Board Thread:Archive/@comment-24866242-20140529211830

Story: The Colorado Donovan posted June 14, 1998 05:02 PM

"Hey, Ben?"

Ben glanced up from the book he was reading in one of his rare moments away from work. "Yeah, Chief, what's up?"

"Where are you, boss? I've been looking all over for you. The computer says your location is privacy locked and will only tell me you're on deck four."

He glanced around at his surroundings. "I'm… er… I'm in the littlest room on the ship and there's a sink here. I don't think you want to know any more than that."

There was a pause on the other end of the line while Chaz Billith processed that information. "Oh," came the reply. "I just thought you'd wanna know, we're done."

"Done?" Ben frowned. They couldn't be done, Chaz's schedule called for another three weeks of hull modifications. "Am I hearing you right, chief? Is the Colorado ready to leave space dock?"

"I know it sounds crazy, but after I finished the last three week series of hull mods yesterday, I started running a computer hull analysis and set it to go overnight. This morning the results said that the current structure is completely stable at speeds up to warp nine point nine three. I reran the simulations three times to be sure. The computer says that another three weeks to do the last set of modifications would be a waste of time. We'd only gain another two hundredths of a warp factor. I think we should take her out on a shake down cruise."

Ben grinned. "Chaz, this is fantastic! Call everyone to the bridge. I've got the perfect idea for the cruise and we'll turn a profit at the same time."

Donovan posted June 15, 1998 12:10 AM

The bridge was filling up but it was quiet. Chico had been the first to the bridge after Chaz had sent the page through intraship. Staff meeting, everybody get to the bridge. What was that? Staff meeting? Never heard of one on the Colorado before. There were the morning progress reports everyone had gotten used to, but that was routine by now.

Well if anyone was going to complain, it wasn't going to be Chico Alvarez. The Bridge was where he wanted to be, not down on deck seven in a Jefferies tube working on the replicators. Chico was a pilot now. He and Jeff had logged more than four hundred hours in the simulator since they had begun work on the ship six months ago. The computer was rating him as a level three pilot. A high level three. If he kept getting better he'd be a four before long. Ben was only a five. That was Chico's goal. Level five and above. It wasn't hard for him to learn either. After twelve hours of repair work every day, three hours putting a toy ship through it's paces in the holodeck was a fun way to relax.

"Chico."

Alvarez turned in his seat at the helm console to see Eli O'Donovan leaning close. "Hey, old man," Chico said in his Spaniard accent. "What is on your mind?"

"You know what this is about?" Eli asked in a hushed voice.

"Well, just between you, me, and the chair I'm sitting on? After the morning progress report, before I went down to deck seven, Chaz said he was going to be working on some computer simulations he did last night. I think there was something there he didn't expect. My guess is we've got another seven extra weeks of work instead of just three, or we're leaving dry dock tomorrow. I'm hoping for tomorrow."

"It's going to be an extra seven weeks, you know it is," Jeff said, sitting down at the navigator's station next to Chico.

"You're such a pessimist," Chico chided. "Learn to expect the best out of life."

"Expect the worst and you'll never be let down is my motto."

Eli had wandered back to his security station while Chico and Jeff were talking so when Chico turned to say something about Jeff's pessimistic attitude he was surprised to find the security chief on the far side of the room, whispering in hushed tones with Francine. He shrugged and turned back to Jeff, determined to prove once and for all that the cup was half full but Ben and Chaz chose that moment to step off of the turbolift, putting the entire crew of the Colorado on her bridge.

"Okay, everybody, big news," Ben said straight away. "I know interupting the work on this ship is highly irregular, so let's get to it. We leave dock tomorrow."

Chico shot a triumphant glance at Jeff but the look of glee on the other man's face took all of the gloat out off the Spaniard. Maybe expecting the worst really did work after all.

"Chaz," Ben said. "Take it away."

Chaz showed his computer models to the rest of the crew and explained why he thought the final hull modifications were going to be unnecessary but Chico didn't really pay much attention to all of the technical explanation. All he cared about was that tomorrow morning he was going to be piloting this baby out of space dock for the very first time. For real! This wasn't going to be just another holodeck simulation. He and Jeff would plot a course for their shakedown cruise tonight!

Chaz finished up his presentation after only a few minutes and Chico turned around to address Ben in the Captain's chair. "So where are we going for our first flight around the block? Can Jeff and I plot a course?"

Ben must have read the enthusiasm in his voice because the other man grinned. "You can plot the course if you want to but I'll supply the destination if you don't mind. I've got a place in mind. We need to buy supplies and we're short on cash but I think I've struck on the perfect solution.

[Note: This message was edited by Ben Stinel]

Ben Stinel posted June 21, 1998 01:20 AM

Back about two hundred years ago, before the fourth civil war, there was a time when New Oregon wasn't a world filled with xenophobes. Space travel had just been reinvented and for the first time since the destruction of the original colony ship, New Oregon men were stepping foot into space. The mood was expansion and everyone was eager to spread the reach of the King to the surrounding star systems. Brave explorers, working with the information salvaged from the original colony survey reports, began searching the outlying star systems for planets that were ready to land new colonies on. At the very least, they were looking for planets that could be terraformed.

These explorers found what they were looking for. New Oregon was in the middle of a dense cluster of stars, nearly all of which had planets ripe for colonization. The few that didn't could be made ready in less than fifty years. The best part was that New Oregon was alone in this cluster. There was no one to compete with for these planets' resources.

Men made their names for ten years searching out these planets while at home workers began building the ships that would bring the colonists to their new homes. One such man was Philip Scott.

Scott found over twenty-three inhabitable worlds in his nine years as a planet hunter. Only two other men ever topped that number. Seven of Scott's planets were scheduled to be colonized in the twenty years to follow, but they never were.

Ten years after this legendary hunt began, the King behind it died without an heir. His closest living relative was a second cousin in a different house. The leader of the old King's house was not about to let the monarchy pass to a different name, however, and war ensued. And it was a long and bloody war by the standards of most New Oregon succession wars. It lasted nearly fifteen years and the planet was left scared by weapons unlike any of those available when the last war had left it's mark a hundred and fifty years before.

By the time it was over, there were so many problems at home to fix that no one even considered setting down roots elsewhere. There were three perfectly habitable worlds right there in their own star system and fourteen acceptable moons. Why move?

The fourth succession war wasn't what created the New Oregonian's xenophobia, but we'll get into that another time. What is important is that it put an end to any desire to leave the confines of their star system. That is why the Planet Hunters faded away, forgotten by a society that no longer had any interest in what they had to offer. Most of them found other professions, some had saved enough on their salaries to retire in modest comfort for the rest of their days. Some even joined the terraforming teams that were setting up on the other planets in the system. Scott had a different option.

Scott retired after the Fourth Civil War. But he retired with a full bank account and an estate bigger than many nobles had. Scott never said just how he came by his fortune, but there were many theories about it. Most of the logical ones were the furthest from the truth. They said that he must have inherited it from some rich uncle or that perhaps he'd made some smart investments during the war and had managed to hide a small fortune which after fourteen years of war was suddenly worth a great deal more. Some thought that he had invented something and sold the patent and still others thought he had made his fortune gambling in Fortuna City.

Each guess was more ridiculous than the last and no one ever came close to the truth. The truth was, after all, the most farfetched of all. Scott had found more than plants and rocks on one of the planets he had found for New Oregon's expansion program but he'd never reported it. Out of every planet ever searched by any of the planet hunters, there was no sign of intelligent life. No sign that anyone with any level of technology at all had ever even been close to any of the planets. Except for one...

No one but Scott suspected this until two hundred years later when once again New Oregon men had dared to step foot outside of their own star system, however tentatively that step may have been taken or whatever dire need had provoked it. Indeed, at the time Scott's secret was revealed only one New Oregon man was any distance from the outermost world of his home system, and that man was curious about something.

Ben Stinel first started investigating the historical records of the Planet Hunters and New Oregon's brief expansionistic period because The Naylor Consortium, which Ben was surveilling, seemed to be doing something around the area of the old Planet Hunter's exploits. When he couldn't find anything about the planets themselves that could explain the activity, he turned to the Planet Hunters themselves. That was how he found out about Captain Scott's secret fortune and that was what made him curious. Scott had finally been nailed for Tax Evasion when he was eighty-two years old and he died a few years later, but he never told the authorities where the money had come from. Since Ben had learned the whole sordid story while searching through the histories of the Planet Hunters, he went back there when he started looking for his answer. Scott had filed twenty-three reports in nine years, one for each planet he found. Not all of the Planet Hunters worked alone, some had small crews of two or three, but Scott never had a crewmate his entire nine years, so Scott's reports were it. That narrowed it down somewhat.

Having the computer analyze all of the computer documents Scott filed for hidden data streams did the trick. In his last report. A message written by Scott himself was blended into the other files in his report. Not wanting to offset the file sizes too much and arouse suspicions about hidden data, he had kept it to text only.

It went a little like this:

Well, if you're reading this message, you've gone to a lot of trouble to do it, so you probably suspect anyway. Let me just come out with it. Sometime over the last nine years I found something on one of my planets. Something no one else has found on any of the other planets in this cluster; a dead society. They were primitive but wealthy beyond most people's dreams. My preliminary scans showed strange evidence of buildings on the surface. Mostly stone castles and such. Like those that were still standing on Earth in the British Isles before our ancestors left. Anything else must have simply rotted away. Secondary scans showed strange chambers dug out under the top soil all across the formerly inhabited continent. And that these pits had been carefully hidden from any means of detection that these people might have possessed.

This fascinated me, so after I had finished my orbital data collection and was ready to start working on the surface, I chose a landing spot near one of these underground caches. And a cache it was! I found gold, silver, diamonds, rich jewelry and ornaments like nothing I had ever seen before. The makers were probably humans, or at least aliens with very similar tastes. Whoever they were, they were gone when I got there. Maybe they died out or got sick, but they left their heritage behind wherever they went. I took two sacks from my ship and filled them with the choicest objects from the cache I had broken into and carefully omitted any trace of the lost people from the scans I included with my report. I expect that that will be enough to keep me living in luxury for the rest of my days.

Just in case it isn't enough.... I'm not going to make it easy for you, whoever you are, to find this place. After all, you might be reading this with me still alive and if someone finds out about my deception I might get in trouble. The reports themselves won't be any help to you, I made certain of that. You'll just have to check every planet yourself. I'll tell you this though. It's one of the planets that I recommended as unsuitable for immediate colonization. You'll know why when you find it. If I told you now you might be able to narrow down the list. You already know it's down to ten planets.... Happy Hunting!

Ben Stinel posted July 27, 1998 09:32 PM

"Computer, freeze program."

"Damn, not again."

Ben emerged from the shadows at the back of the bridge and circled around to stand in front of Jeff and Chico where they sat at the helm to look down on them disapprovingly. He had a padd tucked under his arm and he pulled it out and glanced at it before clasping it in both hands and letting it hang in front of him.

"Don't tell us," Jeff groaned, leaning back in his chair, "we're dead, aren't we."

"For the third time," Chico moaned, letting his head hang down until his hair brushed against the holographic console.

Ben frowned and turned to walk towards the view screen before turning around to face them again. "I'm just beginning to realize," he started, looking at Jeff, "that all of your training so far has been in interstellar navigation. And all of your training," he said to Chico, "has been in pretty basic overall piloting. You two have no idea how to work together, but even worse, neither of you has any idea how to make your way through a solar system."

"It's hard, Capitano," Chico protested. "No mater how close I follow the course I keep getting pulled off."

"You had too much speed in that last run," Ben told him, "That's why you got pulled off course when you were trying to achieve orbit and that's why you crashed into that planet."

"Yeah, taco brain," Jeff jibed.

"Plus you had a really bad course to follow," Ben continued.

The smirk dropped from Jeff's face.

"Quién ahora es el cerebro del taco, usted mujer cubierta pelo?" Chico laughed.

Jeff did his best to ignore Chico since Jeff didn't know a drop of Spanish. "So what did we do wrong, boss?"

"You plotted a course through four different gravity wells. A trained pilot would have been able to make his way through it but it's a complicated course for a training run."

"But we did the run exactly like the standard orbit simulation!" Chico insisted.

"That simulation was with a rouge planet. No star, no moons, no other planets to throw you off," Ben said as he tapped some controls on the padd. Behind him on the main viewer the frozen view of some unnamed planet rushing up to meet them dissolved into a schematic of the unnamed star system the planet called home. "You have to remember, on your approach to making orbit around the planet you're already negotiating an orbit around the star. You speed up in that and your orbit will widen. That's what happened here. You were trying to start your orbit along the inside and you came in too fast. Your orbit widened and sent you careening right into the planet's gravity well. On top of that the planet has two moons the size of Mars."

"We're never gonna get this," Chico hung his head.

"Don't worry about it, Chico. After a while you'll develop an instinct for it. And as Jeff gets better at navigation his courses will get easier to follow. You two are a team now. In the New Oregon Navy Pilot/Navigator teams stay together all the way through the academy and on until they get promoted past that stage. I've known teams that went on to become captain and first officer together. When you work with someone that long you learn how to anticipate each other."

The sound of the holodeck doors opening behind him made Ben turn around. Where the view screen had been there was a large opening into a hallway. Eli O'Donovan stood there, silhouetted against the brighter light in the hall.

O'Donovan never spoke much so what he did say was usually short and too the point. Now was no exception. "We're here."

The three of them followed the burly security officer off the illusory bridge and into the hallway outside. The Colorado wasn't a big ship, but for a crew of less than ten it was downright huge. The holodeck was on deck six. Everything was on deck six. Well, most everything. Sickbay, the holodeck, the main shuttle bay, the galley, sensor control... The only two vital parts of the ship that didn't intersect on deck six were the bridge and engineering. But then again, auxiliary control was on deck six and almost anything you could ever want to do from either the bridge or engineering could be done there. So it made sense that the tiny crew of the Colorado had set up housekeeping on deck six right along the forward edge of the ship. Sure it was six floors up to get to work every morning, but Chaz had already converted most of the other decks to cargo areas anyway. There was no turning back now.

"So," Jeff chirped, walking alongside O'Donovan. Ben noted with amusement that Chico took the other side. They were double-teaming him as usual. "What's the word? This system is as desolate as the last four, isn't it."

O'Donovan made a noncommittal grunting noise, neither affirming nor denying the navigator's cynicism.

Chico grinned, "Don' you believe that for a second, Jeffy. We're gonna strike it rich here, I ken feel it in my bones. Tell him, Eli."

Between the two of them, Ben was surprised that they hadn't driven the poor man insane already. Not that Eli O'Donovan was that sane to begin with.

They reached a junction point in the hallway and turned to board the turbolift to the bridge. Chico and Jeff seemed to have lost interest in trying to provoke a response out of Eli so Ben decided to try it. "So what does it look like?"

Eli unclipped a data padd from his belt and handed to Ben without saying a word. Ben glanced over the contents and nodded. The doors to the lift slid apart, freeing them to move to their posts. Ben cut Chico off as he was about to slide into his chair at the helm.

"I'll do the flying today, Chico," he said. "You can have her back once we're back in more familiar waters."

"Can I at least watch?" Chico asked glumly.

"Knock yourself out," Ben told him as he slid into the chair. "What's our status?"

Jarrid Pallin was at the tactical console on the right side of the bridge and he had been the only one there until the four of them arrived. "Nothing special, but the third planet has a strange sensor readout. It wasn't on Scott's survey report for this system. It's the first time anything hasn't matched up with his damn near perfect records so I think it's at least worth checking out."

"That's what we're here for, isn't it?" Jeff grumbled at the navigation console. More from not getting to plot the ship's course than from boredom with the mission. After all, if Chico wasn't flying, he was useless too. Ben didn't need his help.

Ben shot a sympathetic glance in his direction. He knew the feeling. Just the same, letting Jeff and Chico fly the Colorado through an actual star system would be suicide, and Ben didn't want to die before finding out if Philip Scott was telling the truth or if this was all some two hundred year old practical joke.

"I'm plotting a course for the third planet. ETA at standard orbit, four minutes."

Eli Pryde posted August 07, 1998 09:52 PM

Eli ducks out of the bridge, nodding to the others as he does so, though the nod really has no meaning whatsoever, just a form of propriety. He simply needs to escape the cute bridge banter the others insist is normal. Normal... He snorts, from time to time he indulges them, but not this time, he has too much to think about.

He takes the lift down to Francine's quarters, stopping outside the door and pressing on the chime.

"Come in," he hears her call out from behind the doors.

They slide open and Francine rises from whatever she was doing and moves over to the door looking at O'Donovan questioningly.

"It's time." he says.

Comprehension glows in her eyes, "The planet?"

Eli nods, and she follows him out into the hallway. The two of them walk toward the lift with their heads together, whispering quietly...

A few minutes later they step out of the lift back onto the bridge, moving to opposite sides. Francine moves over to the station on the right, inventory, and Eli takes his place at the security station. Jarrid glances up at Eli giving him a questioning look. The big man stares back blankly and Jarrid returns his attention to the screen. The planet appears huge and lush on the view-screen, drifting to the right as Ben moves them into orbit, "Let's see what's down there, Jarrid."

"Certainly Ben." Jarrid says, punching the commands into the computer. "It's hot at 85 degrees global average, this tropical planet paradise boasts such features as: a breathable atmosphere, four continents covered in jungle, various forms of plant and animal life forms, and the remnants of a dead society." He glances up at Ben, grinning, "Not quite what Scott's reports said, and our sensors didn't lie, I think we've found our buried treasure. There's also some sort of field around the planet, its natural, but I doubt we'll be able to get through it with our transporters."

Ben nods, "That's alright, we'll take the McKenzie. Jarrid, Chico and Eli you three come with me. Francine, Jeff, you two scan the planet and see if you can find the richest sites." He opens a commline to Engineering, "Chaz, there's some kind of field stopping us from using transporters, can you take care of it?"

There's a pause at the other end before Chaz comes back, "I'll see what I can do, are you gonna take the runabout?"

"Yeah, there's no rush, just see what you can do."

"Understood."

Ben glances at the three coming with him, "Let's go boys."

The four of them get into the turbolift, the others squeezing to one side as Eli ducks his muscled mass through the doors. They ride silently down to the bay where the McKenzie waits, and when the doors open they all head for the big runabout, making no equipment stops, for they all carry their own weapons and have sensor equipment built into their handheld comms.

Ben opens the airlock doors of the ship and they all step inside, the doors closing behind them, Ben and Chico take their positions in the pilot chairs and Eli and Jarrid sit behind them at the other two positions in the cockpit. Ben powers the ship up and enters the code to open the bay doors, they creep slowly apart revealing the darkness of space on their left and the looming green of the planet at their right. Ben pilots the runabout through the bay doors and over the engineering section. As they begin their descent to the planet's surface, Francine chimes in over the comm, "There's a likely site on the western coast of the third continent, I'm sending the coordinates."

"Right." Ben answers. The planet's surface speeds by beneath them as Ben pilots them to the cache coordinates, soon, the blur of terrain slows, "We're close, I'm looking for a place to land," Ben says. A clearing presents itself in the midst of the jungle. And they land.

Donovan posted August 24, 1998 12:52 AM

“That’s the last of it,” Ben said as he tossed the last pack out of the runabout.

Eli and Chico were double checking all of their equipment as Ben unloaded it and Jarrid was about fifty feet into the jungle scanning with his tricorder.

Ben jumped down the ladder from the hatchway and hoisted his own pack. “We’d better get going,” he announced. “Jarrid!”

Eli and Chico both had their packs on when Jarrid emerged from the underbrush. “We’re two days walk from the nearest cache. It’s only eleven miles but we won’t make very good time in this…” he gestured at the surrounding jungle to help make his point.

“This is the closest landing point to this cache,” Ben said with a shrug. “There was a kind of temple with a flat roof only two miles from it but I don’t think it would support the weight of the runabout.”

“Hey, we could burn a path with the phasers on the runabout. Or maybe just burn out a clear place to land?” Chico suggested.

“That wouldn’t work.” Jarrid said. His voice had a flair of certainty that Chico must have missed.

“Why not?”

Whatever answer Chico might have been expecting it wasn’t the one he got. Jarrid pulled his phaser out of his pack and fired point blank into the Spaniard’s chest.

Ben’s jaw dropped, the muscles holding in place forgotten as his brain tried to cope with what his eyes were telling it.

Eli on the other hand, unhindered by any preconceived notions of what his associates should or should not be doing next jumped into action. In the world where he came from anyone might turn on anyone else at any moment. His plan was to stop Jarrid before the other man decided to turn that phaser on him next.

Jarrid was on the ground with Eli’s knee over his throat and his phaser arm pinned down next to his head before he knew what had hit him. Eli pried the phaser from Jarrid’s hand and glanced at it before showing the power setting to Ben.

Full power. Enough to vaporize a man in two tenths of a second.

“Jarrid, what the hell are you doing?!?!”

“Urrghhhrrglll…” Jarrid gurgled and cast a poignant look down at Eli’s knee which was still weighing heavily on his neck.

Eli eased up enough to allow Jarrid the luxury of a breath of air. Jarrid used that to say, “Look.”

Ben turned to follow Jarrid’s eyes to where Chico was standing, looking like he’d just stared the devil in the eyes and spit in his face but been allowed to walk away unscathed. Nevertheless, he was enthusiastically checking himself for holes.

“Chico, are you hurt? Did he miss you?” Ben asked.

“No and no, capitano. He hit me dead center but I don’ have even a phaser burn to show for it. Kind of tickled but it didn’t phase me.” Chico laughed in the face of danger and his own joke, especially since it was such a bad one. Then he abruptly sat down on the bottom step to the hatch of the runabout. “Was that phaser really on maximum?”

“Eli, let him up. I think I see what he was doing.” Ben said.

The burly security officer begrudgingly let up his strangle hold on the tactician. Jarrid sat up and began coughing violently.

“My fault,” he said when he could get a few words in between coughs. “That’ll teach me to try and be dramatic. The same field that’s blocking our transporters is screwing up our phasers. We might as well leave them here with the ship. That’s an extra half pound that we don’t need to carry.”

“I see your point,” Chico said. “We can’t burn our way through. Can we just start walking please?”

Ben nodded. He pulled his phaser off his belt and took Jarrid’s and Chico’s as well. Eli relinquished the three weapons from his private mobile arsenal which used energy pulses and would be affected by the planet’s strange magnetic field the same way as the phasers. Ben climbed the ladder and shoved them all into the hatch.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Ben Stinel posted August 26, 1998 05:12 AM

The jungle was a hot and sweaty place for the four men as they marched steadily on through it’s dark and tangled mass. The trees seemed to be constantly ripping at their clothes or their burdens and it was a rare occasion for them to go more than five feet without a snag. With some luck, they had the foresight to pack machetes with the rest of their gear and the blades were out and hacking a path for them before they had gone fifty yards from their ship.

After the first eight hours of hacking their way through the heavy foliage it was becoming obvious to all of them that Jarrid’s original estimate of only two days for the eleven-mile hike was rapidly widening it’s time frame into three days.

There wasn’t much evidence of life aside from themselves and the plants in the jungle. They heard an occasional hoot of a primate in the trees and sometimes there was a rustling in the underbrush off to the sides of their intended path but not much more. The only creature they saw were the constant and biting insects that seemed to dog their every move. They made frequent stops to combat the heat and to rest their arms and legs and on each of these Jarrid passed around a hypo that contained something his wife had assured him would make their blood unpalatable to the local insect life. Unfortunately the bugs didn’t know this until after they’d had a taste. The drug also had the side affect of making their eyes extremely sensitive to light. Under the green canopy of the trees this wasn’t a big problem. Except for those occasions when the sunlight found its way between the leaves and into their faces. The unbearable brightness was painful in the extreme and would blind them for minutes or more at a time.

They went on this way for the first day until they stopped for the night at the foot of a large tree which had a trunk large enough around that Ben and Jarrid couldn’t clasp each other’s hands around it. And yes, they actually attempted to do just that.

It was a relief just to lay down in their clothes when the time came but as the weariness eased out of their feet and arms they began to feel the roots that were digging into their backs and the fallen leaves began to itch around their necks and in their hair. Not one of them was asleep when it began to rain sometime around two in the morning.

“Now why couldn’t we have just landed in a tree a mile from the cache?” Chico asked. He’d been trying various alternatives. Eli reached over and smacked him for his trouble.

“Spider,” the older man told the younger in response to his reproachful look.

“‘I road the cannonball down to the ocean,’” Ben began to recite. “‘Across the desert from sea to shining sea. I rode a ladder that climbed across the nation, fifty million feet of earth between the buried and me.’”

“Send us a ghost train to ride to our destination, please!” Jarrid pleaded with the rain, taking his cue from Ben’s quote.

All of them were silent for a few moments and listened to the sound of the rain pounding the leaves above before collecting into the larger droplets which were landing on them below.

Chico was the first to break the silence. “Why didn’t one of us hover a few feet above that temple that you mentioned in the runabout and everyone else jump out and go on to the cache? Then the one of us in the runabout could have flown back to that clearing to land and wait until you guys were back at the temple and ready to leave.”

Chico didn’t get swatted for his efforts. Eli didn’t say a word. It had been his plan to land in the clearing and go the distance on foot. At the time it had seemed like a good idea.

Ben and Jarrid sat up and looked right at Eli in the dark. Still he said not a word. Perhaps he was embarrassed that he had missed such a seemingly obvious alternative to this long trek. Or maybe it was just that Chico had seen it instead.

“No doubt about it,” Jarrid said, “The kid’s right.”

“So why didn’t you suggest that this morning, Chico? We could have saved two days of walking through this jungle.”

“Jus’ came to me?” The grin on the Spaniard’s face was audible.

“Actually,” Jarrid said, “If we turn around and use Chico’s plan we’ll still save a full day of walking. We can make the trip from that temple to the cache and back in just under a day.”

Ben frowned, hating to waste the distance they’d already gained even though it would mean less work in the long run. “Okay,” he said finally, giving in to logic over his feeling that it would be less wasteful to keep going as they were. “We’ll do it Chico’s way. Now let’s get to sleep. I want to get an early start.” 