then Taran went and sat down next to the false window that mimicked sunlight behind a translucent panel and began tapping his long fingernails on the table as he started thinking hard about Comstar's complicity in this and how best to address the situation with the Chancellor when he returned.

There had to be a price paid, otherwise the Capellan Confederation was nothing more than lapdogs to those technocrats. But if they shut off their comm relays it would leave them wide open to another Davion incursion, or the Free Worlds League taking a bite out of their territory, so it would have to be some far more subtle means of revenge.

And that would have to take careful planning and forethought. Fortunately, it looked like he was going to have weeks, if not months of jumpship travel ahead of him to work this out. He'd have a plan in place to present to the Chancellor when he arrived back on their capitol…quietly. It wouldn't do for Comstar to pick him up again on the way there, so he'd need to travel unnoticed.

That would take even more time, but he wasn't willing to risk getting captured again. He was fortunate to be alive, let alone about to be returned home. He didn't know who this House Morten was, but he was about to owe them a very large debt…if they indeed did return him. He'd believe it when it actually happened. Not before.

Rannel Morten had spent most of the past few days floating in 0g as she studied the Hyperpulse Generator onboard the pirate ship while 8 of her best techs scoured the ship looking at other systems as well as the 'booty' that Grady had brought back that was stashed in the cargo hold.

Rannel didn't like being in 0g for long, but she had no choice. The HPG wasn't located in the gravity disc inside the ship, but in its own special compartment back in the engineering sections that were all 0g, and what she was learning about the device, from physical inspections to running through the digital manual, was rather shocking.

First, there was an enormous amount of EMP shielding around the device. Enough to blunt the EMP from a nuke. Why that would be necessary she didn't understand until the basic function of the mysterious HPG technology was finally revealed.

It didn't send a transmission through hyperspace like she'd guessed. Instead, it created an artificial jump point and sent a signal through it the same way you'd send a ship. Rannel didn't even think it was possible to create an artificial jump point, nor had any idea to even go about it inside a gravity well, but the Star League had found a way and Comstar had inherited that technology.

The EMP was a result of essentially tearing a jump point into a magnetic field where one didn't belong. Ships coming and going from the natural jump points above and below a star were doing so because of the unique shape of the magnetic field pulling in at those two points. Technically, if you got far enough away from a star, or planet, all the empty space between them was also a 'jump point,' except it would do you no good because the starlight out there was so weak it would take months or years to gradually soak up enough to make another jump. Decades even if you got really far out from a star system.

So the Zenith and Nadir jump points were by far the closest you could get to a star to recharge your jump drives using your solar sails. Now, a ship could recharge using a fusion reactor or, if they had batteries already charged, hop out into no-man's land and then make a second jump, so going beyond the jump points wasn't exactly the realm of impossibility with regards to jumpship travel, but there was a very good reason the Zenith and Nadir jump points were always used except by those tactically brilliant or suicidally crazy.

Both the magnetic field and the gravity fields of stars and planets acted like an insulating coating preventing jump drives from tearing a hole into hyperspace, so you had to get to where it was really really thin to do it. The Star League had found a way to do it where it was thick, and it required an enormous amount of power. Far too much to send a ship through, but if all they were sending was a little bit of comms radiation, they had enough power to be able to make it work.

But tearing that hole in the magnetic field created distortions…hence the EMP. That meant that every Comstar station on a planet was a big electromagnetic bomb going off each time they transmitted something into hyperspace, and without that shielding in place, every system they had would be fried, as well as the surrounding cities.

Rannel knew immediately it could be used as a weapon if someone wanted, which was probably item #12 on Comstar's list of reasons not to let anyone else know how these damn things worked. And the small amount of 'static' that Project Doorbell was picking up was the hyperspace fallout from tearing a tiny hole into an artificial jump point.

And to think about it, if they maintained the jump point constantly…which they would have to do, otherwise transmissions would be picked up by the entire planet if they emerged from the Zenith or Nadir points…then they were essentially providing power to weaken the region but not breach it, the same way jumpships went to a weak region to do their breaching into hyperspace.

So it had to be the breaches themselves that created the EMP…which meant incoming signals looking for that artificial jump point would also create the disruption centered at each Comstar facility.

But not on this ship. The device was not active, nor had been for a very long time…which made sense. You had to know the location of a jump point in order to fling yourself, or a packet of energy, towards it and hope to get close enough to get sucked into the weak point. Miss, and you'd emerge at the next closest 'weak' zone…which was usually the edge of a star system beyond the orbit of all the planets where the stellar radiation was likewise weak as hell. If you emerged intact, which all ships did not, you'd have to wait a very long time to get enough energy to jump back in, even to the nearby star.

If you didn't have enough food to wait that out, you were screwed.

So transmitting a signal to a roaming ship was impossible. The ship itself would have to transmit first to a known location, giving its own location, then establish a ping relationship and hold position for the duration of whatever transfer of data would be taking place. So the pirate Captain couldn't be tracked by Comstar, but he could contact them anytime he was in range of a planet that had a HPG relay on it, and according to the transmission logs, that's exactly what he was doing to arrange pickup and transfer of prisoners, as well as getting paid in hard currency and valuable materials of small weight, like gemstones and precious metals.

Rannel had been told there was a room full of the stuff taken from the planet, but she hadn't bothered to look at it yet. This technology was worth far more than money, and she'd spent every hour aside from sleeping and eating in with the equipment learning how it functioned.

As well as learning about the communications back and forth between the pirate and his former employers. The comm log of such transmissions had never been deleted, going all the way back to the start of this ship's exploration mission.

She'd flipped through those pages briefly, finding nothing of real interest to her at the moment, so she'd passed them on to another of her staff to go through carefully and make duplicates of to take back to Stephan. Others were documenting the upgrades to the ship that Comstar had made…or perhaps other ships had lost over time since the fall of the Star League. Either way, there were other tidbits of technology here that were of value, but Rannel was focused on the big prize right now and was pouring through a virtual schematic in the diagnostics program when Vendan Morten floated up behind her.

He was twelve years older than her, and a brother to Stephan's father who had never really found a niche in the House for himself, so he'd become a floater between the various divisions and had volunteered to come help unlock the secrets of this ship given his few years already spent helping out the research and development wing of their tech division.

"Rannel, we need you to come look at something," he said after placing a hand on her shoulder to get her attention from the screenlock she was in.

"There's lots of things I need to see…later," she admonished him with a casual look, then her eyes went back to the screen.

"That's why they sent me," he said with a smirk. "They didn't want to piss you off."

She frowned, both at being interrupted and by the inference that she was somehow cranky. "Meaning what?"

"Meaning you've got a mental death grip on this thing and you're barely sleeping at all. I'm family, so they figured I should be the one to pry you away from it."

"I'm fine, Vendan. I learned long ago how to press the edge without stepping over it. I'm not even taking any caffeine at the moment."

"The chance to study an HPG is probably more addictive," the older Morten said, undeterred. "Chance found something that he couldn't identify, and neither can anyone else. It's got Star League markings on it, but none of us know what it is or what it does. It's also not part of the ship. It was stashed with the pirate's personal treasures."

"And you think it's more important than an HPG?" she challenged. "Why can't it wait until later?"

"Because the comm logs that Anders has been going over indicate that Comstar has found several other devices like this and that there are standing orders to destroy them whenever they're found."

Rannel raised an eyebrow. "Really? What did they call it?"

"Item 11832."

"How revealing," she said with a sigh. "Alright, I'll take a look."

"Thank you," he said patronizingly.

"I'm not cranky," she said, pushing off the console and floating towards the door frame behind her.

"I never said it."

"You were thinking it."

"I was thinking you were like a little kid with your favorite new toy you didn't want to let go of to get in the bath."

"You're right," she said, pulling herself around and through the doorway into the corridor. "You're lucky you are family, or I'd find something nasty for you to work on for the next week."

Vendan smiled and shot ahead of her, then led the way to the gravity disc in the ship and the room where they had been doing inventory on the loot. Rannel's legs welcomed the gravity as she saw stacks of money, of various types, next to more unruly piles of it that had yet to be counted. The room was a mix of order and disorder, and by the size of the amounts she was seeing, the pirate had made himself filthy rich.

"Here," Chance Yui said, standing next to a table with an innocuous black box laid on top of it. Aside from the Star League emblem, otherwise known as the 'Cameron Star,' molded into the cover, it had no markings or identification on it at all.

Rannel stepped up and quickly found the latches on either side and tilted up the protective covering to find a control board with built-in mini-screen on the left side, but no obvious power button.

She fiddled around with it for a few minutes, then found a hidden panel that opened up to reveal a thick key on a stretchable cord. She pulled it out and slid it into the matching slot on the lower right hand side of the control board.

When she did the whole board rose up, tilting at an angle with the far side rising and the lower side coming up a mere inch as all the buttons and screen lit up. Rannel's mouth slowly hung open in a curious look as she read the various indicators and played with a few buttons.

"You were right," she finally said. "I'm a cranky old witch with screen lock. This was worth interrupting me."

"Do you know what it is?" Vendan asked.

"If you're asking if I've seen or heard of something like this before, the answer is no. But this control panel is very familiar. Anyone care to take a guess," she said, stepping backward for a moment so the now six other people in the room looking over her shoulder could see it.

"Doorbell," Shio Drennan said, his jaw dropping as well.

"Bingo," Rannel said dryly. "It's some kind of very advanced version of it. And as of now none of you are to do anything more than lay eyes on it. It was turned off for a reason, and its function may interfere with the HPG, or vice versa, so we're not going to risk damaging either one. I want this…black box…taken back to Cholis," she said, stopping herself as she realized it might interfere, or even be detectable, by the Comstar HPG there. "No, I need this taken to Drymo and stored in an ultra-secure area until I can…"

Vendan coughing slightly caused her to stop.

"Fine. Vendan will take Chance and the black box to Drymo and start figuring it out. Just don't break it or blow it up. And I want a detailed preliminary report by the time I get there. Send the jumpship back here once you arrive."

"Thank you for sharing," Vendan said sarcastically. "Now you can get back to your big toy."

Rannel smirked, then looked at Chance. "Good find."

"Thank you," the young man said as she walked over to the stacks of gold and silver coins, picking up one of the latter and tossing it to him.

"Finder's fee," Rannel said, with him suddenly smiling ear to ear. "If anyone else finds something like this, just come tell me. I'm not that mean."

"You haven't had any coffee in three days," another tech said in a meek voice.

"Young lady, coffee is not required to be nice, and we're not on the clock here, so I prefer not to use it as a crutch until I need to."

"Maybe one cup would help," Vendan said innocently.

She mock glared at him. "Don't you have somewhere to be right now?"

"Come on, rich boy," he said to Chance as he stepped towards the door. "We've been dismissed."

Rannel pulled the key out of the device and resealed the cover, then handed it to the discoverer who quickly shuffled out the door along with Vendan.

"Do I really get that cranky?" she asked the youngest in the group, a 23 year old non-Morten who she'd hired from one of their new Academy offshoots on Foniss.

"No, ma'am. You just don't like getting interrupted when you're focused on something."

"Who does?" she countered, glancing around the room of un-itemized loot. "As you were people. I'll be getting that cup of coffee, then returning to my lair."