Milk Run (Smuggler's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

registered, but nothing at all showed on the navigational log. As far as the log showed, it was empty space.
    She watched the log recording her system overrides and then the blink of the jump into the outgoing traffic lane. There were no sensor readings at all for the ships, the missile tracks, or the explosions. The logs held no record of missile locks or weapons fire. She watched the recording until all the systems returned to normal, then keyed the window closed.
    She leaned back in her seat and gazed out at the Deep Dark around them. The hot coffee grounded her and wafted moist air across her face as she held the cup in both hands in front of her chin. Her mind sorted through the various steps that brought them to knocking on Verkol Kondur’s door. She had an idea how the incident might have happened but it would have required somebody from outside the ship to compromise her systems.
    She leaned forward again and opened the ship’s system log instead of the navigation log. She scrolled back through the encounter time frame. She searched for the command that released the system overrides on the jump drive.
    Key not found.
    “That can’t be right,” she muttered.
    She reran the search to look for the command to restore the override and found it immediately. Scrolling back, she found no other system log entries after the main system power-up at Newmar Orbital until the entry showing the restored overrides. She scrolled back in the log. The time stamps showed big gaps in time between visits. Few of her visits lately had been more than routine maintenance. She’d been so busy with school and graduation there hadn’t been time to take the ship out for a spin. She kept scrolling looking for the last time she’d left the station.
    When she found it, the log looked normal. Nothing about the process stood out as odd. System power-up. Engines on standby. Station-ties released. She checked the navigation log entry for the time and saw her request for departure clearance and the subsequent granting of same. The next significant change to the system log came when she’d slaved her tablet to the engineering console displays. She nodded to herself. She’d been tuning the fuel mixture back in engineering and used her tablet to track the minute changes as she made the final adjustments.
    She popped the log back to the top, displaying the most current entries, and sat back in her couch. The system log showed nothing between initial power-up and the time she replaced the system overrides.
    She’d seen this kind of thing before, but only in training simulations—and the knowledge put a cold seed of doubt in her belly.
    A window bipped open on her pilot’s console. She sat down and keyed the acknowledgment.
    The message opened in a separate window to show a standard docking assignment, an approach protocol string, a frequency designator, and a single line of text. “Welcome to Dark Knight.”
    “At least I understand this,” Natalya said. She keyed the receipt and sat back in her couch.
    She transferred the docking protocol to her navigational computer and kicked it on. A countdown timer popped up and started ticking down. Fourteen stans before the automated course corrections. The annotations said they’d dock ten stans later, more or less.
    That gave her plenty of time to dig around in the innards of the ship’s systems to see if any simulator code still remained. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to convince her to run. She couldn’t help but wonder who and why. One thing she knew for sure. Her roommate—her friend —had a lot to answer for when she woke up.

Chapter 5
Dark Knight: 2363, May 26
    The navigation timer ticked down to zero and the ship’s system kicked into the next stage of the course. The plotter showed Natalya the estimated course along with some navigation notes on local traffic control. The ship rumbled as the kickers provided the tiniest bit of thrust to start slowing them. She eyed the readouts and