Trinket

Unofficial Report Document:

Okay, I am writing this to cover my own ass if any of this comes out. I was engaged by Captain K_____________ on a mission to retrieve an object on a post-apocalyptic Tier-4 planet and the mission went very badly. This is how I am interpreting it. This document will be stored with my other papers, so I do not expect to have this timestamped beyond the safe where it is kept and the lodging where I awaited my instructions. Again, I was taken onto a mission by a senior officer. I followed orders. I obeyed.

Okay, now, with that out of the way, I can speak freely. Always talking and never doing, that was what we always said about the Captain. Not to his face, of course, but I think that he would have agreed with anyone who could approach him so honestly. I really hope he would because I suspect that one day, he will read this. Or at least I used to think so. Not so sure now.

I was the navigator in charge of this mission, my 50th with the Captain. A nice round number to the staff and managers, if they ever heard about it. Again, I repeat, this was a private mission and he asked me to not bring it up with the head office. I thought it was a joke, but he was quite serious about it. A part of me felt that some of the ugly comments I made about him behind his back were catching up with him and he wanted some sort of revenge, but I quickly pushed all that out of my head. That stuff about talking and not doing? Not true at all.

Seems strange now, don’t you think? All those missions; all those runs… And he still did not think that he could trust anyone except me. It was not unusual to have a flight with a captain and just one navigator, but we were using a cargo transporter; it was big enough to house a platoon of men, their food and weapons, and bring them into real danger. But this might have been where his genius came out for the first time: they would never suspect what he was doing with such a ship. A smaller one would have to be signed out, registered and then verified after it had come home. The cargo ones were travelling so frequently that there was no problem flying off with it. Smart, I thought. A nice little way to beat the system.

Systems were on my mind as soon as he told me the co-ordinates. And I thought it was a joke. A tier-4 planet in that galaxy? No life left to speak of due to overuse of natural resources and military conflicts? Great. The Captain had gone nuts for some reason. But again, I was navigator working with a man who decided to pilot the ship himself. Maybe he knew something that I didn’t, and he was about to retrieve a very special prize. Or something that I could not guess at.

Okay, I had better share this before I talk about the planet itself. He dropped the information about the locket before we landed. Again, I thought that he was joking or crazy, but he showed it to me. It was a heart. Not a real heart; one of those old-fashioned hearts I saw once when we investigated the history of this place. He kept staring at that picture on one of our monitors as he told me he needed it and that he was going to find it. I said nothing, but I made sure that I had my weapon charged and nearby after he spoke.

Okay, on the planet itself, it was a simple landing. No life forms were detected (no surprise), and the radiation levels were safe enough for us to land and pause for a few moments as I tried to get him to change his mind. We were reading no transmissions, a poor air quality reading and many small storms and tremors in that region. I told him what to expect.

And he went out.

Now, I waited as long as I could. I watched his life readings as he made his exploration of the area. He had his own private monitor and using it, he was tracking the object.

That locket…

Why didn’t anyone say a thing about it before? All this time we had been searching for that key and the captain was the only one who knew that it was in there? Bullshit. We could have sent out teams; we could have filled up that entire cargo ship with a crew that would scour the entire area to find it. It would have been an easy salvage. But no, I had to be dragged on a mission that I never knew was secret until I read what the captain was tracking. I could see that he was in some sort of collapsed structure. He was opening the case…

And that was that.

No readings were available. I made a point of running multiple scans over the whole area and checking the equipment to see if there were any problems or glitches I had not noticed. And then I went out there to see what had happened. Based on the last reading, there was no way he could have made it past ten kilometres northeast. And I took my time. I really did.

I really did.

No one would believe me if they saw it. The photograph… He had somehow had a physical with him when he entered that structure. I found it on the floor of a room, along with his suit. Strange thing is that it was all neatly folded and placed right next to the picture, as if someone were waiting for me to pick it up.

Back at the ship, I did run some tests. His DNA was faint inside the suit, but nothing more could be traced from it.

And I want to be clear about this before I end this report: NOTHING WAS FOUND ON THAT PLANET. It was a wasteland and remains a wasteland today. No reason to go back and search for something most of us have only heard rumours about and have never seen.

Enclosed you will find a photo of the locket, this letter, and all the information and data taken from the record of the journey. I expect that this will become available to the first person who not only cracks the code of the safe, but cares that I am gone.

And there is something that I must do…