Publication History:

Published 19 August 2005 on the author's web site, RangerLord.Net, this work of fiction remains the intellectual property of the author. All rights reserved.  This is Chapter One of a work-in-progress.  Commentary, questions and constructive criticism are requested.  See the Comments section at the end of the chapter, or e-mail comments to RangerLord@rangerlord.net.  Thank you, and enjoy!

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"Poppa Bear, this is Ice Planet Zero. Come in, Poppa Bear."

Static crackled on the wireless in the Mark I Viper's cockpit. "Frak-head," thought the pilot, rolling the old fighter in an arc around the moonlet that circled near the outer limit of his patrol area.

"Ursula Station, Patrol One. Turetti, this is an official Colonial government channel. Stick to regulation wireless protocol." Patrol One's pilot keyed his microphone off, adding, "...and cut the felgercarb." He was annoyed by Turetti's lack of attention to regulations. Sure, the guy wasn't Navy, and neither was he anymore, with the Cylon War over some twenty years now. Add to that their posting out here on the frozen edge of nowhere, and he could understand from where the lack of discipline came. Still, that did not excuse it, and as long as he was Security Chief for Ursula Station he wasn't going to permit it.

Turetti's voice came back over the wireless, just a trace of annoyance threading through it. "Patrol One, Ursula Station. Twenty-hundred hours, sir. We have you at outer perimeter, making the turn around Gold Nugget." Turetti could actually be good, if you could keep him motivated.

"Ursula Station, Patrol One. Copy that. Turn completed, entering final leg of patrol. ETE your location twenty minutes."

"Acknowledged, Patrol One. The inmates can't wait to see you again. Ursula Station out."

Even when Turetti was toeing the line, he still found ways to test his limits. Patrol One's pilot ran his visual check again, then scanned the readouts from the fighter's magnetometer and WEDAR system. All clear. Not a tin can within sniffing distance of the prison. Of course, that had been the case for the last two decades. No human had seen a Cylon since the Armistice.

Out here, on the ass-end of the Colonies, Patrol One was known by his real name. Captain Ben Goldsmith, Colonial Navy, retired. He’d been a fighter pilot in the War. Turetti would have still been in middle school when it all ended. Ben worked out here because he loved to fly. When a war buddy had tipped him off to the job, he had pounced on the opportunity. The chance to fly on almost a daily basis was worth working in the remote location. Ben had lost a lot of his family during the War. Many of them had served, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Most of the rest had died when the Cylons destroyed Ephesus. There was no one close left for him to miss, or to miss him. He'd been out here nearly five years now.

Ben realized Turetti had called him ‘Poppa Bear’ again, and har-rumphed. Turetti's humor always had an angle to it. Poppa Bear was a reference to his age, as well a nod to his Navy callsign. He'd been called Kodiak, after the huge golden-brown bears of the Caprican north. The callsign was an homage as much to his height and build as it had been to his temperament. He hadn't used it since his discharge. When the prison station had procured the war surplus Viper for security patrols, Turetti had one of the trustees paint Ben’s name and his old callsign on the bird. They’d even gotten his kill total on it. He remembered the look on Turetti’s face when they’d presented their handiwork. He’d shrugged it off, but the kid really admired him, despite chafing at his disciplinarian ways.

Ben rolled the Viper over, taking a look at the moonlet that bore the name Gold Nugget. It was a captured asteroid, snagged by the gravity of the frozen planet at the edge of the Aerilon system. The War had pushed the Colonials out here to look for tylium, titanium and other minerals. This particular moonlet had been a bust, but it picked up its name from its high concentration of iron pyrite. The planet and two of its other moons, however, had supported full-scale mining activity during the War. After the Armistice, operations had almost ceased, and one of the played-out tylium facilities had become a super-maximum security prison. That was where he worked now, serving as Ursula Station’s Chief of External Security.

Now Colonial activity around Ursula was on the upswing again. With new technologies came a new hunger for rare minerals, and the Troy Mining Settlement had been established on Ursula’s largest moon just a few years past. Judging from its growth, the operation must be turning a profit despite the difficulty of mining the ice-shrouded moon. Something in the sediment on the bottom of the frozen oceans of Troy was in high demand on the homeworlds. Ben couldn’t recall what, and didn’t care. The rise of the Troy settlement had resulted in a request from the planetary government of Aerilon that CSF add a leg to the Ursula Station patrol. That had set just fine with Ben, it meant more time in the cockpit.

One thing that didn’t set so well with him, though, was having to share his bird. He couldn’t fly patrols around the clock, though, and that meant the old Viper had to be shared. As the highest ranking Colonial Security Forces officer on Ursula station, save of course for the Warden, he could have ordered the other pilots to fly the old Panther. Mothballed in the far end of the prison station’s hangar, with its flight computer removed to deter inmates’ thoughts of escape, the Panther had been the prison’s patrol craft until Ben had used his connections to obtain the reconditioned Viper. Panthers had once been the Colonial Navy’s premier fighter. Ben had flown one in the Cylon War, in his first assignment after earning his wings. He’d scored his first kill with it. That was a long time ago. Now, Ben considered the Mark I Viper he flew to be miserably out of date. The Panther was little more than a candidate for the Air and Space Museum at Delphi, Caprica. For reasons of safety and effectiveness, at the minimum, he could not require the other guys to fly the ancient bird. Perhaps he should contact the Museum; the Panther deserved more than to rot away in the same facility as the Colonies’ worst criminals.

If he had to share the Viper, though, at least it was his name painted below the canopy. Whatever Turetti’s true motive, the act of tagging the Viper with his name and callsign had secretly pleased Ben. It tended to annoy the CSF pilots that rotated through Ursula Station. They typically had chips on their shoulders to start, because so many people viewed them as lesser pilots since they weren’t Navy. Currently, Ben was putting up with a CSF Lieutenant, a jay-gee named Enright. His callsign was Rapidfire, and he’d probably earned it for his mouth. Unless he’d been dubbed such by the female pilots.

There were two others on the station who flew patrols, Vargas and McDiarmid. Vargas was a CSF full Lieutenant, on assignment to the prison currently. She also served as the Quartermaster for their small CSF detachment. Rumor had it that she’d stepped on the wrong toes back home and had been reassigned to the Rock for her misdeeds. Ben didn’t pay much heed to rumors; Vargas was a damn good pilot and she’d stayed off his toes so far. McDiarmid was a prison guard. He had been a Colonial Navy pilot during the last days of the war, flying heavies and an occasional recon ship. He’d done ‘ten and out’, and then entered Public Service as a guard. Word was that he was working toward a position with the Aerilon Federal Police. When he’d arrived here six months ago, Ben had seen his service record and immediately tapped him to fly patrols. That meant swearing him in as a Warrant Officer in the CSF to qualify him to fly the fully-armed Viper. It gave him an up on the other guards, who were all civilian CSF employees, and extra ‘street cred’ with the inmates.

Ben was now five minutes out from Ursula Station, and the planet filled his forward canopy window. Turetti was right to call the place Ice Planet Zero. Ursula was the outermost planet of the Aerilon system, a frozen ball of ice wrapped around a rocky core. Not water ice, either, but a soup of odd chemicals that only held solid form in this deep-freeze where the sun was little more than a brilliant star. The zero fit them, too. The Colonial government barely gave them a thought, unless they had a lifer that had been sentenced to the supermax. For even the CSF, they were barely a ghost on the scope. The prison detachment was small, and was a dead-end assignment for most. A few, like McDiarmid, would be able to use it as a rung up the ladder. For others, like Ben, it was a last posting before retirement. The Warden, he suspected, viewed it as a quiet assignment where he could rack up service years to bolster his pension. Ben was doing that, too, but it was the flying that brought him out here, and it was why he stayed.

He rolled the Viper over and did another visual scan. Nothin’ but the rain, he thought. He checked the magnetometer, and then the WEDAR. As he did, it chirped for his attention. His eyes searched the scope as it scanned for wireless emissions, but there was nothing now. It had detected something for just an instant, but before he’d seen it, it had disappeared. Ben hit the recall button to pull up the last contact. There, on the cusp of the planet, was the bogey. It could be just space junk, but space junk didn’t typically emit wireless signals and was therefore invisible to the WEDAR in passive mode. He adjusted the Viper’s course to go investigate. If it really was a bogey, it was using the planet to screen itself from him - an indication of intelligence. Accelerating the Viper, he began his pursuit.

"Ursula Station, Patrol One. Advise I have unidentified WEDAR contact and am changing course to investigate. Designate contact Ghost One." He scanned his scopes again. The bogey had been too far out to be seen with the human eye. There was nothing on the magnetometer near the previous contact except the structures at Site 241, an abandoned mine. Passive WEDAR was clear as well. His ghost had not returned.

Turetti answered his wireless transmission, "Ghost One? Ben, there ain’t nothin’ out there, so don’t go off on some joyride."

"Ursula Station, Patrol One." Ben’s voice clearly contained barely-controlled anger. "Ensign Turetti, you will follow correct wireless protocol. I am investigating an intermittent contact, designate Ghost One. Check the station’s scanners and report."

"Patrol One, Ursula Station, acknowledged. Checking now." This was not the time for Turetti to get stupid with him. They had a possible intruder and Ben needed him to be all business. After a couple seconds of silence, Turetti came back on the wireless. "Sir, no contacts. Scopes are clean."

Ben was now closing on the location of his prior contact. His scopes were clean, too. There was nothing here but the abandoned mine. He switched the WEDAR system to active mode, and it began sending out a stream of wireless ping signals. If there was something hiding out here, it had already seen him - he might as well see it too. Other than the signal bouncing back from Site 241, though, active WEDAR showed nothing. Whatever it had been, it didn’t look like Ben was going to find it. Switching back to passive mode, he nosed the Viper around toward Ursula Station. This was one secret the frozen world was going to keep. "Ursula Station, Patrol One. No further contacts. I’m coming home."

Minutes later, Ben was nearing Ursula station. Turetti called him on the wireless, letting him know that the hangar was open, its artificial gravity disabled for his landing. Ben turned on a lateral approach vector, flying parallel to the planet’s surface two klicks above the orbit of the station. At a point directly above the station, he rolled the Viper toward the station below to make his final approach.

Technical description: The following four paragraphs are a technical description of Ursula Station. While the station’s structure is important to the plot of this story, non-techie readers may want to just skim this material. J

Although Ursula Station appeared unremarkable to the casual observer, it was actually an engineering achievement unique in the Colonies. A basic understanding of the station’s mechanics was part of the briefing for any CSF personnel assigned here. Originally built as a tylium mine, the station consisted of two major parts. There was nothing particularly unusual about the mine itself, which stood on the frozen surface of the planet below. In synchronous orbit above the mine was the cargo transfer facility, and what made the station unique was the immense cable - over a hundred klicks in length - that tethered it to the mine below. The system was called a truncated skyhook, and until the war it had been only theoretical. At its particular orbital altitude, the transfer facility’s tendency to fly outward to a higher orbit was cancelled by the mass of the cable suspended below, thus making its orbit stable. The strain on the cable anchor was limited to a small tensioning force created by ballasting mass held in the transfer facility, plus a variable amount caused by any cargo that was being transferred.

The cable tether was constructed of a high-tensile material that had been experimental at the time. A system of electromagnets ringed its surface at intervals, up its entire length, and it was these electromagnets that drove the cargo transfer elevator. During its operation as a tylium mine, Ursula station had transferred tylium from the surface to the orbital station using the tether/elevator system. Although it was very economical in operation, its creation had been enormously expensive. That was the primary reason, aside from the war itself, that the construction had never been repeated.

On the surface below, the mine was now largely abandoned. The housing section, which once held nearly a thousand miners, had been sealed off from the rest of the facility and converted into the super-maximum security prison. The orbital facility had become the station’s command center, isolated from nearly any danger that the inmates might present. Where once the cable car had operated near-constantly, bringing tylium up to the transfer facility for the War against the Cylons, it now remained docked at the top of the cable, used only for supply deliveries and the rare arrival of another lifer.

At the top of the tether, the cargo transfer facility consisted of a core which contained the tether’s upper anchor point, the tensioning ballast, and a landing bay for small craft such as personnel shuttles. Around the core was wrapped a cylinder which contained the operations, communications and living spaces of the facility. In a move to conserve energy, common for facilities built during the war, the cylinder rotated around the core to create artificial gravity. A spider web of docking gantries, conveyers, and piping formed a non-rotating collar around the lower end of the operations cylinder. To Ben, the station had always looked like a food can, minus the label, on the end of a string. He had played with just such a homemade toy as a child, communicating secretly with his cousins as they had played in his uncle’s house.

J End of Technical description.

Now, Ben aimed the Mark I at the open end of the can. Landings here were manual, without even an LSO, but there was plenty of room to put down a Viper since the bay was designed to handle the much bigger Colonial shuttles. The only problem some pilots had was fixating on the outer section of the station as it rotated around the landing bay. This caused some of them to ‘chase the lights’, rolling their craft in response to the spin. So far no one had frakked up a landing, but the radio officers had made a few call-offs. Ben had no problems, though, and brought his bird home safely today, like every time. Once inside the bay, he brought the fighter down onto the deck with maneuvering thrusters and engaged the front skid with the transfer grapple. He signaled Turetti, and within moments the grapple drew the fighter into its hangar and Turetti had gravity engaged and started the hangar pressurizing. Ben wanted to get up to Operations and review the stations instrument logs, and then check the duty roster to see who was out on the next patrol.

J End of Chapter One  J