Again.
It's not the first time, though the circumstances seemed a bit unusual. At least for her. When she's gone missing in the past, there was usually something very complex going on involving Reavers, AI's, or some kind of unmentionable research. This time, it seems she stacked her boat. While that would be the usual way for someone to go missing out here, it's not for her.
An Alliance patrol found parts of her boat, then one of our local folk found the rest of the wrecked hull. Cody himself brought me a chunk of log Lily had left behind for us to find, though whether she was consciously thinking "us" when she wrote it is something we'll have to find out later. When that would be? That would be the hard one.
We'd gotten a ghost on Navtrac. Someone had picked Lily up and spirited her away, and the signature was very familiar. A distant image, classified by an Alliance recon skiff, of a large boat spotted in the area confirmed the suspicion of just who, or, more correctly, what, had picked up Lily after the wreck.
Reavers.
Only, on some fundamental level, they weren't Reavers. We'd seen this boat before. A large converted transport with distinctive markings. It had been Lily's home at one point. It had also been Mindo's home during some of his experiments, and the crew of Reavers weren't. Not in the way we'd come to know them. More like . . . experiments gone wrong rather than victims of an experiment really gone wrong. We were never sure of the origin of any of them, of course. But there was a fair bit of evidence to this bunch, at least, being the results of Mindo's intentional manipulation rather than survivors of the Pax on Miranda. If "survivor" was really the right term to apply. Victim was probably more accurate.
Mindo's experiment coming back to haunt us wasn't a good thing. Mindo himself was dead, or at least "half way to Paradise Beach" as the saying went. That his legacy was still out there causing us problems wasn't a pleasant thought. If it was them, Lily was safe. More or less. She had some kind of special place with them and that group had never shown an inclination to do her harm in the past. Now? Unknown. But it seemed likely the pattern would hold.
Since they'd managed to get clear of any of the Navtrac hubs we could jack in to, we'd effectively lost track of them. I suspected they were either going to a new nest carved out of a rock somewhere, or rendezvousing with their tribe, or flotilla, or however they organized themselves, deep in the Black. In any case, there were some resources I could throw at the problem. It would be another good test of Saule Silencieuse's capabilities. While she was designed specifically for the ELINT role, her sensors were better than anything short of a dedicated recee boat. I'd hand the assignment to her Captain and let him worry about the details.
The only question now: why?
Child of Science
Answers the call of the past
Present close behind
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