Wild Thargoid Chase: Baiting the Line
22 Jan 2021Lilly Terranova
"This is humiliating," Alyse complained, again, as the COVAS's voice sounded in the cockpit. "Docking successful. Engines disengaged."
Lilly did not respond immediately. Her focus seemed to be on securing the Nepenthe's systems as the Python-class vessel was lowered in to the small station's hangar. This was hardly unusual, as the Pilot's Federation commander who employed Alyse was most generously described as taciturn. In something like three years of working with her, Alyse had found that Lilly was as likely to ignore anything short of a direct question as not. And when questioned directly, her odds of responding were not always significantly better.
Behind them, through the sealed hatch to the remainder of the ship, Alyse could just make out the voice of their temporary hire, Jackson Vines, as he ushered the dozens of passengers down the boarding ramp toward the station proper. Some thanked him, others said nothing, but Alyse could not have been less interested in what they had to say.
"Weeks we've been at this, ferrying these rich assholes around like we're some kind of interstellar tour bus. This is a Python, Commander. The designers are spinning in their graves right now," Alyse insisted.
"What do all of our clients have in common?" Lilly asked, her eyes on a feed with the booking agents on station as she closed out contracts to the usual thanks for a job well done.
The question took Alyse off guard, and she had to think for a moment. For the last few weeks, almost immediately following their peculiar and very nearly deadly encounter with an unidentified Imperial Cutter, Lilly had abandoned all of her usual projects and activities, withdrawn to an isolated corner of the Bubble, and begun ferrying passengers back and forth to minor tourist destinations. It had gone on long enough that by now Alyse was considering resigning and going back to work for whatever freight company would have her. At least they wouldn't force her to use auto-landers and supercruise assist modules! The indignity of it made her cheeks burn! No self-respecting pilot used these things, and after the first week, she'd found the integrated music system that came with the auto-lander and physically torn it from the console, launching it out one of the refresher's vac tubes on a short break. If Lilly had noticed the bit of vandalism, or the absence of music, she had not commented on either.
But the matter of what their clients had in common left Alyse wondering for a moment, until she remembered one of the more unusual additions to their improvised passenger liner. Lilly had made sure to fit heat sinks into every utility slot, leaving the ship able to avoid scans from system authority vessels. The answer came to her at once.
"They're criminals."
Lilly nodded. "I thought smuggling might have some small appeal to you." Her lifeless, mechanical monotone voice made it difficult to tell whether she was being sincere, but Alyse had also never known her to make a joke.
Alyse would have been lying if she had claimed it did not, but she also had to admit that even knowing she was smuggling criminals from system to system brought little in the way of excitement to an almost entirely automated process. "But...why?" she asked. To her knowledge, Lilly had no criminal ties, nor any interest in forming relationships with any criminal organizations.
For a moment, it seemed she might not get an answer. But then Lilly pushed her console aside and turned to face Alyse. "To lure out those who attacked us."
Alyse stared. How would running a glorified tourist service for criminals draw out whoever had attacked them? Her face contorted in confusion, brows knitting together as she attempted to puzzle out Lilly's logic in this. Lilly, however, remained stoic as usual, her face betraying nothing of what she might be thinking. The woman was nearly impossible to read, even after Alyse had spent so much time with her. "O...kay. But how do you expect that to work?"
Again, Lilly did not answer immediately. Her cybernetic eyes, so obviously metallic with their faintly pulsing red indicator lights, flicked toward her console screen as if she were considering going back to it. At length, though, she seemed to decide not to, her full attention instead returning to Alyse.
"What were your impressions of our attackers?"
This was not the response Alyse had expected, but she had found that getting answers out of Lilly was a complicated game that frequently entailed following her along an at best tangentially related digression that more often than not seemed like Lilly's way of testing her understanding of a situation. It was frustrating at best, and condescending at worst. But if she wanted to know, she had to play. So she cast her mind back to the attack, to the Imperial Cutter that had used a frankly excessive amount of heat sinks to mask its signature as it observed their last combat with the Thargoids, then attacked almost immediately once they hailed it. It had been equipped more for surveillance and some measure of stealth than combat, which probably explained why they were still alive to have this conversation, considering that their vessel had been badly damaged before the engagement began, and had been specifically outfitted for combat with Thargoid vessels, rather than human ships. The black-painted Cutter had been difficult to spot, and commanded by someone who had clearly not had particularly detailed knowledge of Thargoid weaponry and the specific dangers their ships posed.
"Well, they were spies, not fighters. Definitely not very familiar with Thargoids, so probably not local to the Pleiades sector. They probably hadn't intended to get in a fight, but also didn't want you knowing they were there because..." she trailed off, thinking. "...because they knew you'd know who they were, and couldn't have you telling...someone, I'm not sure who. Maybe Imperial? They don't sell those Cutters to just anyone, and they had some sensor equipment I wasn't familiar with. Plus, their way of hiding from sensors seemed like something your average independent types either wouldn't know to do or wouldn't bother trying."
Lilly nodded. "You are largely correct so far," she said simply, and Alyse felt a little surge of gratification, which she quickly stamped down. She wasn't some cadet enjoying an instructor's approval. She was a trained pilot who didn't need this kind of patronizing.
"Are you going to tell me what this is about, or make me keep guessing?" she asked irritably.
Lilly arched a brow. It was one of the few expressions she made often, and it served so many purposes that Alyse had trouble keeping track of them all. Curiosity, mild surprise, faint disapproval, warning. This last seemed most appropriate here, as she was perhaps overstepping with her current attitude. What was odd though, was what Lilly said next.
"I do not want you to guess. My intent is for you to examine what you know and put that information to work in a useful manner, that you might realize you know more than you think."
What was perhaps strangest was that it was, in a roundabout way, a sort of compliment. Such a thing was exceedingly rare from Lilly.
"I still don't see the connection between attacking us after a Thargoid hunt and us ferrying criminals about," Alyse said.
At that, Lilly inclined her head fractionally. "Then I will explain. The Cutter monitoring our battle with the Thargoids represents someone paying very close attention to our activities."
"Ours, or yours?" Alyse asked pointedly.
"Ours. Though it would be fair to say mine. We are engaging in minor criminal activity in an attempt to draw them out. Our vessel is unarmed, unshielded, and no threat to anyone. If their intent is to observe us, we will know by cross-referencing sensor logs of what ships we encounter between our destination and home station. If they mean to attack to capture us, then we have given them an opportunity to demonstrate that. If their intent is to kill us, then they similarly have an excellent opportunity to reveal that. Whatever the case, we will learn something of their intentions once they locate us. And if their desire is to bring us into custody, we have given them a pretext to do so here, though we have not engaged in such egregious violations of the law as to warrant support being provided by whatever larger entity to which they are beholden."
It was almost as much as she'd ever heard Lilly say at one time.
"But...why would someone want to bring you—ah, us in?" she asked.
Lilly raised her eyebrow once again, and Alyse growled her frustration. For a long moment, she sat, staring at Lilly, wondering if trying her own hand at cold silence might wear her down. The other woman met her gaze impassively, seeming unbothered by the stretching silence. While it felt like their little staring contest stretched for ages, Alyse was confident the clock would show it had only gone on for a few seconds. Frustrated, she threw up her hands.
"What, are you some kind of spy or something!?"
"Do you truly want an answer to that?" Lilly asked, her voice a good deal quieter than usual, as if she were trying to somehow soften that grating, digitized voice that always seemed to issue from the center of her throat, rather than her mouth.
"I..." Alyse met Lilly's gaze, and she couldn't tell whether there was amusement or something like concern in her eyes. Without eyelids to frame them, it was frequently difficult to discern what few expressions ever played across Lilly's face. "I, uh, guess not?"
Lilly turned her attention from Alyse as the hatch to the cockpit opened and Jackson leaned in, smiling as ever.
"That's the last of them, Commander," he said to Lilly. "Are we going out with another batch?"
Unlike Alyse, Jackson seemed quite pleased to be ferrying tourists around, criminals or otherwise. As Lilly had all the social graces of a Thargoid herself, and Alyse was too sullen at the prospect of automated flying to manage being personable, Lilly had brought on Jackson as a flight attendant of sorts, tending to the comfort of their passengers and providing them with whatever they might require. He seemed to enjoy the work, and would have been perfectly happy to continue the indefinitely as far as Alyse could tell. Much as that bothered her, he was too friendly and cheerful for her to be able to dislike with any real conviction.
"We are," Lilly replied, and Alyse groaned aloud. "I will be in contact with the passenger booking teams on the station shortly. See to cleaning the cabins and preparing for new passengers within the hour."
"Aye, aye, ma'am," he said brightly, giving a salute that, while well-intended, was so poorly executed he would have spent the afternoon running laps around the station had he been a cadet in the Federation. Before Alyse could inform him of as much, he flashed the pair another smile and ducked out, closing and latching the door behind him. Lilly's instructions that none of the passengers be allowed into the cockpit had been explicit, and somehow, even over the objections of extraordinarily pushy, entitled rich clients, Jackson had seen that those instructions were followed to the letter. This thought caused something to click into place for Alyse.
"You...are hoping they're going to book passage on the ship and come up here after us, aren't you?" she asked.
Lilly paused in her work at her console and turned to look Alyse over for a moment. She nodded once, as if in approval rather than agreement. "Very good," she said, and Alyse took it at face value as a compliment, as she had never known Lilly to joke. And this small acknowledgement made several other bits of information click into place.
"That's why you're taking on the same sorts of clients from the same area. You're not just giving them a pretext to arrest you in space or anything like that... You're giving them a profile to work from, so that if they want, they can buy their way aboard without having to fight us in space. But...if they want to get in here, won't they have to get past Jackson to do that?"
She nodded.
"Isn't...there a chance they might kill him?"
She nodded again, then turned back to her console, scrolling through available transport contracts.