“What do you mean, ‘It was you.’?” Asked Jan.
Rai desperately tried to put the thoughts in her head back in some kind of order now that things had calmed down a little. “Last night, I was thinking about this ridiculous quest of yours and I remembered, I know someone who might be able to help us.” She looked sheepish, “So… I sent him a message. They must have tracked it.”
“Dammit, Rai. You’ve been hiding out here for years, why would you throw that away now? Couldn’t I have sent the message?”
“Well, like me, he’s a pretty private guy. He doesn’t like getting communications he doesn’t know he can trust.”
“Don’t you think we have enough trust issues in our party already?” Jan asked, glaring at Alan, still holding his neck after his confrontation with Jan.
“But, I told you, it wasn-“
“Not the time!” barked Jan, turning back to Rai. “Who the hell is this guy?”
“Doctor Axi.”
“Doctor Axi, The serial killer?” Jan was incredulous.
“Oh, Jan! I’d expect more form you! You know that wasn’t his fault!”
Jan interrupted, his train of thought barely derailed, “Are you part of some sort of fugitive support group?” He paused, having processed what Rai had said, “What do you mean ‘It wasn’t his fault?’ The guy wiped out an entire species.” Jan turned and began stomping up the stairs to the flight deck. “Let’s just hope we don’t here back from him; we might not survive!”
Asteroid M751 was little more than a floating cave, and not much of a laboratory, but this is what Doctor Michel Axi had found himself reduced to. He had never intended to become a fugitive, an engineer and history professor at one of the largest of the home system’s universities, accused of the murder of an entire intelligent species that should never have existed.
When the accident had forced Doctor Axi to leave the University of Titan he had intended to flee to Earth where there was no longer any extradition to the outer planets where he was considered a pariah and would not be as difficult as getting passage out of the system. His journey towards the system’s core had been more than a little problematic.
Eventually, he made it as far as the asteroid belt before the less than capable ship he had secured for himself had begun to die and thus had found himself stranded on M751 desperately trying to develop a new propulsion system to get him to Earth with TiSec bounty hunters sweeping the belt looking for him.
He spent his days floating around his new home, having salvaged some of the less essential parts of his ship to seal the rock’s interior and create somewhat of a liveable atmosphere within the maze-like tunnels, and running various disappointing and repetitive experiments on minerals from the surrounding boulders.
Communication with the outside world was sparse, he gave information on his whereabouts to the few people he knew he could trust. He was rather surprised when he switched on his comms array, performing his five hundred and thirty-ninth daily check, to find a message awaiting him from a former student. With some great trepidation, Doctor Axi opened the message.
Jan spent the rest of the day sulking and silently preparing the ship to leave Mars. He broke his silence temporarily to order Alan and Sophie to assemble a list of supplies the team would need for the long journey to Tellos and the anticipated expedition across the planet’s surface.
Rai thought it best to keep out from under Jan’s feet so she spent the day in the engine room seeing what she could do to update the ship’s long-out-of-warranty engines and generally tightening any loose bolts she could find.
She had compiled a manifest of parts that she could use to cut down their travel time significantly and headed back to the store when her personal communicator bleeped. Normally this wouldn’t be out of the ordinary; she often had requests sent through to her mailbox from the researchers at the base when they were running low on something, but she had started getting them forwarded directly to the store so Sophie could get used to the banalities of day-to-day shopkeeping.
The message could only have come from one of two other sources, either Jan had decided to apologise for his outburst (extremely unlikely) or by some miracle, Doctor Axi had received her message.
She opened the message and found that it contained a long string of navigation coordinates followed by the words ‘…ou environs’ definitely Doctor Axi. Now it was just a case of convincing Jan and finding him before the TiSec did.
