Junkers Moon: Lucy And The Quantum Gnarls

Junkers Moon

Lucy And The Quantum Gnarls

Copyright © 2018 Peter Salisbury

Smashwords Edition

No copying of this material is permitted by any means be it on a physical medium, electronically or in the form of transmitted data without the prior written consent of the author.

These stories are works of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person or place is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

Introduction

Junker's Moon Scrap, Salvage and Servicing Company had been owned by three generations of the Brion family. Originally the company was started by grandfather Silas Brion on the moon orbiting the planet Cymbeline, in an out-of-the-way system at the very furthest reaches of one of the more obscure space-lanes. Marshall Brion, current owner and sole proprietor, is proud to have inherited the business and is keen to carry on its traditions. The top three traditions Marshall followed often changed order, but the one which most often held first place was to always be on the look-out for trouble.

What does an unconscious former employee of the Junker's Moon Scrap, Salvage and Servicing Company have to do with a massive smoking metal artefact sitting in a field? Marshall Brion, owner of the company, must use all his wits, and his association with a partially reformed pirate captain, the notorious Inspector Vanessa Robin, in an attempt to save the whole colony from deadly danger.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Thing In The Valley

Chapter 2: Rescue

Chapter 3: Crew

Chapter 4: Excavations

Chapter 5: Facing the past

Chapter 6: A Really Useful Rabbit

Chapter 7: Flying Lessons

Chapter 8: Trouble With FBIS

Chapter 9: Charming To The Last

Chapter 10: Lucy's Curious Plan

The Junkers Moon Stories

Personnel in the Junkers Moon stories

Chapter 1: The Thing In The Valley

Lucy hadn't reported in for more than a week, and now the base couldn't raise any response from her at all. Marshall Brion, the owner of the Junker's Moon Scrap, Salvage and Maintenance Depot was astonished that for the latest emergency there was not a single ship at his disposal. His workshops were at full capacity with asteroid miners' ships being repaired and serviced. Normally Marshall considered that situation to be very good for business, but when all he wanted was a surface hopper, and even the Junkers Moon base ship was out of action he was not at all pleased. The hopper was lying, fins akimbo and engines in pieces, in the service bay, with another two days of work needed before it got a 'Fit To Fly' certificate. The fast and heavily armoured Medallion, a magnificent beast of a vessel, was fit and ready to fly. Marshall had commandeered it as spoils of capture from a viscious pirate who had used it to rob and terrorise peace-loving citizens up and down the space-lanes. It was now in a high orbit above Cymbeline, hidden from casual observers, but the fuel overheads of using it for a short planetside hop were absurd. In other words, all Marshall had available was a truck.

Lucy, one of Marshall's former employees, had set up in business with her new husband, Theo, producing exotic herbs and spices, which grew better in the soil of Cymbeline than any other planet yet found. Comparatively, the yields were enormous, and Theo's plan was to extend his growing areas to increase his income. A week before the alarm about Lucy and Theo's well-being was raised, he had surveyed the valley next to the one where he had already established a cleverly irrigated set of terraces. He had performed a sideways radar scan on the off-chance that he may find a reason that the herbs and spices grew so well there. He was interested in the steep upper slopes of the adjacent valley, which was crowned by an ancient, wind-swept tree whose branches were bent in obedience to the prevailing wind, and which provided an area of deep shade from the sun. While Theo's scanner whirred softly away he had fallen asleep in the shade of the tree. An hour or more later, a bleep alerted him to the fact that the computer's AI had found something of interest. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and blinked at the screen, which showed that the scan had stopped at a point where the valley had broadened out to form its lower slopes. What he saw was the outline of a structure in the ground that was being highlighted by the AI. Immediately jolted wide awake by the appearance of rectilinear shapes where there should have been none, he extended the scan to roll out along the valley and called Lucy to come and look. By the time Lucy had finished what she was doing in their little stone cottage, and climbed up to where Theo had set up his gear under the tree, more had been revealed. She squealed with excitement when she saw the outlines of buildings and old walls that had been sketched out by the automated pattern recognition system.

'This means there must have been people here long before it was discovered by Marshall's grandfather,' she said.

'OK, well don't rush off and tell him just yet. I am still interested in buying the land rights for the growing area at the head of the valley.'

So began the chain of events which led to Lucy missing her scheduled comms check-in with the Junker's Moon Scrap, Salvage and Maintenance Depot.

Debbi, Marshall's right hand girl, allowed a few hours to pass without hearing from Lucy before commenting. When she called again and got no response, she spoke to the boss.

'Marshall, Lucy always checks in with me so I know that they are OK right out there on their own, but I haven't heard from her at all this week.'

'Don't they have visitors staying at their hotel, or maybe they've gone off to visit Theo's family?'

'She would have told me. I think we should go over there.'

'OK, Debbi, you wouldn't be saying that if you hadn't already tried to raise them on the radio.'

'I'll call down to the workshop and get them to pull out a truck front for us.'

That was the moment Marshall got the bad news about the transport situation.

Theo and Lucy went back to their cottage next to the hotel in the valley where they had first settled. The scanner would take a long time to cover the whole valley.

All through the morning and well into the afternoon, alerts kept sounding as more structures were recognised by the system. At first Lucy and Theo ran to the screen each time to see what had been found, but after the sixth set of walls, they decided to wait until the scan was completed, so that they could assess the find properly.

Late in the afternoon a different alert sounded, this time it was for sensing a large body of metal. Theo immediately went to the screen, as any sort of metal or mineral deposits might provide a clue as to why the ground was so peculiarly fertile.

'Lucy, it looks like there was once a village here, maybe a couple of dozen houses, but what the AI has just identified is a huge metallic object. I think it's…'

Lucy was leaning over Theo's shoulder, staring at the image. 'That's a ship!' she shrieked.

Theo and Lucy didn't wait for the scan to complete, they sprinted over the ridge and ran down to the where the drone was hovering. They had grabbed shovels on the way and began digging at where the scan had shown a shallow covering of topsoil. They made two holes close to each other, shovelling the dirt into loose heaps. Four feet down, their shovels clanked on solid metal, and they started clearing the soil between the two holes to join them up into a larger one.

Theo ran back to the hotel and brought back some brushes. Lucy had extended the excavation to a thin layer over the metal surface. The object, or ship, was so large that the curve was barely noticeable. Lucy began sweeping while Theo carried on digging. He stopped when she had cleared an area of bare metal where they had first struck it with their shovels.

Curiously, there was no sign of where their shovels had made contact with the hull, for it was now obvious that it really was a ship of some sort. Theo dug at the surface with the tip of his shovel, and was rewarded with same dull clank that they had heard previously, but the spade's steel made not the slightest mark. The metal was of a colour neither Theo nor Lucy had seen before, and Lucy had seen a good few ships when she used to work as a technician in Marshall Brion's repair shop. She had certainly never seen one made of a metal that was completely resistant to the impact of a steel tool.

Theo took out a pocket knife and scraped at the metal, but the sharp blade had no effect whatever, it was almost as though the metal was protected by a layer of something which prevented anything actually contacting it.

Theo and Lucy were so excited that they had to keep stepping back to look at how much more they had uncovered, before going forward again to shift away more of the soil. Theo actually admitted that it was more exciting than watching his seedlings sprout. Lucy promptly collapsed into laughter, because she could think of any number of things which were more exciting than watching seedlings sprout.

By the time they had dug into the early evening, they were starting to stagger around from sheer tiredness. Where the sun's slanting light caught the ship they could see that there were shallow folds in the metal surface, and they had uncovered two places where the metal looked as if it had been damaged. Theo shook his head as he thought about that, because no further attempts by either Lucy or him to mark the surface had met with any success at all.

'What do you think, Lucy?' Theo had said. 'Weapons strikes?'

'I've seen where beam weapons have been used on a ship, several times. The metal melts until it boils off. If the hull is punctured, the pressure from inside blows the molten metal outwards but when that happens it looks nothing like this.'

Instead of the hull looking as if it had been struck by something from