Miami Pete 5:

Pete pulled a data chip from his pocket and pushed it into the the slot on the nav console. After a few minutes the screen on the nav console blinked to life with the image of a system. Looking at the console, I could see that the nav data that Pete had uploaded, while it wasn't very detailed, was indeed a match for the system. Where had he gotten that data chip?

Nav data chips in general are relatively easy to come by. Nearly every space port, station, fuel depot, or any other place one might dock or land a ship will have a nav merchant of some type. Sometimes in the form of an automated kiosk, sometimes an office with an actual person, where for a few creds anyone can purchase the nav data for the surrounding sector of space. Sometimes a nav merchant will have data from beyond the sector, usually gotten from people like me. Pete and I travel pretty far and wide on Hauley, going wherever a load will take us, and I've suped up our nav scanner suite to update our nav data using the sensors wherever we go. I'm sometimes able to package up that nav data for various out-of-the-way sectors and sell it to make a bit of pocket money. Pete doesn't seem to mind as long as it doesn't interfere with my duties. However, I hav no idea how Pete had gotten this particular nav data. Judging from the numbers on the screen we were WAY off the beaten path on this one. Like "Where no one has gone before" kind of off the beaten path. Only, someone had to have, since it takes being there to get the kind of data we have. You can't get accurate enough readings from a telescope to create nav data.

"If we had the nav data on a chip, why did you wait until we got here to load it?" I asked Pete.

"To keep you from selling it to the highest bidder you little pirate." Pete replied with a smile. He seemed to be in a much better mood than usual. That was odd, since Pete was usually one of the most morose people that I had ever known, and that's saying something because I grew up on Deltos where being morose was practically the favorite pass time in that gods forsaken place.  You might say that it's the "way of my people".   It was nice to see him smile for once though.

Looking at the nav display, I could see that we were positioned pretty deeply into the system, sitting near the only displayed hyper-jump point marked on the nav data.  The system's star was a hairy little thing, small-ish for a system star, but seemingly trying to make up for it by spitting out solar flares at an alarming rate.  I had never seen anything like it.  The name of the star was marked with a data tag rather than a name. This is pretty common for a star or star system that hadn't been claimed by anyone. Like one that had been cataloged by telescope, but hadn't been traveled to. That didn't make sense in this case since Pete had that nav data, scant though it was.  Stars usually only get nice friendly names when someone stakes a claim to them.

The planets in the system, of which there were six, were all named with the same data tag and a letter, which is pretty standard.  "-A" for the closest to the star, "-B" for the next and so on.  Oddly enough, the planet that would have gotten the "-C" had some squiggly lines instead.  After a few minutes, I realized where I had seen similar lines.

"You jumped us to a 'rus system!" I exclaimed.

I had seen 'rus writing here and there.  As far as I knew, no humans could read it, but the 'rus tended to mark the outsides of their black ships with nearly equally dark gray writing very similar to this.

"Very good kid. Only took you a few minutes to figure that one out" came Pete's reply. "I know you've been studying nav, so set us a course to the 'rus planet. That way!" He pointed. Which of course was silly because pointing is ridiculously imprecise.

I set the course as ordered, using the nav data not the finger point, and got us under way.  The nav system estimated a three day journey, so I informed Pete.  In the mean time, I fired up the sensor suite to get a little more information about our surroundings and our destination.  The -B and -D planets were both gas giants which we might be able to drop the siphon into to siphon off some reactor mass if we needed it, which we probably would. The other planets were bare rocky planets. None of the planets were in the Goldilocks zone; that narrow band where a planet is close enough to the system star to be warm enough to support life but not too close. You know, "just right" like in the old earth fairy tale.  Our destination was the closest to being habitable, orbiting the star just a little to closely to be considered to be in the zone. It didn't have an atmosphere that I could detect, but it did appear to have a weak magnetosphere that might have once been able to protect the planet from the solar radiation if the star was more settled. It wouldn't be enough with the current level of solar activity.