Junker's Moon: Cult Ship

By Peter Salisbury

Book 4 - Junker's Moon Scrap, Salvage and Servicing Company has the dubious honour of being visited by a cult ship, The Garden. The vessel is registered as having charitable status and is therefore beyond FBIS jurisdiction. Its owner, Pastor Gripthorne, holds captive more than one hundred female followers, and is set on a direct course to cause trouble with a capital 'T'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Salisbury
• Release date: Nov 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310094958

Peter Salisbury

I am a life-long fan of science fiction, and so when I had an idea for my first story, I wasn't surprised that it was in that genre. The first book took me ten years to complete, but I've got a little quicker since. I am pleased to say that I now have over thirty books published in my name. What next? So far I haven't run short of ideas for new stories, so there are several projects in various stages of completion, and I hope to be publishing the next story before too long, so please subscribe to my alerts. My profile picture is a portrait of the author as a young man, painted by my daughter Charlotte Salisbury who has also contributed to several of my book covers. Professional background In the 1970s I studied Chemistry at university and then spent over thirty years in classrooms across England teaching almost anything but Chemistry, including Photography, Communications Skills, General Science, Computing, and Information and Communications Technology. In the 1990s I spent ten years writing abstracts of chemical patents. This was a most exacting process but very rewarding to be reading about the very latest inventions in the field, and the abstracts were distributed world-wide to research scientists by subscription. Articles of mine have been published in magazines and I have written assignments used for assessing Communications Skills for a major international Examination Board. After retiring early this century I began writing in earnest.

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Junker's Moon: Cult Ship

Copyright Peter Salisbury November 2013

Junker's Moon: Cult Ship

Copyright Peter Salisbury November 2013

Smashwords Edition

2014 January 04

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person or place is entirely coincidental. No part of this work may be distributed, printed, reprinted or copied by any means without the permission of the author.

Book 4: Junker's Moon Scrap, Salvage and Servicing Company had the exceedingly dubious honour of being visited by a cult ship, The Garden. The ship was registered as having charitable status and was therefore beyond FBIS jurisdiction. Its owner had stopped short of adding 'Of Eden' to its registered name but that was clearly his intention. Pastor Gripthorne was going to cause trouble with a capital 'T'.

Junker's Moon: Cult Ship

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Indecent Haste

Chapter 2: Charity Begins Again

Chapter 3: Exodus

Chapter 4: Lucy's Delight

Chapter 5: The Tour

Chapter 6: The Barouche

Chapter 7: It's All In The Ground

Chapter 8: Resentment

Chapter 9: Spite

Chapter 10: Duel

Chapter 11: Dawn

Chapter 12: Deserters

Chapter 13: Secret Message

Chapter 14: Anticipation

Chapter 15: The No-Show

Chapter 16: Boarders

Chapter 17: Planetside

Chapter 18: Confiscated

Epilogue

Introduction

More Books by Peter Salisbury

Chapter 1: Indecent Haste

Marshall had been present when the pirate Vanessa Longtail was shot down by FBIS agents. Her death was an end to Marshall's immediate fears of attempts on his life. Without the use of stealth technology, her capture by Debbi and Marshall would have been impossible. The system aboard the Medallion had rendered it invisible, allowing them to get within firing distance to disable Longtail's freighter. Without the Medallion, the ship which had once belonged to Longtail's husband, she would still be at large and bent on taking her revenge on Marshall.

The Federal Bureau of Interstellar Space had arrived only in the nick of time to save Marshall after a game of cat and mouse lasting several days aboard the Medallion. When Longtail had attempted to use a hidden dagger for a final lunge at Marshall, she had been shot by FBIS agents. At the time, neither Marshall nor Debbi noticed the almost indecent haste, even for the remains of a pirate, with which Vanessa's body had been whisked away by the attending FBIS captain and his medic. The latter had seemed very ready to declare her dead after the discharge of three or four FBIS depolariser weapons, at least two of which scored direct hits. The medic claimed that the effect was to completely neutralise all nervous impulses in Longtail's brain and body, making any attempt at reviving her useless.

On the way back from Vanessa's capture Marshall and Debbi had several times tried the stealth technology, and once it had failed to work when they drifted past a planet. As a result, they were hailed by the local flight control centre, requesting an explanation for their apparently spontaneous appearance. Without any expectation that it would be believed, Marshall made up an excuse about a transponder fault which they intended to repair at their next stop, and made haste back into the hyperspace pipe.

The mission to intercept the pirate and her men had been extremely dangerous because of Vanessa Longtail's murderous character. She liked nothing better than to strike fear at the point of her sword into the hearts of whoever she encountered. If crossed in any way, she had no hesitation in using the sword to deadly effect. When news of Marshall and Debbi's success reached Junker's Moon, a week of celebrations was planned for their return. Once the festivities had finally run out of steam, Marshall's mind returned to the question of the stealth technology.

'If we have only the one system and it breaks down, revealing our presence at just the wrong time, we'll be in a pretty pickle, especially if we don't know how to repair it. It failed once on the way back, luckily only when it was not critical. If it had failed when we were intercepting Vanessa, we probably would not be here to tell the tale.'

'I'll look into it at once, Marshall,' Lucy said.

'And I'll try and find out something about its origin,' Debbi said. 'It will help if I could get hold of some technical specs.'

Lucy reported back after a week that on the outside of the Medallion there were ten strategically placed sensors and transducers, each being linked back to a small box concealed inside one of the control consoles.

'Did you manage to find out why it only works in hyperspace?'

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. 'No idea, other than it's wired into the hyperspace engine controls and that there's a failsafe to prevent it operating in normal space.'

'What else did you come up with?'

'It works on a similar principle to the noise-cancelling headphones we use in the workshops to protect our ears, except without the phase change. The sensors pick up radiation impinging on them and the transducers re-transmit the radiation on the opposite side of the ship, so that the ship doesn't show up on any visual or energy-based scanner.'

'Then you can replicate it,' Marshall said excitedly.

'Only if you put Debbi on the job, too. The control box has a powerful computer inside. It presumably generates a digital replica of the signal coming in from the multiple sensors, then sends the signal to the respective transducer.'

'And what about reflective scanners?'

'If a radar pulse strikes the ship, a highly absorbent coating soaks up the pulse and any signal which does bounce off is cancelled by the transducer arrays.'

Marshall pinged Debbi on the com and called her into the office.

'Lucy says she's found out how the stealth system works in terms of hardware. Have you made any progress on the specs or the detail of this black box she's found?'

'It was developed at an obscure research company and what Dirk Knight had installed on the Medallion was a prototype. He must have had a contact in the company who smuggled it out for him. Either that, or they used his ship as a test bed.'

'Is it still going, this company?'

'No, it appears that the outfit was a bit too cutting edge for its own good. From the little I could find out about it in the commercial records, they were always pushing the limits. The company base was destroyed in one of their own experiments into explosives, with the loss of all personnel and data about their research.'

'Most inconvenient.'

'But if it's got a computer at the heart of it, I can deconstruct it and make another, probably better than the original.'

True to her word, Debbi made a more compact control box which was just as effective. Its smaller size meant that it was more easily concealed.

To keep it simple, Lucy and Debbi first installed a replicated system and on a tug. The problem was that the tug did not have hyperspace capability, so they towed it into the pipe using the Medallion. They found that the stealth system worked perfectly with the tug enclosed in the hyperspace field generated by the Medallion's engines.

Debbi omitted to deactivate stealth mode on the tug and to their amazement the tug was still invisible when it exited the pipe. Further research showed that on a relatively small ship such as a tug the technology worked even in normal space.

'Give that the stealth technology doesn't work in normal space, having a tug which can be concealed might come