Zony Tixia stood on the surface of Bayone Three and watched the overhead star pattern closely. Her oxygen monitor began to climb as the suit began to separate the atmosphere around her and distill the breathable elements.
She was at the base of a large complex of rocky foothills which stretched for miles to the north. She had guessed correctly about the source of the sulfur and other compounds in the pool. Water had apparently trickled down from the top of the ridge and gathered in a deep basin where a lack of sunlight had lowered the underground temperatures to below freezing. It was possible she had “landed” against the side of the ridge and simply slid down the rocks into the pool and sank into the mud. It sounded like fun, which made Zony a little sad she hadn’t been awake to enjoy it.
A vast plain decorated with the occasional short tree and shrub stretched to the southern horizon. Approximately 100 miles south of Zony’s location loomed a shadowy mountain range.
She knew her ship was in orbit and should be visible unaided from the ground. Unlike the old sport of satellite spotting she and her classmates practiced long into the night back at Skywatch Academy, where relatively tiny dots of light had to be picked out from the numerous stationary stars behind them, a Citadel-class strike battleship was rather obvious in orbit, day or night.
Still, the Argent signals officer wanted to be sure. So she activated her orbital rangefinding scanners and used them to drive the heads-up display inside her helmet. One by one her tac-suit’s systems picked out every moving object larger than a baseball in space over the planet, cataloged it, plotted its course and speed and added it to a trajectory schedule so it would be possible to arbitrarily predict its position in the future.
The same systems she used to analyze Bayone Three’s orbits instantly obtained a fix on DSS Argent as the enormous capital ship appeared over the southeastern horizon. It was traversing the night sky at an orbital velocity of just over 21000 MPH and was in exactly the same orbit Captain Hunter had first ordered when they arrived over the planet. Zony activated her subspace and local high-powered transceivers and ran a transmission/reception diagnostic against the sophisticated automatic communications systems aboard her battleship.
She had about thirty-five minutes before she would lose line-of-sight, so she had to work fast. She was satisfied all systems were operational, so she attempted to establish a datalink connection with the command computer using her suit’s universal interface. Zony knew if Argent hadn’t responded to her original hail, it was likely under radio silence, which meant it wouldn’t actively respond to her transmissions.
It also meant their original suspicion might be correct. There might very well be hostiles planetside.
Fortunately, establishing a datalink didn’t require Argent to transmit on an easily detectable voice channel. She could use a narrow-beam connection similar to the ones employed by Skywatch to communicate in a battlespace where an enemy might be able to intercept an omnidirectional broadcast. Hers would simply be from planet to orbit and back.
After analyzing the vessel’s course, Zony was able to configure her datalink LOS beam to automatically key on Argent’s main ventral antennas and to follow them across the sky so the connection wouldn’t be interrupted. Once she had a permanent datalink, she could go to work.
Standing on the surface of the planet, Zony silently keyed a distress signal and ordered the Argent command computer to notify the bridge. Then she accessed Skywatch spacelane traffic control and requested an upload of the last known location of Copernicus One to her tac-suit’s navigational array. She might not have been able to keep track of the engineering corvette from the ground, but STC kept a continuous track of every boat, fighter and gunship it launched from the moment it left the flight deck until it landed again. Using all the relevant transponder data, Zony quickly triangulated a four square mile zone to the north where the boat was likely to have gone down.
Tixia activated her handheld scanner and began following her heads-up display’s navigational overlay. The crash zone was on the opposite side of the rocky hills to the north, so she began making her way around the closest ridge on foot. Once she had line-of-sight on a wide enough horizon, the combination of her tac-suit’s systems, her handheld scanner and Argent’s look-down sensors would give her a reliable least-distance path to the crash site.