It's a good thing I checked the job boards beforehand. I was only a few hours from the station - close enough to get to its public computers - and I figured I'd spend the time looking for additional contracts. Exile had paid but Katie hadn't tipped, after all, so I was starting to run low on funds. Speaking of which, I made a note to myself to, upon my arrival on station, find a branch of the company that sold my translator to me. I had a linguistic bounty to collect.
Meanwhile, my programs had flagged this job for me as being highest priority:
"Pilot desired for personnel transport from station to borderlands. Lane 404 travel a must. Only pilots whose goals resonate with these should apply."
You can guess which word was the key in that particular ad. The reason I knew where I could find Steve, unlike the others, was that he continued to post jobs to the board on this station. Anytime I, or anyone else on the team I suppose, wanted to find him, all we had to do was stop by the station and check for messages with 'resonate' as a keyword. This message was strange, though. It seemed to indicate that he'd left for the borderlands, but the Lane 404 caveat was what kept throwing me for a loop. There was no lane 404, at least none in this area of space. Some other scientists on the other side of the galaxy might have named their lane that, but locally 404 was widely known as "The Lost Lane". Somewhat of a - to use an idiom I hope will translate - "Bermuda Triangle". Any Lane that wasn't numbered was dubbed 404, and for good reason; they tended to be unstable. When a Lane failed, anything on it suffered a rather non-pretty fate. Why Steve had mentioned such a route was beyond me. Unless....
He couldn't be serious. In his other life, before management at our project and countless projects before, Salient Steve had been an engineer. Specifically, a Lane engineer.
My fingers flew across the keys on my various control panels. I wanted to access the navigational feed from the station; the sort of thing that warned about sunspots interfering with older drives or which Lanes weren't congested. It only took a few moments. My gut instinct had proven true: Lane 685 was experiencing unexpected instability due to a malfunctioning emitter. Steve had, if the rest of my suspicions were true, redirected it for his own purposes. A Lane with only one emitter would be shoddy at best and could hold very little traffic, but someone with enough knowledge of the topic could make it work.
I began to very subtly scan for Lanes. I had to be very careful - Lanes were typically marked by buoys, and it was rare that one would need to actively attempt to discover them. If anyone caught me doing so, they'd wonder why. I wouldn't get in trouble, but it was obvious to me that Steve was going through a lot of effort to stay hidden from everyone but the rest of his old gang, and if that was the case he almost certainly would be in trouble if he was caught.
My sensors showed a very faint echo near 685. I queried the station nav computers as to whether it was a safe lane to travel at all; they informed me that the AMS had many redundant emitters for the safety and convenience of its travelers, and while the ride along 685 would likely be slightly bumpier than usual, it would be no more dangerous.
Excellent. I did everything in my power to make it look as though I was going down lane 685, when in fact I was heading for the small sensor echo just off of it. Hopefully this had actually been set up by Steve, otherwise chances were good that the new lane would vanish and take me with it. Still, the message didn't make sense unless he had meant for one of us to find him.
I turned on the Lane drive, and hoped.