TEXT: BattleCorps
  FORGOTTEN 
  WORLDS
  Book One
  The Hunt for Jardine
  Herbert A. Beas II
  
  BattleCorps
  Forgotten Worlds: The Hunt for Jardine • Page 
  Chapter Four
  
  BattleCorps
  Forgotten Worlds: The Hunt for Jardine • Page 
  I still can’t believe she’s gone. I just can’t.
  I’ve seen my share of dangers in this job. Hell, there was never 
  an IE contract I ever did that didn’t have a hazard clause for things 
  like this. I knew—we all knew—there was a particular danger in this 
  one, but I always presumed we could handle it. I always presumed 
  they’d come after me, or maybe after T. Why did Marie even have 
  to get back in that damned truck? Why?
  And damn it, it had to be then that we finally found the malf-
  ing firecats, too! Someone had tried to kill us all, killed Marie and 
  Esok, and we suddenly found the stupid beasts that caused all this 
  trouble!
  We tracked those twice-damned animals for weeks after that, 
  and I felt about half a meter tall through the whole thing. Marie 
  should’ve been there. I would’ve given up and told Croft to shove 
  his entire mission, but I just couldn’t. Not after the cost. I couldn’t 
  even bring myself to tell Tyler right away. How could I?
  And it all led back to an IE ship! A stupid, Bast-damned IE DropShip 
  carried those beasties to Shasta before something brought them 
  down. Somehow, enough cats survived and escaped to breed 
  in the rainforest, where they’ve been wiping out anything small 
  enough for them to kill and eat.
  Lawrence and I found the recorders, but they’re maybe five years 
  old; Trouble doesn’t even think he can decipher them now, but at 
  least we’re done with Shasta. 
  Damn it all! Why did I have to be so angry with her on that day?
  —From the journals of Brooklyn Stevens
  
  BattleCorps
  Forgotten Worlds: The Hunt for Jardine • Page 
  K-1 DropShuttle Columbus 
  Zenith Jump Point Approach Vector 
  Shasta, Free Worlds League 
  13 October 3067
  Brooke stared at the readouts before her without truly seeing 
  them. Her fingers had paged back and forth through the informa-
  tion—what little of it Tibor scrounged from the flight logs—perhaps 
  a hundred times already, and even now, she could not recall any of 
  it. The numbers, words, and images all looked like a blur.
  It took Tibor four attempts to break through the haze of her 
  thoughts.
  His jade and emerald eyes were suddenly before her again. She 
  realized somehow that he’d been standing over her for a while. 
  His hand was on her shoulder, but only now was she aware of it 
  there.
  I’m a mess! she told herself.
  Seeing recognition in her eyes at last, Tibor let out a heavy sigh 
  and finally sat down in the tiny booth that often doubled as the 
  DropShuttle Columbus’ breakfast table and a mid-day worksta-
  tion. Her mind still hazy, Brooke wondered how many days she’d 
  spent at the table, staring blankly at the computer screens, me-
  chanically writing notes in her journals, or just plain brooding.
  “You can’t let it eat you up like this, Brooke,” Tibor said, softly. 
  “You know that!”
  I was supposed to take care of her! She wanted to scream that 
  out loud, but couldn’t find the strength. How long had it been since 
  she’d eaten? Her stomach growled, and her mouth felt pasty.
  “Are you even hearing me?” he asked.
  She shook her head.
  Tibor’s voice grew stern. “Brooke—!”
  “Damn it, Trouble!” she exploded, fighting back the welling tears. 
  “I know, damn it!”
  All at once, it felt as though she had snapped back into the pres-
  ent. She could smell, now, the artificially purified air circulating 
  through the ship, feel and hear the ambient rumble of the main 
  
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  drive engines. Before her, still clutched in her hand, was a com-
  pad Tibor probably handed to her over an hour ago, before her 
  latest bout of remorse. The screen displayed fragments of an itin-
  erary, visuals of a planet that looked from space like just about 
  anywhere, coordinate values that she somehow knew made no 
  rational sense. A flight log corrupted by five years of neglect and 
  the elements, recovered from a downed ship with Interstellar 
  Expeditions’ registry.
  For this, she reminded herself, we left Marie buried on an alien 
  world…
  “Well?” Tibor asked.
  “What do you want me to say, Trouble?” she challenged him. 
  “She was closer to me—closer to us—than anyone we ever lost 
  on a mission! And you told me not to bring her along, but I didn’t 
  list—!”
  Tibor took one of her hands in his. “No,” he said. “You were right, 
  Brooke. Marie belonged in the field on this one. She knew what to 
  look for; I wouldn’t have done any better.”
  Brooke pulled her hand back and dropped the compad. It hit the 
  polished steel table with a clatter. She fell back in the seat, arms 
  folding across her chest, and avoided Tibor’s gaze. The rational 
  part of her mind knew that the proper thing to do would be to 
  stiffen up and get back to the business of command. She shook 
  her head again.
  “Maybe,” she admitted. “Maybe…”
  “Brooke, if we’re going to finish this mission, we need you back 
  in the here and now. Lawrence and I are getting worried.”
  “I know already! But, damn it, how professional do you want me 
  to be here?”
  “Well, for starters, you can tell us what we’re going to do next.”
  Brooke sighed. Her eyes dropped back to the compad.
  “You know,” she said after a moment. “I have half a mind to take 
  this data, go back to Croft, and tell him to screw this whole mis-
  sion.”
  Tibor smirked. “Ja,” he said. “I thought you might.” 
  “But you also know I can’t do that.”
  
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  “Honestly?” Tibor arched her eyebrows. “I wasn’t sure this 
  time.”
  Brooke shook her head and met his eyes once more.
  “Close,” she admitted. “Centimeters close, maybe. But no. We 
  do, I guess, have to go back to IE with this, though. The coordi-
  nates are in code, and I don’t recognize the key. The flight data’s 
  all mucked up on top of it anyway, so I’d guess that even if we did 
  decode the text, the only people who could make sense of the 
  itinerary would be Croft’s.”
  “Perhaps.” Tibor nodded cautiously.
  Brooke paused for a moment, catching something in his tone 
  that suggested more than a lackluster agreement. All of a sudden, 
  it was as if the fog in her mind lifted. Of course!
  “You’re thinking that I suspect Croft knew of this ship all 
  along?” she asked. “And thus he also knows what her itinerary 
  was?” 
  A thin smile crawled across Tibor’s face. “Something like that.”
  “Well,” she said, drawing out the word as she rolled the thought 
  around. “That’s possible. But as I think about that now, I think he 
  didn’t know. Suspected, maybe. He would’ve volunteered that 
  kind of thing if he believed it completely. Then he could’ve simply 
  turned this mission into a recovery op…”
  The realization dawned on her like a flash of lightning. She blink-
  ed, and felt as though she had finally awoken from a long, deep 
  sleep. “No,” she exclaimed. “He wouldn’t have even needed us if 
  he knew all that…”
  Tibor’s eyes narrowed.
  “I think he wants us to find Jardine first, Trouble. This DropShip—
  the Clarke, I think—went missing before she could report which 
  leg of the journey she was on. You know some of the company’s 
  captains are sloppy record-keepers. Hell, maybe the Clarke’s cap-
  tain was even the greedy sort, withholding reports in exchange for 
  a higher finder’s fee.”
  “IE internal politics at its most cutthroat,” Tibor agreed dryly. 
  “That’s certainly possible. Plus, ships go missing during ops all 
  the time, and so many are looking for places like Jardine. Ghosts, 
  maybe?”
  
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  The image of the camouflaged man floated before Brooke’s eyes 
  for a moment and she shuddered. He had no identification on him 
  when she finally checked out his body. Even his exotic Gauss rifle 
  and the electronic camouflage failed to yield any clues, as if the 
  gear was custom-made for its user. The Green Ghosts had been 
  known to sport both Clan and Star League technologies in the past. 
  Then again, so could ComStar and just about any Great House.
  “Maybe,” she mumbled. “Either way, IE lost the Clarke and wasn’t 
  sure where she went. Or, maybe, the ship did report in, and they 
  knew she’d been shot down—”
  “—Or,” Tibor jumped in, “maybe she was too busy running from 
  whoever wanted to keep the secret to radio in.”
  “Enau,” Brooke said with a nod. “Whichever way it went down, it 
  means that in order to find Jardine, they needed to find the ship, 
  but they still want someone to carry forward, find the planet, con-
  firm it, get back out alive, and report it.”
  Tibor nodded. “And for that, they’d rather send in a scout who’s 
  not directly attached to the company, since it’s now a proven risk. 
  So, we’re bait?”
  “Of a sort,” Brooke said thoughtfully. “But we suspected as much 
  going in. What this means is that we’re half done with the mission, 
  though; we found the missing link, and with IE’s records, we should 
  be able to find a list of possible destinations. I would presume that 
  the Clarke’s JumpShip also got wasted. But in deep space, debris 
  would’ve scattered everywhere before anyone picked it up; by 
  then, finding a recorder would be like finding a needle in a planet-
  sized haystack.”
  Tibor’s smile broadened. “So we cross-reference any JumpShip 
  losses that coincide with DropShip losses—”
  “—particularly around the time this little gem went missing,” 
  Brooke finished, while waving the compad. “We have a vessel 
  name, a general location, and an estimated time of disappear-
  ance. IE should be able to give us a flight plan to work from, 
  and I would wager that we’re within 30 light years of the target. 
  More than one jump away, and there’s just no excuse beyond 
  bald-faced stupidity why an IE explorer wouldn’t check in with 
  something.”
  “Well, unless they simply didn’t trust the local commo-nets,” 
  Tibor said.
  
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  Brooke sagged. “I suppose that works, too, but it widens the 
  search area considerably.”
  “True,” Tibor sighed. “It’s about a few hundred stars to choose 
  from, but at least it’s a start if we look into anything within the one-
  jump radius of here. I’m sure we can narrow it down with what we 
  know of Jardine’s spectral data in the archives. But an itinerary 
  would let us make a chain of such areas to look into, if the captain 
  followed it right…”
  With a grunt, Tibor paused, closing his artificial emerald eye for 
  a moment. “You sure Croft won’t cut us loose after we ID the ship, 
  if he has her itinerary already?”
  “If he does, we can sue him for breach of contract,” Brooke said 
  blandly, “but I don’t think he will. He wants us to go there and 
  come back. He wants us to confirm Jardine before he takes credit 
  for its discovery. And he wants us to trip any traps along the way 
  so his boys can go in safe.”
  “The crafty old Arsch!” Tibor muttered. “So, then, back to the 
  original question: What are we doing now?”
  Brooke pondered again. “We can’t HPG a message from here,” 
  she said finally. “Too dangerous. We could black box it, maybe, 
  but I’d hate to reveal to IE that we still have another of their most 
  expensive toys…”
  “Good call, assuming they don’t already know.”
  Brooke frowned at the thought. IE’s possession of black boxes 
  was one of the scattered organization’s greatest secrets—one she 
  would bet the Sacajawea that the Steiner and Davion families 
  (at least) would be deadly interested in investigating. An ancient 
  alternative to HPGs, IE had used the few dozen or so they had un-
  covered over the years to build their own off-grid communications 
  network, paranoid over possible ComStar eavesdropping.
  And two such boxes “just happened” to go missing from IE’s 
  inventory about the same time a certain Doctor Brooklyn Stevens 
  and the crew of the JumpShip Sacajawea left their company. 
  “Either way,” she said, “we should get clear of the area. Maybe 
  make for Alliance space again. Whoever those bastards were who 
  sent that man back there, they should lose our scent for a while 
  after one or two jumps, and we can get a broadcast out or some-
  thing, arrange a meeting but leave out the particulars.”
  
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  Tibor nodded. “Sounds like a plan, then.”
  Brooke frowned again. Already, her mind was drifting, and she 
  could feel the tears welling up. Why—?
  Tibor’s hand was on hers. “Hey…”
  “Why?” she whispered. “Why did I have to be so angry with her 
  that day?”
  “You can’t live every minute like it’s going to be your last,” Tibor 
  said. “If you did, you’d never leave the ship.”
  “Maybe,” Brooke sniffed. “But that’s a poor damned excuse 
  when the moment comes, Trouble.”
  “Anything we say at times like this is just going to sound like a 
  platitude, hon. But you have to know, at the end of the day, that 
  we all took risks coming out here. We knew someone was out to 
  keep this secret.”
  “Yeah, but if I’d been with Marie instead of Lawrence—”
  “Then in all probability, Lawrence would be dead instead of 
  Marie?” Tibor guessed, making Brooke wince inwardly. “Or may-
  be that guy down there was stalking you and not the guide, so 
  it still would’ve been Marie. You and I both know it won’t do any 
  good to second-guess.”
  Brooke sighed, the tears once more under control. “Can’t help it,” 
  she mumbled. “I just—”
  A metallic tap on the bulkhead doorway distracted them both. 
  Looking up, she saw Lawrence standing tactfully silent across the 
  room. Although he wore a sheepish expression on his face, his 
  ice-blue eyes were intense.
  “We have company at the jump point,” he said simply. “And they 
  want to speak with you.”
  v v v
  “Doctor Stevens,” said the leathery face on the monitor, stressing 
  Brooke’s title in a way that made Tibor’s eyes roll, “I understand 
  your surprise. My own crew was on assignment several jumps 
  away when IE called us to come here. Henry Croft signed the or-
  ders personally, and the contract clearly defines our role in this 
  
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  mission as providing military escort for your investigation, with 
  an emphasis on acting as your security advisor. As such, I would 
  strongly advise that your team pay heed to my experience in such 
  matters…”
  “Galatean diplomacy at its finest,” Lawrence grumbled.
  Tibor chuckled as Brooke sighed irritably. What with the annoying 
  four-minute “light lag” between sending and receiving messages, 
  and the arrogance obvious in this Captain Anton Hara’s voice, her 
  earlier malaise was giving way to simmering anger.
  Oblivious to her mood, Hara’s malachite eyes stared directly into 
  the monitor, as if trying to peer into Brooke’s soul across time 
  and space. His skin was darkly tanned—to the point of premature 
  aging—and his short mop of hair was a sandy blond. Brooke imag-
  ined that the man’s homeworld was likely a colder planet than the 
  one he grew up on.
  He wore a flat gray jumpsuit, with a black turtleneck under-
  shirt—a fashion Brooke found common among spacer crews. His 
  voice was rich, with a trace of an accent she couldn’t quite place, 
  and carried over with a confidence of someone not used to being 
  questioned. 
  “…As you know,” he continued, “IE considers this expedition dan-
  gerous in the extreme. So, unless your team is packing a DropShip 
  or two we’re unaware of, it would be in our mutual best interests 
  to work together as closely as possible from here on out, with an 
  emphasis on the security needs of the present operations.”
  The image froze; after four exchanges so far, this time Hara 
  wasn’t even bothering with a proper signoff. Brooke sighed and 
  propped a fist under her chin as she studied the monitor.
  “Who the hell does this guy think he’s dealing with?” she finally 
  asked aloud.
  In the pilot’s seat beside Brooke, Tibor grunted, drumming slim 
  fingers on the flight console, a bland smirk on his face. Behind them, 
  occupying the third seat in the DropShuttle Columbus’ cramped 
  cockpit, sat Lawrence, keeping himself busy with yet another veri-
  fication that the life support systems were working normally.
  “Well,” Tibor said, turning his eyes out toward the canopy, to 
  take in the tiny points of light dead ahead that could as easily have 
  been stars as ships. “From what we can see, he came in with his 
  own Jumper, a Leopard, and some fighters, right? So I’m thinking 
  
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  he’s thinking that the merc with the bigger guns gets to make the 
  rules.”
  “That guy’s only got bigger guns in his mind,” Lawrence 
  scoffed.
  Brooke allowed herself a smirk at the thought. In all likeli-
  hood, the enhanced armaments the Sacajawea and her shuttles 
  possessed would surprise the likes of Anton Hara and his crew. 
  Thanks to a legacy of years spent venturing into strange and occa-
  sionally hostile regions off the beaten path, both the Sac and her 
  complement of small craft had undergone heavy modifications 
  to improve their survivability over long-haul missions, often trad-
  ing minor luxuries for armor and weapons. Together, the vessels 
  boasted enough firepower to make any unsuspecting pirate band 
  think twice before considering them easy prey for a casual smash-
  and-plunder. While that factor had saved Brooke and her crew on 
  many occasions since they and IE parted ways, it was a surprise 
  hidden from the casual observer.
  But whether or not the extra weaponry would deter Hara didn’t 
  matter so much to Brooke as the fact that he seemed to be confus-
  ing his alleged role of “mission support” with “mission control.” 
   “I’ve half a mind to tell this guy to chase a comet,” she mum-
  bled. “But that wasn’t Galatean diplomacy, Lawrence. Galatean 
  mercs like to yell and curse a lot more. That was almost scripted; 
  fifty kroner says he’s got an IE liaison whispering in his ear.”
  “Oh, there’s a pleasant thought,” Lawrence said.
  “Maybe,” Tibor replied. “But if so, it means we may want to com-
  promise a little bit.”
  Brooke arched an eyebrow at him.
  “Consider this: We were just discussing going back to Croft any-
  way to see if IE had records on the Clarke’s itinerary. Now here’s 
  this guy with an IE contract, signed by Croft, and a liaison watch-
  ing over his shoulder?”
  “You’re not saying I should let these hired guns claim command 
  rights in exchange for the data, are you?”
  “Oh, hell no!” Tibor exclaimed, giving her his most indignant 
  scowl. “Actually, I think Croft’s plans—whatever they are—call for 
  lending us these guys as more than just military support.”
  
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  “So the mercs aren’t here to escort us, they are the liaison, eh?” 
  Lawrence asked.
  “That sounds possible,” Brooke said, mulling over the idea. “But 
  IE has played this one close to the vest from the moment they 
  hired us. This Hara and his boys may not even know all the details, 
  or they’re simply being misled into thinking they have some au-
  thority here. Neither of which is conducive to their actually getting 
  it.”
  “Yeah,” Lawrence grunted. “It could also be that the liaison is 
  hoping to weasel what we know and—if it’s enough—send Hara 
  and his warriors off to secure the objective or maybe even bump 
  us off.”
  Brooke shook her head. “That’s not really Croft’s style, but I won’t 
  exclude the possibility, either. It does bring us back to square one 
  here. Bottom line: I think we’re all agreed that we can’t just trust 
  these guys to take control, but keeping them around may help us 
  get some missing pieces to the puzzle worked out.”
  “Then I suppose we got us a new partner, ja?” 
  Brooke nodded. “The trick is getting them to do what we want in 
  such a way as to make them think it’s what they want.”
  “Well, my dear,” Tibor said with a grin, “I imagine that’s your 
  department.”
  Brooke sneered at him and shook her head again as she readied 
  herself for another transmission. “The things I do for this team,” 
  she grumbled.
  
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