Jackson looked at her and felt a love for one of his children. “Kathea, it is my understanding that you were the first to touch the Good Luck Man. Tell me about what happened.”
Kathea thought a moment, “He dropped his shovel and I noticed that he touched me on my shoulder when I bent to pick it up.”
“That’s not unusual, Kathea. Did he touch you inappropriately?”
“No, he didn’t, but he is a very good looking man and I watched him in the fields as we worked. I noticed that he touched many other women during the day. He also volunteered for water detail and continued touching other women.” Jackson nodded and continued to stare at Kathea. “I approached him that evening when we were gathered to eat and asked him why he was touching so many of my sisters.”
Jackson sat up straighter, “What was his response?”
“He said that his father told him that he was a good luck baby, and that every woman he touched would have good luck. He also said that his father believed that if he could touch every woman in the community, that the entire community would have good luck.”
“And you believed him?”
“Not really, but something happened that made me wonder.” Jackson remained silent and waited. Kathea reached up to her neck and pulled a string out of her dress and showed Jackson the small metal ring. “This ring has been handed down in my family since we first landed on this planet. It was the wedding ring of my original ancestor.” Jackson looked at the ring and furrowed his brow.
“The string broke one day several weeks before and I lost this ring in the fields. Within an hour of him touching me, I was pulling weeds from the crops and the ring came up with one of the weeds. What are the chances of that happening, Jackson? I also discovered that more than ten of my other sisters had found lost items and ten others received proposals from the ones they were hoping to marry. There was just too many coincidences, and I told others about what had happened. The rest you know about. It seems that everyone who touches him has something good happen. The community sees that we are over the limit on our numbers and the Keepers have not come to take us. There is a growing sense that all of our women want to touch him to see if what he says has any truth in it. What do you think about all this, Jackson?”
Jackson rocked and slowly shook his head, “Quite frankly I find it difficult, if not impossible, to believe he is a Good Luck Man. I also don’t remember ever seeing him before he touched you.” Kathea furrowed her brow and tilted her head, “But that doesn’t mean anything, Kathea. I’m sure there are many that I don’t know.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Jackson. Your memory is legendary.”
“Perhaps.” They both continued to rock in silence then Jackson asked, “What do you think we should do, Kathea?”
Kathea started nodding her head slowly, “I would have every female in the community touch him as quickly as possible. I’ve seen too many things happen that just can’t be explained and maybe, just maybe, there is good luck for us if we do.”
Jackson nodded and said, “I think I need to speak with him before we set that up.”
Kathea nodded, “You should. I think you’ll like him.”
“We’ll see.”
“Cynthia, a ship is moving in from the jump limit.”
“I’ve wondered why they haven’t taken any of the population. It is now higher than the established level by more than fifty.”
“So you think they are coming to receive colonists?”
“Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
Cynthia was quiet for a few moments, “If they’re not coming here for that, what do you think they’re doing?”
“I don’t know, but in every instance except provisioning for the invasion fleet, when the ships came to receive food the colonists were taken four days prior to the ships’ arrival. It must take some time to prepare them for shipment, and that time frame has remained constant in all of their arrivals. That ship will arrive in ten hours, and the Keepers have not taken any colonists since the invasion started.”
Cynthia sat and thought about what Junior had said. If they weren’t coming for food, why were they coming? She had a moment of fear that they had been detected, but that fear vanished when she remembered the three ships that had come when the Searcher had been discovered. If they were not detected and they were not coming for food, then what were they doing here? Then she knew, “They’re coming to set a trap, aren’t they?”
“That’s what I suspect. They must have seen races in their scan of the stars Realm that matched the races on this planet. I think they rightly suspect that if there are any other incursions into their domain that it will happen here.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing but wait and see where they go. I suspect that we will have a neighbor on this moon shortly.”
“This is not good, Junior!”
“Tell me about it.”
The brown ship moved in-system, and ten hours later arrived at the moon. It changed course and moved toward the moon’s surface, landing on top of a crater wall less than six hundred yards from the Realm’s ship. Cynthia saw the ship settle with the bow facing toward the planet. She saw the drives of the Keepers ship directly above her at the top of the crater. “Hey, Junior, those drives don’t look brown to me.”
“I just noticed that myself. I wonder if they are surrounded by the brown material or something else.”
“How can we find out?”
Junior was silent for more than a minute, which Cynthia knew represented more than a year of thought by human standards, “I’m going to use a one-way teleport and send a microprobe inside one of them.”
“Junior, we’re really close to these creatures. That probe will use energy to move around. Are you sure this is a risk worth taking?”
“Well, if something was inside our ship’s drive tubes, would our scanners see it?”
Cynthia thought about that question, “I don’t know.”
“Where are our scanners set to scan?”
“Everything around the ship.”
“And they are located just under the hull of our ships looking out from that hull. If anything is behind the scanner, it won’t be seen.”
“What about internal scanners?”
“The will be in the walls of the ship looking inward. I don’t think you would have scanners looking in at the drives of a ship. We certainly don’t engineer our ships that way, and there are some constants in ship construction that transcend all ship builders. If the ship detects it then it would have to turn its bow toward us, and we could teleport away before that happened.”
“Or they could call in other ships to hit us like the first Searcher.”
“We still have the passive scanners on the other side of the moon to warn us. I think it’s worth the risk. This is information that could prove invaluable to the Realm.”
“Is there a possibility that they will detect the teleport screen?”
“I’ll orient the screen away from them. There will be nothing to scan on their side of the screen.”
Cynthia patted her feet on the floor, “How do I let you talk me into these things?”
Junior laughed over the speaker, “Because in your heart you are a warrior and actually live for the fight.”
“Just do it, Junior.”
The micro probe appeared in the drive tube of the Keepers’ ship and recorded the surrounding surfaces. It moved from one end to the other, then found what it was programmed to find. The fuel lines feeding the drives came through the brown wall at the front end of the drives. It attached itself to the wall and waited for the signal.
“Junior, how are we going to collect the probe’s information?”
“I’m going to take a small risk.”
“Uh oh.”
“That ship is close to where the Searcher was killed. There is a passive probe across the crater from them, and I am going to have it reflect light at the rear of their ship. The light will enter the drives and the probe will see the flash send its information is less than one millionth of a second. The power it will use is less that a hundredth of the light being reflected. I don’t think they will be able to see both on their scanners. The passive sensor will then melt. If they investigate the source of the light they will see a melted scanner. I hope they attribute it to the Searcher they killed.”