SS White Lady

With her ragged particle sails spread, the SS White Lady still drifts on, her nose cone blinking a sickly yellow warning. She broadcasts 'B' in Morse across the spectrum, a hissed warning of white noise. Dah dit dit dit. Bravo, the Earthside nautical code for 'dangerous cargo on board'. Hear it and your fate is sealed.
From 'Urban Legends of the Star Services' by Yars Loco.

'The Star Ship White Lady was a Clipper Class cargo sphere, on the tramp in the Blue Tetroid region, working between the nodal points.' Yars Loco flicked his remote and an animation came to life in the holostage. 'Designed by T'ase for the Deign Trading Company, she was the first of the Clipper Class and had all of the features that became standard in trading spheres.' He let the animation run, stripping away layers, showing the warehouse units, the hotel complexes, the market cubes, the life support systems and last, but not least, the propulsion units.

'It was T'ase and the Drogon Syndicate who developed the Collapse and Ping system to flick the Clippers through subspace wormholes.' Yars Loco thumbed another animation into action. The sphere folded into itself, drawing in the particle sails, doubling up the outer skin and rotating the phase shield generators into position. A Boson Drive opened its petal reflectors and began to shimmer into life. The phase shield went into the ultraviolet and the famous green donut of a wormhole entrance appeared. With an audible 'ping' the White Lady was flicked into the hole. The donut collapsed, gave a pulse of white light and closed.

'As we all know, the sphere pops out at the next destination, reverses the Collapse and opens for business.' The holostage went dark, then small pinpricks appeared in constellations. The Magellan cloud hung low, a large, speckled shape. A green donut formed. Then closed with its tell-tale flash. 'Except that on the eighth day of Madrigal, 450 S.D. she didn't.' The small audience shifted in their seats, the story was well known and they beginning to wonder why they were here. 'Lost in space.' Yars Loco put a slight echo in his voice projection. 'With her warehouses full of trade goods and the profits of a very successful venture into Zach mining.'

'Sentient Yars Loco,' the Leading Sentient of the Company whistled, 'come to the point. If there is one.'

'There are two points, Honored Leader.' Yars Loco wangled his arm politely. 'We have obtained the genuine cargo manifest for the SS White Lady and have found the data cache for her last wormhole flick.' There was a tightening of attention. 'There was a small glitch in the j-plane calculation. We can recreate it and pinpoint her within light years.' He felt, rather than heard, the slump in their interest. Just searching even a light year of distance for a lost vessel was impossible. But he had saved the tempter for last. 'The cargo manifest shows a shipment from Drogon IV.'

'Common knowledge.' The Leading Sentient crooned. He was bored.

'But it was not dissert pelts.' Yars Loco decided on a dramatic pause. 'That was a misdirection.' Now he had them again. 'The cargo had been loaded on Drogon IV,' another pause and he could hear their robes rustling, 'but it originated on Drogon X's moon.'

Silence.

'Ghaaan crystals?' Someone whispered. 'Is this certain?'

'Sentients. If you are willing to invest in this venture, you will have full access to the cargo manifests and proofs of their veracity. The ordinary cargo should achieve a yield of five billion, which would cover the expedition and salvage costs. At current market values the ghaaan crystals are well in excess of thirty billion. His teeth flashed in a piratical grin. 'Provided we release them piecemeal to keep the price high.'

'And what about the curse of the Bravo cargo?' That had to be Ventahedgrio, he came from the superstitious culture of the Wanderer Klan.

'Oh. That.' Yars Loco's grin would have been likened to a shark's, if he had been on Terra. 'I made it up. A mixture of the Flying Dutchman and the Marie Celeste, both legends of abandoned plague ships before the days of the Boson Drive.' His book had been a masterpiece of faction, enough truth to make the rest believable and selling well enough to fund research into his grand passion. The White Lady. The Clipper that his ancestor Yarsant Golo had been Cargo Master on. The same one who had left behind the legend of a Bravo cargo. And a locked, encrypted data cache that Yars Loco had spent a fortune on decrypting.

Five years later Yars Loco was on the bridge of the Blanche the hair on his arms standing on end as the phase shield built into full resonance. Captain Fallbright stood at ease behind Helm M'b, watching the Rutde Sentient at his station.

'Donut iris at maximum, Captain.'

'Engage Boson. Ping us through, Helm.'

There was that moment of being squeezed through more dimensions. An eternal instant of existence in wrongness that ended with a collapse into familiarity. Yars Loco hated it. But, like most Star Sailors, he was addicted to it. It left him as high as Aldebaran and as deep as a black hole. As the phase shield dropped, the external cameras came back on line and the bridge screens lit up with the outside view. Yars Loco let go a deep breath. It looked no different from any other between stars space. White, red, yellow stars of differing luminosity and sizes lay in random speckles in lightless void.

'Deploy sails.' Captain Fallbright was crisp. 'Search pattern Alpha, Helm.' He lowered himself into the Captain's chair. 'Sit reps all departments.' Yars Loco excused himself and went to his living suite. It was time to settle into cruising routine, the search would take some time and he wanted to continue his research into Yarsant Golo's data cache. There were still a few files which were being stubborn. He had a feeling that they would shorten the search considerably.

Life on board settled into routines. A theatre group had a go at Hamlet. They were better at The Importance of Being Ernest. Handbag jokes lingered for weeks. The Rudte Crooners drew in members that could listen without headaches. A shipwide Uckers contest was won by the Green Engineers. Feast Days left everyone bloated and Fast Days made the civilians crabby. Star charts were updated and new ones prepared. The presence of planets noted, some with life, some with possible sentients. Noted and tagged for surveillance and contact ships.

But no SS White Lady. No twitch of a boson trail. No blip on the scanners. No sight of a sickly yellow flash. The subspace beacon receiver only played white noise with the occasional click of a pulsar. The old fashioned radio was silent. Yars Loco grew a luxurious beard. Then shaved it off.

Insomnia had rarely been Yars Loco's friend. Planetside he would have had a stiff drink with, or without, a dose of medicant. Shipside he fired up his compact and did battle with the Minions of Makrahelion. He was slaughtered. Endless puzzle games gave him a headache. Opening Yarsant Golo's data cache, he stared at the arrangements of encrypted and decrypted files. Idly, he made arrangements of the keys, the file names, the passcodes. He was tired. His eyes slipped in and out of focus. His mind drifted back to his childhood.

An electric shock stiffened his vertebrae. Bolt upright, he moved files and notations into a new pattern. He stared at it. Words drifted out of the past. He muttered them. Not quite right. There was a rhythm, a rhyme to them. Shutting his eyes, he tried again. That was it! The music made the words fit. A low, melodious chord pried open his eyes. Page after page of text and images flowed across the screen. Double encrypted and compressed they were huge, showing no sign of a finish to the upload.

A hot brew later and the details of the last cargo manifest was challenging Yars Loco to suspend his disbelief. It could not be true.

Could it?

Was it even possible nowadays? Back in the day there had been things called viruses. An illness. It made your body malfunction. Sometimes fatally. These days they did not happen. A simple implant of de-virus genetic code and no-one ever need suffer again. The idea had been transferred to software, a computer virus made the machine malfunction. Sometimes fatally. De-virus implants had immunized everything.

But. What if. What if there was a virus that disabled all the de-virus implants? What if the slightest contact was enough to pass on the infection? What if it could not be destroyed? What if they managed to contain it in one place? What if they tried to quarantine it in a cargo ship until an anti virus could be found? What if they decided to open a wormhole and flick the ship out of normal routes? Then the virus got into the system and put a glitch into the navigation. And the few who knew the truth were fatally infected?

'Yars Loco. Report to the bridge, please.' The suppressed excitement in Captain Fallbright's voice froze him. Then he was pelting down corridors, scrambling up stairs, cannoning crew aside. He burst into the bridge in time to see a great grin splitting the Captain's face as his finger touched a control panel.

'NO!' Yars Loco screamed as the bridge filled with everything from the SS White Lady.

Shshh. Ssh. Ssh. Ssh.

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