Spaced Out

That's No Moon

One thousand one hundred and sixty four.

One thousand one hundred and sixty five.

One hundred one thous...wait...

Blinking, Lily wagged her head. The long front ends of her hair slapped her cheeks. Counting stars crossed her eyes and blurred her vision. She massaged her closed lids with the heels of her hands. Her skim shift was barely halfway done and she already twitched with boredom.

Space was amazing in short periods, but, honestly, you'd seen one star and you'd seen them all. Yawning, she checked the distant and close skim displays on the console under her elbows. Nothing out there but dust and gas and rocks. Like always.

Reesa trained Lily on the skims before her first shift. The Verakian woman showed her the difference between large space objects and legit starships. Reesa's cool attitude towards her thawed while they worked together and the women's usual rapport returned. While the captain's sister demonstrated how the skims worked she discovered a number of denied transmissions with military codes attached to their sigIDs. At the time, she paged Vortrand over the 'rounds.

"Are these denied Command transmissions I'm seeing from Luthe?" She'd asked.

"Yes," Vortrand had answered. "Delete them. Luthe has my last message detailing my methods and reasons. If he files a formal challenge the documentation will not support him."

"If you don't send at least a token response Luthe could move to intercept."

"We're not at that point yet." A long, uncertain pause trailed Vortrand's statement. "He won't waste his time chasing us." The captain sounded like he wanted to believe that. His private channel had gone dead. Reesa hadn't paged him again and had left Lily to the skims with an encouraging squeeze of her shoulders.

During that first two ard shift (four hours in Earth time) Lily brought her Archivist to pass the peccards. When Vortrand relieved her he flipped out over the persotome.

"How are you monitoring the skims and shitting around on the Prestige arenas? Leave it in your personal quarters before you report for a shift. It's not only scrapers we're looking out for. If Luthe gets a wild hair up his ass he will track us down. If I don't have time to prepare evasives and a plausible cover you will end up in pieces floating in specimen jars."

A puff of breath blew Lily's bangs from her face. Whatever. Nothing ever showed up on the skims and having nothing to do made her dwell on home and her parents and she'd get weepy if she didn't distract herself.

On a HOptic tile, she poked around the manta's intra-versal files while she kept the skim display on one of the control dash's dedicated screens. Red flagged files creased her brows. She recognized some of the codes on the sigIDs. Weren't these the transmissions from Command Vortrand told Reesa to delete? Why hadn't she?

Lily swept up one of the files onto the primary interface that spanned the entirety of the manta's observation shield. An unfriendly Verakian face filled the HOptic web. Lily spied this face on Myskuul. This was the man Vortrand met with at the bar. This was Luthe.