Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

"Good Eye"

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Good Eye"
By Nicholas Mahaffey

There was a muffled thump as we cleared the magnetic atmosphere-containment shield of the outbound bay. I did a quick visual scan of the area directly in front of the ship before checking the scanner. As exciting as movies may make it seem, there’s nothing particularly thrilling about a near-miss with a large tanker or bulk cargo vessel. And, unlike the movies, having a piece of equipment sheared off isn’t a small deal. Those pieces of equipment usually cost more than the cargo in the hold, and certainly more than you’d be making for delivering the cargo. Once I was certain that I wasn’t going to turn my Black Sun 490 into a large greasy spot on the side of a bulk haul, I re-opened the cargo manifest packet and set in a course that would take us to the delivery location.

I’m a privateer. My partner, Snake, and I fly missions for hire. The run we’d just embarked on was a simple, nothing-too-important cargo haul to an aeroponics research and development station in a nearby system. There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that no one is going to kill you for your cargo unless they have a particularly strong grudge against your client. Not that it never happens, but it’s comfortably rare.

Snake gave a contented sigh as he began swiveling his turret; giving the actuators a chance to warm up. Our armaments weren’t exactly the best in the business. Snakes Starburst lasers weren’t bad or weak by any means, but they certainly didn’t deliver the sting of, oh, say, McMahon 327 High Output IV lasers. Those were the T-rex of the laser food chain. McMahon lasers ate lesser lasers for breakfast. Other pieces of my ship needed upgrading or repair, as well, but, all in all, my little boat had held together through the meanest of fights and proven her worth; she’d never completely let me down . . . not completely.

Within two hours, we had reached the first jump point and were a mere ten hours from being finished with our run. I entered the pattern at the jump point and awaited my turn to take us through the anomaly into the next system. “Ever wonder what all the other ships are doing?”, Snake asked from his turret. “Huh?”, came my intelligent response. “You know, what brought each of them out here. Are they doing cargo runs of their own? Are they on their way to a vacation spot? Are they stupid people who are clogging up the space lanes just because they enjoy flying? It’s interesting to look at ships and try to gather clues as to what they’re up to.”

I shrugged my shoulders, even though Snake couldn’t see the gesture from down in his turret. “I never gave it much thought, to be honest.”, I said in response to his musing. With no further thoughts to share on the subject, I turned my attention back to the pattern as we waited in line to jump. It was a good fifteen minutes before we actually got to the edge of the ‘safe’ range around the jump point. Only one ship was allowed by law inside of the ‘safe’ range at one time, so that it would prevent a ship from coming through the point and into a congestion of oncoming vessels. Of course, if any two ships entered the jump point at the same time from opposite ends, the result would be utter disaster. Each orifice of the anomaly would open up and spew flaming wreckage at the surrounding traffic. Protocols for jump point use had been established because far too many Confleet vessels had entered into a jump point while some junk merchie sauntered into the opposite end; and the results had always been a lot of dead people from the collision in hyperspace.

While we were still yet the fifth ship in line, all hell broke loose. Snake, ever vigilant, had been keeping watch on the other vessels; probably looking from ship to ship as he mused over their business at the jump point. “Hey, boss . . .” he began calmly, “there’s a ship that looks like it’s heading our . .” His casual sentence drew my attention to the vessel in question just as it opened up four military-issue ship-to-ship railguns on us. The extremely expensive and brutally lethal cannons were every bit as long as a Fillian C-9, and used a series of extremely powerful electromagnets to hurl thumb-sized bits of matter towards a target and near-light speed. The first round of shots hit our shields and decimated them. In a frantic attempt to avoid the second quartet of zooming death, I punched the afterburner and climbed as I rolled the ship away. The volley that was intended for me instead hit a ship about a thousand meters port of us and hulled it deeply, sending flaming atmosphere through the four gigantic holes torn in the fuselage. Snake swore aloud and opened up a hail of bright orange beams to give our attacker something to deal with and buy us some time. Without getting a close look at our attacker, I angled the ship for the jump point, careening into the 'safe' zone rather unsafely with my afterburners wide open. The remaining ships in line dove franticly to avoid having us up their pipes. I sent the ship into a series of ducks and weaves as we closed on the jump nexus, hoping that my jinks might keep our attacker from landing another shot. His shots filled the space around us as he tried to predict a good lead. Snake continued to fire rearward as I changed course to duck behind the hulk of a Zenith ECC cargo transport in an attempt to put the behemoth and her thick shields and armor between us and our assailant. As our attacker’s shots began to pound the larger ship, it pulled a slow evasive roll, cutting our breathing time in half. Realizing that my cheap tricks were running out, I pointed the nose of my ship directly into the nexus and punched the burner again, praying silently that no one would emerge from the orifice at the wrong moment.

I spared a quick glance in the direction of our attacker as we crossed the last few hundred meters to the jump point. His nimble ship skirted the edge of the Zenith’s battered hull as he resumed his firing solution on us. Snake reopened with a hail of fire as I turned my attention back to the nexus we had rushed past several ships to get to. Just as I began to heave a sigh of relief, the nexus opened up and another Fillian C-9 materialized from the opening. I screamed in terror as I swerved in a desperate bid to avoid ending my life against its front quarter. My Black Sun 490 wrenched away just in time to dodge another volley of railgun shot, which plowed into the front quarter of the C-9 and tore off the nose cone. Snake and I swore in unison as I skimmed us just past the freighter and into the “transit range” of the nexus. “Jumping!”, I cried as I shut off the throttle and engaged the jump engine. Another volley zinged past us with one of the four rounds connecting just in front of our second engine, punching through the remaining shields and leaving a tolerable scar in the armor. Even as the screeching sound of metal-on-metal filled the cabin, the universe suddenly melted away behind us as we transited through the jump point.

Ten Minutes Later . . .

"That's it." Snake said as he tapped his knuckles against the empty metal tank. "That's the last of our afterburner fuel." I was both relieved and enraged. The parting shot from our assailant had, in fact, pierced our armor and hit one of the hoses that carried fuel to the afterburners on the engines. If that shot had hit about two feet further forward, it would have hit the tank of 'burner gas and blown us, our ship, and that unfortunate C-9 across the immediate vicinity in a spray of wreckage, aeroponics equipment, and bad luck. After clearing the jump, I engaged the afterburners and made a mad scramble for the nearest cover I could find, which, this time, was a debris field where burned out hulks of destroyed freighters had been picked over and left to drift. With our afterburner leaking fuel, we only got about three quarters of the way there before the burner began to lose pressure; I decided to cut the engines and allow inertia to carry us the rest of the way. Snake took it upon himself (as it was his job anyway) to head into the back and check on the cargo and look for other damage. Fortunately, the shot hadn't pierced the bulkheads of the cargo bay, else we'd have had to don pressure suits and purge the atmosphere from the cabin to open the bay door. When we reached the junkyard, I brought the ship to a stop, taking time to notice that we were indeed leaving a detectable trail of fuel, and joined Snake where he surveyed the damage.

"Well, Snake, it looks like we'll be making a pit stop in this system, if we can." Snake scratched his head. "Don't suppose any of these dead tankers might have any spare hoses, do you?" I shook my head. "Too picked over." Snake continued scratching; wincing as he accidentally scratched off a scab from a cut he'd received a week ago near the crown of his head. I chuckled to myself as I thought aloud. "Chances are, if we took the time to hunt through each of these hulks and actually found a hose that would fit our 'burner, we'd also find some unsavaged fuel." Snake gave a wry chuckle of his own and closed the hatch that covered the now-empty fuel tank. "Well," he began, "without afterburners, we won't be able to run if our buddy manages to follow us." I'd already taken into consideration that our "buddy" had indeed followed us through the jump point and was already following our trail of fuel across the system. That reminded me; "Hey, Snake, did you get a good look at the ship that came after us?" His brow furrowed. "Well . . . sorta. I know it was a smaller vessel . . probably not capable of carrying much cargo. The quad railguns were mounted on the fuselage, but extended way out beyond the nose. Scanner didn't get a very good look at it, but my guess would be that it was a fighter. Probably a professional headhunter." Snake punctuated his guess with a shrug. "Well, even that little bit of knowledge might aid us in the near future, should he actually be on our trail. Good job spotting him at the jump point, by the way. Good eye.” “Thanks, I guess.”, came his reply.

Snake and I stood in silence for a few seconds, doing our best to scrounge up a plan while also trying not to think about another run-in with our menace. I was the first to speak up. "We probably won't leave much of a trail now that our tank is empty. Instead of trying to work our way to a base or planet in this system, we should try to make it to a jump point." Snake thought it over for a moment, "Well," he pondered, "if he is indeed tracking us, and sees that we're leaking afterburner fuel, he'll probably check here at this junk yard, and, if he doesn't find us, he'd probably check the most logical places for us to go for repairs. But, at the same time, if we're wrong and he catches us at a jump point, we might make it through the nexus, but we'll never outrun him on the other side." I nodded. “Well, then” and Snake cringed at the resignation in my voice, “I guess we’ll have to use our favorite method of making important, life-changing decisions.” Snake clapped his hand over his eyes as I fished a coin from my pocket. This particular coin was minted by a frontier government that had disbanded over fifteen years ago. It was only good for decision-making. “Care to call it?” I asked Snake, offering him the opportunity to have some sort of say in the situation. “Sure”, he sighed. “Heads we hit the station, tails we run for the jump point.” He paused for a few seconds. “And pray to whatever gods we know of that we don’t run into that headhunter again.” I nodded my concurrence. Pursing my lips, I thumbed the coin into the air, caught it, and slapped it over onto the back of my hand. Without looking at it myself, I showed it to Snake . . .

Two hours later . . .

We were just within radar range of Rucker Watson’s, a stop-over station in orbit around the outer planet of the three-planet system. It was basically a space-born truck stop. You could dock your ship, get some minor repairs, eat, fuel up, and if you had low standards, get a room. Like everything else this side of Diis superstation, it was old, worn out, and crummy. Fortunately, along with the rest of those traits, it was also sufficient for its purpose and reliable. Snake and I had stopped here a dozen or so times over the years. We knew that we could get the needed repairs here, and stock up on some necessary groceries (such as afterburner fuel), despite the poor cosmetics.

We approached the station with caution. We didn’t want to risk bellying up to the bar just to have four railguns pressed to our backs, cowboy-style. We were going to take this approach nice and slow, being sure to keep a low profile in case that headhunter had indeed tracked us here. When we had closed half the distance to the station, Snake called for my attention with a tremor in his voice.

“Hey, boss.” He sounded rather shaken. “Don’t alter course or speed, but look about fifty meters to starboard, in between those bits of debris.” I looked in that direction, and gasped involuntarily. Our headhunter had indeed followed us. His ship was sitting out there, powered down, making no emissions. He’d waited on us. He was watching us pass right in front of him. Within thirty seconds, we’d be far enough past him that he’d have a good shot at our engines. It was a dangerous trap to set, but a danged effective one if you had a Sunday punch that could stop somebody cold. “Snake,” I said as calmly as I could muster. “I’m gonna turn in his direction and see if I can’t dumbfire a rocket up his nose. On my mark, open up on him.” Snake’s terse “Affirmative.” was his only response. “Oh, and, by the way . . . Snake?” I called to him again. “Yeah?” “Make your shots count, huh?”

I banked into a slow turn, hoping to give the illusion that I was beginning a landing run on the station. At just the right moment, I sharpened my bank and lined up directly on the still, motionless bounty hunter. “NOW, SNAKE! NOW!” I instructed. Snake’s turret opened up with bright orange lasers as I switched my scanner into “target acquisition and lock-on” mode. The infra-red missiles on my hardpoints wouldn’t lock onto the headhunter so long as his ship wasn’t giving off any emissions. Snake’s shots raked across his armor, scoring hits before he had time to power up and activate his shields. Just as his engines started pushing, Snake’s fire hulled the casing and the turbine inside blew out of the nozzle in a shower of sparks and turbine blades. His shields flickered into existence a second later and he lined up a shot. The round of his quad railguns took us head on, and punched through my shields with the first shot. Fortunately, the shields had burned away enough of the matter so that the projectiles didn’t pierce our armor, but only left deep grooves where they’d burrowed through the first few centimeters. My scanner acquired a stage one rudimentary lock on the headhunters half-crippled fighter, and I quickly popped off one of my IR missiles in his direction. I knew that a stage one lock probably wouldn’t get him, but it would occupy him long enough for us to get out of his line of fire, and possibly extend an escape.

I turned in the direction of the jump point and pushed the engines to the firewall. Without afterburners, we would only achieve maximum cruising speed, but, with any luck, that would be enough to keep us out of his range. His twin-engine fighter would be hard pressed to keep up with us with only one engine functioning. Snake continued to pepper shots in his direction as he managed to escape the missile’s locking mechanism. Instead of following us, he fired a departing shot and turned towards the station. His parting shot hit our rear shields, penetrating them, and lodging one round of railgun shot in our number three engine. The turbine jammed and the engine began to whine and strain. Before it had a chance to overheat and take major damage, I shut it down and shunted the power to the shielding. Snake swore sulphuriously as the hunter retreated to Watson’s. “A little lower and I’d have peeled that engine completely off! He’d have been a scorched hunk of wreckage and jerk-bits. Go after him!” Snake hadn’t noticed that the engine just behind him wasn’t running anymore. “Engine number three is offline.” I stated matter-of-factly. “One of his railgun shots jammed it up. It’s probably not gonna need any major repairs, but we don’t have spacewalk gear to go out there and pull the shot out of the turbine. We’re stuck with two engines until we find a place to land.” Snake swore again. “So I guess we’re headed for the jump point?”, he stated more than asked. “Yes.” I confirmed. “Hopefully, we can get to our destination before that hunter gets his engine fixed.” Snake sighed, allowing the adrenalin to subside and rubbing his face.

“Oh, Snake, by the way . . .”
“Yea?”
“Good eye.”
“Thanks, I guess . . .”

Fifteen hours later . . .

“Well, I have good news and bad news.” Snake popped his head out of the engine casing, grease smearing his face. “What?”, he asked, not at all enthused about the “bad news” part. “Good news is we got full payment for our run. The research director has also asked us to courier this data packet back to the manufacturer, along with a crate full of RMA parts. Two thousand credits, up front, good faith.” I handed him the manifest clipboard with the cargo, destination, and credits offered, complete with “Paid in Full” stamped at the bottom. Snake grinned, until he remembered the “bad news”. “And?”, he asked, expectantly. “And”, I began, “they didn’t have the hose we need. They had some spare fuel to fill us up, but without the hose, we still don’t have an afterburner.” Snake grunted. “Well”, he mused, “it was a long shot anyway. I didn’t really figure they’d have a spare afterburner hose just lying around. Especially one that would fit this old of a design.” I frowned, but otherwise ignored his jab at my ship. “How’s the turbine coming?”, I asked, changing the subject. “Well, I’ve got the shot out of the turbine, but one of the blades looks warped. The engine will work, but we can forget catching any naps en rout until we take the engine apart and hammer the blades back into shape.” “That bad, huh?” “Just wait till you hear it. It’s worse than your snoring.”

“Ready to go?” I asked. Snake handed back the clipboard, grabbed a rag, and wiped his face and hands. “I wouldn’t mind washing up, but, other than that, I’ve done all I can do for this engine.” I nodded. “Well, let’s take another hour to tie up any loose ends we can think of, and then be on our way. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good to me, cap’n.”

I was a bit hungry myself, so I traced my steps back to the cafeteria. A quick bite to eat and a quick stop in the restroom would do wonders for my mood. Not that getting paid hadn’t helped me out any. After eating, I rented a stall and took a quick shower; finishing just in time to get back to the ship to leave. I found Snake reclined across the passenger couch, reading from his periodical computer.

“Whatcha readin’?” I asked.
“Take a look at this, boss. I looked up the design of the hunter’s ship. It’s called a “Hayades”, and it’s manufactured by Omni-Trek Motors Inc. Their website only provides basic information about the fighter, though. Most of it is sales-oriented. But, as it turns out, there’s a cornucopia of information on the earlier model Hayades fighters. Everything from engine design, cockpit layouts, and wiring diagrams.”

“Anything of interest?” I asked. “Eh . . depends. Do you want to out-fly it or out-design it? Unless you know about reconfiguring ECM transmitters or re-wiring ship-to-ship, there’s not much here to work with. It’s acceleration, turn rate, and top speed quotas are pretty stiff to beat.” I sighed. “Well, maybe he just didn’t want us to make it to this station. Perhaps he’ll leave us alone now.” Snake chuckled and replied chidingly. “Let’s just keep our eyes open anyway, how ‘bout it?” I gave a chuckle myself and turned to crawl into my acceleration couch. It was time to leave. Snake closed his periodical computer and carried it down into his turret; tucking it into his jacket for the climb down the ladder. I flipped the appropriate sequence of switches to prep the engines for ignition. As they began to roar to life, a horrible, pulsating scraping sound rang through the bulkheads. "Snake", I called out over the hideous noise, "did we stock up on painkillers?" "No.", came his reply. "Just banana flavored energy bars." I scowled. "Piece of-" "Banana flavored nutrition.", Snake butted into my epithet. I'm not sure whether he intended for me to hear him chuckling or not, but I did. "God, I hate banana flavor." I muttered to myself. I'm not sure whether Snake heard me grumbling or not, but I intended for him to.

Ten hours later . . .

Lack of sleep was starting to take its toll on me. I hadn't caught so much as ten minutes of sleep in the past two days. I'd been planing to catch a few hours on our way to the aeroponics research station, but looking out for the hunter had curtailed any chances of sleep. Now that we were on our way back from the aeroponics station, sleep still wasn't an option. I'd even found myself munching on an energy bar, despite the horrid flavor, in hopes that the stimulants in the bar would boost my awareness. They were having some effect, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped or required. Snake sat in his turret gloating over my misery.

"You know, they do make other flavors of energy bars." I not-so-casually stated. I heard Snake stifle a hard laugh with a snort. I'd had enough of his snickering. I reached over to the toolbox and grabbed my trusty Snake-fixin' wrench. The one made out of durasteel. Good hard durasteel.

"Hey, Snake."
"What?"
"Did you make sure to fasten that cover plate down real good?"
"Yea, I guess so. Why?"
"Well, to be on the safe side, you'd better go check it. Here's the wrench."

I tossed the wrench into the air and watched it fall into Snake's turret. The clanging let me know that it hit the ladder a time or two before it caught him in the head. I was hoping that the cut on his head would now have a twin . . . from the same parents, no doubt. He began to swear. "You piece of-" "Banana flavored nutrition." I butted into his curse. He grumbled under his breath and let the exchange end there.

Within two and a half hours, we would be back at the manufacturer’s space-bourn factory. Hopefully, after delivering the research data packet and the RMA parts, they’d hire us to ship some more parts back to the aeroponics research station. Most likely, they would deliberate for a week or two about the RMA parts and we would have to venture out in search of work before they’d be ready to ship replacement parts to their client. It’s not terribly often that one can become the exclusive courier between two points. It’s a nice business to come across, however. Fly back and forth along the same familiar path, bringing in the credits as you do. We were lucky we got the return mission from the research station. As it was, though, once we dropped off the packet and the parts, we’d have only a short hop into the next system, which was heavily populated and sure to bring us a few good runs.

As we closed in on the last jump point of the journey, Snake said something that caught my interest.

“Hey, boss.”
“Yeah.”
“I can you remember any potentially “controversial” runs we’ve done in the past year or so?”
“Uhh . . well,” I began, “we ARE privateers, Snake.”
“I know that, lamebrain. I mean ones that could potentially get a bounty stuck on us.”
“You mean like the Romulus incident?” Snake snorted at my mention of the “Romulus incident”.
“Yes, like the Romulus incident. That’s one. Any others?” I thought about it for a moment. I couldn’t remember any right off the top of my head. “I don’t think so.”, came my reply. I didn’t blame Snake for his curiosity. Neither of had been able to relax knowing that we were possibly being followed. We’d been in this system when we last encountered that hunter. We’d traced the same path back to the manufacturer from the research station. We were only an hour or so from Rucker Watson’s where we’d given the hunter a cheap, but live-saving, kick in the chops. It wouldn’t be to far-fetched a guess to say that he’d be here waiting on us to return. “Well,”, Snake exhorted, “should you think of any, do be a good little boy and share it, alright? I’d love to know who put out a hit on us.”

I couldn’t argue with Snake there. A bounty on your head is a hard thing to live with. Mostly because it’s designed to inhibit your living. For pay.

Within a short while, we were within visual distance of the jump point. Again, we took our place in the pattern and waited for our turn to head transit through the nexus. Snake and I both kept a vigilant lookout. Sneaking up on someone at a jump point was easy to do because of all of the clutter. Snake kept his turret moving, bringing his guns to bear on anything that caught his eye. I kept a visual check, as well as one eye on the scanner. We’d sat in line for maybe six or seven minutes before anything of interest happened.

“Shoot! There he is! Six o’clock low.” Snake alerted. I turned in my chair, trying to get a good view of that quadrant from the side viewport. “Keep quiet, Snake. Maybe he doesn’t see us yet.” We both waited and watched as the familiar Hayades fighter parked at the edge of the fray and started scanning the crowd for us. “He’s gonna spot us before we get through.” Snake announced. Just as he’d finished saying it, the fighter started moving; his afterburners kicking in as he swung around the edge of the congestion to get a good closing angle on us. I swore.

We were in no position to run or fight. Without afterburners, we couldn’t get into the nexus in time to run, and we couldn’t hope to stand our ground against those four railguns. I opened up the transmitter and depressed the ‘all call’ key.

“Hey, anybody out here, I need some help. Somebody give me a hand with this Hayades.”

No reply other than the usual radio chatter. Snake took that as his cue and opened fire at maximum range, hoping that some miracle might keep our attacker at bay. “Gah! I hate this guy.”

I brought our engines up to maximum cruising speed and broke out of line, angling in the direction of the jump point. “Here we go again.” I muttered. Ships in line began to radio us in protest, but I ignored them. Zooming past them, I checked on the position of our attacker. He was still outside of his effective range, but his closure was good. I noticed on the scanner readout that he had new engines.

“Hey, Snake, he’s got new engines. I guess you shot his other one up so bad that he had to have ‘em both replaced.”

“Nice observation.” Snake muttered, non-plused. Then, as if an idea had come to him, he perked up. “Hey, boss! What output are those engines rated?” I took a look at the scanner. “Looks like they’re performing at Class J level, but I can’t be too sure. Why?” Snake stopped firing altogether, and I heard him open his periodical computer. “I think we may have an advantage.”

In the mean time, he still closed on us, and had just gotten within range to open up on us. I began ducking and weaving, hoping to avoid any more damage from those humongous death-rods he had on him.

“How about shooting him?!?” I demanded as Snake continued to fiddle with that blasted contraption of his. “Just hang on.”, he reassured me. “Hang on” isn’t very reassuring when you’re being shot at. I swung around behind a bulk freighter and hugged its hull tightly, hoping that, by the time the Hayades had moved around it to find me, I’d be able to find another hiding place. With any luck, I could hide behind bigger ships all the way to the jump point.

Finally, I heard the periodical computer close. “When he finds us, see if you can get in behind his guns. I want to see something.”, Snake instructed. I snorted. “Behind his guns? How do you propose I do that? Ask him?” “Do it the same way you do anything; auto-pilot and dumb luck.” I bristled at Snake’s jab. This just wasn’t the time for it. “I’ll see if I can, but no promises.” I said. “You never keep promises anyway. You’re a privateer.”, Snake came back. I couldn’t retort.

Within a minute, the hunter found his way around the mammoth haul and started lining up for a strafing run, hoping to pinion us against it’s hull with his fire. Before he had a chance to draw a solid bead on us, I kicked the engines and pushed off from the titan, throwing the ship into a corkscrew maneuver as I tried to close the distance between us and our assailant. I switched my scanner to attempt a lock-on, and possibly to drop an IR missile in his direction, but the corkscrew kept my nose just far enough off of him to prevent a forward-looking lock. Instead of firing directly at him, Snake carefully angled his shots so that our attacker couldn’t move into position to draw a bead on us without taking hits. Instead, he dove into a corkscrew of his own, counterclocking ours, and increased his speed, knowing that he could out-turn is once we passed each other. The only advantage we has was that Snake’s turret could fire to the sides and rear as well as front, while his guns were forward-facing. The closer the quarters of the dogfight, the smaller his cone of fire would be, and if we could use that to our advantage, it might give Snake enough time to wear him down. The problem was that, eventually, he would understand our tactic and put some distance between us. Once he did that, it would be all over. We were too far from the jump point to make a run for it, and if he brought his nose to bear on us, those railguns would tear us apart.

Snake peppered shots at him as our corkscrews closed the distance. I still didn’t know exactly what Snake wanted to see so closely on this ship, but if it didn’t turn anything up, his gamble would have killed us. We passed within fifty feet of each other; so close, in fact, that our shields crackled against each other. Snake swore with excitement.

“That’s it! That’s it! Come around!” he cried.
I pulled the highest G turn that my ship would produce, making sure to keep the Hayades within Snake’s line of sight. Snake rattled of three quick bursts and cursed. I didn’t like how disappointed he sounded.

“Ace, get us out of here. His shields are too thick for what I had in mind.” I growled in rage. “That’s it.” I snarled. “I’m gonna let him run, and as soon as I get a rudimentary lock on him, I’m dropping four IR’s his way. That oughta keep him busy.” Snake nearly choked at what I’d just said. “FOUR?! You’re going to drop FOUR missiles at him? Those IR missiles aren’t cheap!”, he rationalized. “Hey”, I retorted, “It’s not cheap, but it might buy us enough time to bust it through the jump point.” Snake sighed and sent a few more shots at the Hayades as we finished the turn; zooming just past him again as he attempted to draw a bead on us. Some shots connected, but they didn’t drain his superior shields enough to collapse them.

I cut the drives, hit the brakes, and used the maneuvering thrusters to rotate us towards the Hayades, who was attempting a high-speed turn in order to make another pass at us. Just as he saw that my nose was pointed towards him, he snap-rolled off to the left and broke away from his run, opting instead to put some distance between us. I re-ignited the drives and let him gain way, all the while keeping my forward scanner trained on him. I achieved a stage two lock, dropped four munitions, and broke for the jump point as they ignited and rocketed after him. “That oughta keep you busy!”, I said aloud as he began his own intricate dance with the missiles. Snake kept an eye on him as I weaved through traffic and dove into the nexus ahead of a passenger transport.

As we crossed the transit range, I cut the engines and ignited the jump drive, praying that no one was doing the same thing on the other side. “Jump!”, I announced. The last thing I saw before jump transit was one of the missiles coming close enough to his ship to arm the proximity detonation. It barely missed his flank, and as the distance between the two increased again, it detonated, spraying his underside with a storm of shrapnel. Then the sickening, gut-wrenching sensation of hyperspace jump grabbed my hightened senses and tortured them.

The jump was over as quickly as it began, and I sorely wished Snake had been kidding about not stocking up on painkillers. As the stars swirling around my head began to dissipate, I sighed with relief to see that we hadn’t come through just as someone was closing into the transit range. I steered us in the direction of the manufacturing station and brought us up to maximum cruising speed. I was hoping that the missile hit had destroyed or crippled our attacker so that he wouldn’t be able to follow us through the jump point, but I couldn’t leave it up to chance. At maximum speed, I dove through the surrounding traffic, eliciting hails of disapproval and even a threat or two. I also noticed insys patrols falling into position behind me. I would have normally been very nervous about it, but, considering my circumstances, they were a welcome sight.

“Hey, buddy, what’s the rush, huh? Your cargo that hot?”
“Howdy, chief. Just makin’ way to keep that headhunter from blowing my butt off.” The lead craft (there were two) clicked his mic twice and maintained position. Then he spoke up again. “I’m checking your registry. It seems this is the second time you’ve broken jump point protocol in this system. You are aware, of course, that there are penalties and fines for this?”

I laughed, then responded. “Right now, I’d pay you half my profit on this run just to keep that goon off of me if he pops through the jump point.” Now, if we had been talking to confleet personel, they would have immediately taken some sort of action. Headhunting is illegal according to the Articles of Confederation. However, insys personel could usually care less. The bribe may have gotten their attention, but certianly not their sense of duty. Without so much as acknowledging what I’d just said, he did the standard contraband sweep. “Your cargo looks clean, unless you’re using those sun lamps to grow narcotics. You’re free to go.” And with that, they peeled off of my tail. I knew that we’d be contacted shortly about the “penalties and fines”. “Man, I hate insys.”, Snake declared from his turret.

No sooner had he finished that thought than the jump nexus opened in the short distance behind us; our attacker emerged from the orifice and immediately angled in our direction. “Holy crap! He’s persistent!” Snake complained. He took his first shot at range, and missed by some margin. His fire had, however, attracted the attention of insys, and, in the interest of their own safety, they engaged him. I figured that, with the two insys fighters keeping him busy, I could slip in a few shots and possibly take him out. I about-faced and kept my speed up, switching my scanner into “Auto-Lead” mode instead of trying to get another missile lock. I’d used enough missiles against him already. I noticed that his shields were still thin from where the missile blast had caught him. The scan also revealed that his bottom armor was somewhat chewed, though not badly. “It’s a start.” I sighed to myself.

The two insys fighters started to rattle off the usual warnings and statute quotations as they approached the Hayades. I doubt they even noticed that his guns were railguns, or that he was mounted with four of them. As the fighters assumed a flanking position, he braked and they shot past him, directly into his cone of fire. His first volley struck the second craft directly in the rear quarter, and tore it apart. The shields had barely weakened the shot at all, so the four shots tore the engines off of the fighter entirely. The pilot inside alerted a ‘mayday’ call to his wing leader as his craft tumbled helplessly end-over-end from the hit. The next volley caught the spinning wreckage in the midsection, and literally ripped it apart. The pilot inside gurgled a scream as the atmosphere was sucked from his cockpit, just before that section smashed into another free-floating section, crushing both hunks of craft into debris. There was no explosion, only scattering junk, escaping atmosphere, and spilling fuel.

Snake opened up his first volley, his shots scattering past the wreckage and probing for the Hayades. A few of his shots hit spinning chunks of debris and burned them in half. The lead insys craft rolled away from a volley of railgun shot and scrambled with his afterburner, hoping to put some distance between him and the Hayades’ cone of fire.

The Hayades ignored us and swept after him, not giving him any room to breathe. I used this to my advantage by pulling in behind him, and a little low, inverted in relation to his position so that Snake would be able to poke at his weakened shields. Snake’s shots scored occasional hits as I tried to follow him through twists and turns, occasionally taking pot shots with my own front-mounted lasers.

I heard Snake grunt as he loosed another string, which fell just beside the fighter. “Any bright ideas?” I asked, knowing that it was just a matter of time before the hunter wiped out the remaining insys fighter and turned his attention on us. “Just one.”, came his reply. I stayed in position as Snake fired again and again. After a few more volleys, Snake’s shots collapsed his bottom shields and hits began to score his armor. I looked beyond the hunter to see the lead insys fighter spinning out of control from a hit. The hunter slowed and lined up for the killing shot when Snake announced loudly, “There! Got ya now, sucker!” I smiled and watched expectantly for Snake to send some sort of killing shot into the fuselage of the Hayades. Instead, he stopped firing altogether. What happened next surprised the heck out of me.

About a half a second later, the Hayades’ top/rear quarter blew out in a dazzling display of light and burning pieces. What remained of the fighter drifted helplessly; my scanner showed his power output at zero. Completely and utterly intrigued, I pulled up beside him. The pilot inside was dead, his face and chest burned, smoking, and unrecognizable. The next thing that caught my eye was a logo stenciled discreetly under his cockpit. Snake and I both recognized it and announced in unison: “Crisk” “I’ll be danged.”, Snake said, just as surprised as me. “Ol’ Crisk must have put sent one of his dogs after us from prison on Greenly. Get a shot of the logo. Maybe we can get a reward or something.” I took a shot of the tiny logo with my scanner camera and pulled away.

The injured insys pilot regained control of his craft and move into position behind us. “What in the world did you do to him?” The pilot asked. I shrugged, knowing that the pilot couldn’t see the gesture. Snake crawled up from his turret and poked his head past me. I hit the ‘transmit’ button for him. “Lucky shot overloaded him. Enjoy your saved butt, bobby.” I released the button and grinned at Snake.

“Overload?”
Snake collapsed against the bulkhead and wiped the sweat from his face. “You noticed he had new engines. Well, I checked the output of those new engines against the manufacturer’s power plant. The output of the engines was too high for the capacitors. That “lucky shot” was his guns. The wiring diagram from the earlier model Hayades showed that the guns all ran along the same circuit from the power plant’s capacitors, instead of individually. All I had to do was hit one of those guns and break the circuit. As soon as the circuit broke, the capacitors started overloading. Couple seconds later, the entire power plant blew. Probably sent enough sparks flying in his cockpit to cook a turkey right then and there.” I chuckled. “Judging from how burned he is, I’d say it most certainly did.” Snake smiled and chuckled.

“We’ll be at the base in two hours. If there’s any reward for this evidence against Crisk, we’ll be able to take a day or so off and fix the turbines in the engine. Maybe even get some upgrades to some of our stuff.” Snake and I high-fived at the idea. The intercom came to life. It was our insys sucker.

“Boys, bad news for you.” I sighed and turned to the console.
“Go ahead.”, I responded. “Your fines come to two thousand credits.”
“WHAT!?” I screamed back. “Two thousand credits? For a traffic violation?”
He peeled off my tail and headed back for the jump point. “Two thousand credits. You can pay your fines at the Division of Space Lanes office on the second planet. Be safe, boys.” And his transmission was over. I swore. The fines, plus the parts to fix the afterburner, plus fuel, plus re-arming my missile hardpoints, plus repairing the dings in the armor . . . I ran a quick calculation . . I wasn’t happy with the results.

“Well, Snake, it looks like we’ll have enough money to get repairs, plus fix our engine, if we work fast, but we can forget any upgrades. And we have to fix the engine fast. Very fast.” Snake nodded, as he stood up and started to crawl back down into his turret.

“Oh, Snake, by the way.”
“Yeah?”
“Good eye.”
“Thanks, I guess.”

"Damsel in . . . Not Really"

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Damsel In . . . Not Really"
by Nicholas Mahaffey

I sat in my chair in the bar. For the moment, I was enjoying the sensation of a full stomach. It was a rare occurrence. I'm a privateer. My partner and I fly missions for hire. We usually just sit here in the bar. We wait for people to come in with some need for a mission and a pocket full of money. Mostly the latter. Problem is, people just don't seem to have enough problems to need a privateer to fly for them. This is bad for business.

My partner, Snake, came back to the booth where I was sitting. "Nope.", he said. "I checked the board. No good missions. Nothin' but military patrols and insys cargo runs." I gave a disgusted snort. "It figures.", I said. "No one wants to move off-world anymore. They're all scared of those blasted pirates." "Yeah.", Snake replied. "If I had a credit for every time I heard about that terrorist ambush on the Tellison-Markins rout, I'd be rich. They'll never get over that." "People are just too paranoid these days.", I said. "They'd rather play it safe on this garbage hole than let people like us transport them to somewhere else. Remember that skitzy guy who wanted transportation to Phelion?" Snake shook his head. "Yeah. Poor guy. Scared that the Monks of Gethill were going to come after him." I gave an annoyed snort. "The Monks of Gethill didn't even know he was in this system. They were still searching the Albridge system. He should've gone while he could . . ."

Snake and I continued like this for a few moments while we watched people entering and leaving the bar. Mostly the ones who were entering. As we talked, a short woman walked into the bar. She looked like a flyer herself. She was five-foot-two with purple hair that came to just above her shoulders. She was wearing a black leather coat that was rather tattered, a white shirt with an unrecognizable insignia on it, and a pair of cheap khaki pants. All in all, not that bad. She walked up to the bulletin board and looked it over before giving a sarcastic smile at the choices. Annoyance evident in her walk, she made her way over to a booth and sat, running her fingers through her hair once. She was definitely a flyer. Nice figure, too. Snake gave her a glance and went back to watching for business. I watched her for a moment, more out of attraction than any hope of business. She pulled a pad and pen from the end of the table and quickly scribbled something on it. I became curious. She stood, stretched for a moment, and walked ver to the board to pin the paper up.

Snake noticed what I was doing. "Helllooo. Excuse me, we're watching for business here, not babes." I threw him an annoyed glance and looked at where she had put up the paper. "She put something on the board.", I said. "Do what?", he said, turning to look at the board. I got up and walked over to the wall where the board was and read the paper. It said:

Attention all pilots!
Wingman needed for the Tellison-Markins run.
Pirates expected. Pays C-5000
Meet me in the bar to accept.

I looked at Snake. His face showed agitation. "No way, man. That's asking for trouble." I, ignoring Snake, pulled the paper from the board. Just then, I noticed the girl was watching me. I walked over to the table where she was and sat down. "I understand you need a wingman.", I said, keeping an eye out for anyone watching us. Snake stood at the board with his arms folded and shaking his head. The girl glanced at Snake, then at me, her brow raised. "He's my gunner.", I said. She nodded and returned to my question. "Yeah.", she said. A contralto. I thought to myself. "What's it to you?", she asked. Feisty. I thought. "I might be able to facilitate your need, Miss . . .", I said. "You can call me Carla.", she said. "Is that your real name?", I asked. "Real enough for you.", she said. Hmm. Smart, too. "Fine.", I said. "And I could also use the five thousand credits." She gave a slight grin and nodded. "A real mercenary.", she said. "Not too many around these days." Just then, a man in the corner of the bar began to shout. He was drunk. Carla looked in his direction for a moment. I used this time to study her.

She appeared to be in her early twenties. The patch on her coat said class of '31, so she had to be just out of school. I'd say give or take a year, I was close to guessing her age. I was in the class of '28, which made me twenty-four. She looked like she had been flying for years. The signs of living in bars and sleeping in space ships were evident: dirty clothes, unkempt hair, unhealthy thinness, and a few burn scars here and there from sparks flying in the cockpit. She also looked like she hadn't slept in two or three days.

She finished checking on the commotion and looked back at me. "How well can you fly?", she asked. I leaned back in my seat and glanced away for a moment. "I got a butt that's never been kicked.", I said, almost bragging. She didn't look impressed. "Good. What do you fly?" I thought for a second to remember the particular name of my ship. "A Black Sun 490.", I said, hoping that I wasn't mistaken. Carla didn't look too thrilled. "Old design. Does it actually fly?", she asked convincingly. "Of course it does!", I said, insulted. "Most Black Sun models have been blown up by now.", she said. "Do you want my help or not?", I asked, getting tired of the conversation. "Sure.", she said. "We launch immediately. I'll be heading out of bay six. I'll meet you at the top end of the base." "Okay then.", I said. "Let's go." I could hear Snake give a grunt of disbelief from the bulletin board. "See you at the top.", Carla said. "And be ready for pirates."
In Space

Snake settled into his turret underneath my cockpit and strapped in. "This is crazy.", he said. "I know.", I retorted. "But it's also lucrative." I switched on my radio. The channel was filled with chatter from passing ships. I listened for a moment for Carla's voice. She wasn't speaking at the moment. I glanced at my scanner to see how many ships were in the immediate vicinity. Not too many. I pushed down on the stick for a moment to warm up the controls, then rolled and banked starboard towards the top of the base. After a moment, and a near collision with a Rampart class fighter/merchant, I reached the top section of the base. I listened to my radio again for Carla, but she still wasn't talking. I knew she had to be out there, though.

After a moment of waiting, Carla's voice crackled over my radio. "Okay.", she said. "Let's get going. We'll be going through the jump point to Barici." I had no objections, save the fact that the Barici system was hardly ever patrolled by anything other than the local militia. "Let's go.", I said. It was about that time that I noticed what Carla was flying. Five hundred meters to port was a P-593 Razor. Usually a ship flown by the military, and the occasional pirate. It was designed as a shuttle or cargo ship, but was armed with six cannon mounts up front. Not to mention the Jenson 6000 Missile Launching System! I figured that the launcher was a personal touch. It sure beat the Stony 5403 hardpoint system that I was using. I flipped a switch on the console and my navigation map appeared. After entering the course for the Barici jump point, I signaled Carla and leveled on the nav indicator to begin the trip. A moment later, Carla took the lead in formation and set out as well.
At the jump point

The jump point appeared as a distant ball of swirling blue gas suspended in the endless void. The apparition had no matter to it, though, because it was composed of some type of energy that was incomprehensible to modern science. I checked my scanner to see what type of craft were at the jump point. The radar simply blinked and sputtered for a moment before showing a hazy readout that looked like a mixture of military and civilian craft. It didn't look like there were any pirates there at the moment. If any showed up, the military fighters would take care of them.

Snake swiveled his turret every now and then to get a better look at passing ships, occasionally identifying a clan or cult of some type by the markings on different craft. "Kahlian Mutants.", he called out after examining a passing convoy. I ignored him for the moment, keeping my attention on Carla's Razor. The rounded edges gave it a more ferocious appearance than a regular cargo shuttle. The bulky body and sloping nose made it look strong rather than fat. I checked my scanner again for any hostile ships. Still none. The jump point was about 5,000 klicks away, so I started warming up the jump engines. Carla picked up her speed and moved out in front. After a moment, her ship vanished in a white flash as she jumped out-system. I waited until my ship was within the blue sphere before I pressed the button on my console. "Jumping.", I said out of instinct. The emptiness outside gave way to a white and pink cloudy haze as the force of several G's pressed me into the back of my acceleration couch.

The haze cleared to reveal the clear, empty, black void again. I shook my head to clear the fog and tried to relax my stomach. I wished, for the moment, that my stomach hadn't been filled so shortly ago. After a moment, I looked at my radar to check the situation. The Barici system, for the time being, wasn't going to be my death place. Carla's ship was 200 meters ahead and just a little low in relation to my position. Her ship appeared in my targeting VDU. Her Razor, I noticed, had a few dents here and there, probably from a previous fight. I turned to my navigation map to see what our next destination was. The next stop was the jump into Tellison. I pressed a few buttons to enter it into the computer and waited for a response. "Course entered.", the computer said in a monotone feminine voice. I, after some time, had grown to like it. Go figure.

After about ten minutes, we were roughly a quarter of the way to the jump point. A few passing merchants were the only craft in the immediate area. I noticed Carla's ship swaying back and forth just a little. She was probably playing with the controls out of boredom. I switched on my comm system and tried to think of something to say. "So . . .", I began, "do you come to this system often?" I knew immediately that I had said something stupid. I heard Snake burst out laughing in his turret. Carla's image appeared in my communications VDU. She looked like she thought I was trying something. "I mean, do your missions bring you through here a lot?", I said, trying to make myself not look like a complete idiot. Carla looked at me like she wasn't quite sure about me. She finally answered. "I come through here every now and then, but not too often. Why do you ask?" I tried to sound normal and nonchalant. "Just curious." She gave a slight grin and closed down her comm system. Probably, I guessed, to help keep me from making myself look any more stupid. Snake began to laugh harder. I picked up a small tool and fought the temptation to drop it on his head. He popped up through the hatchway. "You just have a hard time with women, don't you?", he asked. I jerked left on the stick and caused him to fall back into his turret. He didn't bother me much after that.

I took a close look at the merchant cargo vessels. They were in an odd formation for a merchant convoy. All of the markings were correct, however, so I didn't pay them much attention. Snake didn't sound like he liked them all that much. I ignored him, as usual. Just then, red dots started appearing on my scanner. Snake saw them too. "Whoa! Red pipers!", he exclaimed. My scanner showed the hostiles congregating around the merchants. Carla's face appeared in my VDU. "Pirates! Six marks, three o'clock high. Tally-ho." Her Razor broke to starboard as she increased her speed. I pushed the throttle forward as I turned my own ship to face the bandits. "Turret station reports ready.", came Snake's report. "I just wish I knew where those fighters came from." I muttered a quick agreement and engaged the afterburner. The ship rattled violently for a moment, then accelerated. Carla appeared on my screen again. "Those fighters must have been docked on those ships. I knew that formation was odd." I could hear her computer giving system reports while she spoke. Her port shield generators had moderate damage. I was jealous, for a moment, because she even had shields. I had to rely on reflective armor and Snake's aim. It was usually Snake's aim that saved us. Snake fired a test shot and pivoted to face the immediate threat.

The six fighters gathered in a cluster, but not really a formation. My targeting computer picked up on the first one and began to work on a missile lock. I was glad for my hardpoints, even if they were old. Carla's guns burst into action as the enemy came into range. One fighter broke away and angled towards me, the rest engaging on Carla. I got the impression that they'd all been introduced before. Snake rattled off a dozen quick shots with the brand new Starburst laser that we bought with the money from our last mission. The money that wasn't spent on repairs, that is. The one fighter that had engaged on us dodged down to avoid the shot. I suddenly remembered that we had taken the laser that we had before and had it mounted on the front of the ship. I searched for a moment before finding the switch that turned it on. I let it warm up for a moment while I maneuvered the ship so that Snake could get better firing angles on the hostile fighter. I glanced out the top window to see how Carla was doing. Her Razor was arching up and firing on one of the five fighters that were dancing about her.

The ship jarred to the side. I looked at my readout to see that the armor on the port side of our ship was down to eighty-seven percent. I could hear Snake mutter under his breath at the attacking ship as he fired another volley of bright orange beams. The shots caught the hostile fighter in the starboard flank. Chunks of twisted metal armor fell away as Snake continued to pound away at the vulnerable broad side of the fighter until it exploded into a ball of flaming gasses, fuels, and metal fragments. Snake let out a howl as he rotated his turret to aim at the other hostile ships. Two of the remaining fighters turned towards us. I let out a stream of shots with my front mounted laser. It wasn't as easy to aim as Snake made it look. My shots were off to the right. Snake let out a burst of fire that caught one of the fighters in the nose. It slew around and finally spun out of control as the flight control systems took damage. I tried to aim at the spinning fighter to perhaps make my first personal kill. My shots raked across the bottom of the fighter, but it still didn't blow. Carla's face appeared in my VDU as she let out a cry of victory. "BURN!", she screamed. I looked out the window to see her Razor do a roll as it flashed through a red cloud of smoke and fire. The two other fighters around her brought their guns to bear on her. She snap- rolled and jerked up just as they began to fire.

Snake let out a scream. "Break left! He's gonna shoot!" I yanked the stick to port just in time to avoid the red beams. It didn't feel to great to see them streak past the cockpit. Snake growled as shot after shot poured from the laser on his turret. The fighter dove and caught a hit or two just above the engine mounts. I rolled to give Snake a better shot, deciding to leave the shooting to him. He lined up on his target again and fired. His shots pounded the top of the fighter. The hostile flared his afterburners to escape. I turned to tail him and tried to engage my own afterburners. The ship rattled violently, again, and began to speed up. The pirate cold-dumped his missiles and cut his speed to zero, signaling his surrender.

I turned my attention to Carla. She was twisting in a complicated corkscrew maneuver as the remaining two pirate vessels tried to follow her. I lined up on the first of them and waited for my targeting computer to attain a missile lock. The red box on the heads-up display turned as it tightened around the fighter. Finally, the box stopped turning and the computer announced "missile locked" to notify me of the lock. I stabbed the button on the side of my stick with my thumb. My ship rocked to one side as the missile blasted away from the hardpoint and streaked towards its target. I watched the trail of white smoke as the tip of it closed on the fighter until it blossomed into a bright flash. When the smoke cleared, the fighter wasn't there. Snake gave an enthusiastic whoop and rattled off a volley of shots at the remaining debris for emphasis. Carla banked right and rolled, performing a snap-up afterwards to bring her target into her cone of fire. Her guns blazed as she passed dangerously close to the pirate ship. Shots lanced out from Snake's laser as the pirate came within range. I lined up on the fighter and tried my aim again. My shots actually hit. The fighter, more afraid of Snake's shots than mine, shook left and pulled up-and-over to get another shot at Carla. She lit her 'burners and outran his aim.

I lined up again and fired. My shots hit inside the nozzle of his engine, causing it to sputter. Snake squeezed off a round of shots that immolated the armor around the engines. The engines of the pirate ship began to spark. About that time, Carla's Razor flashed by as a missile popped out of her launcher. She was going so fast that it seemed to fly in formation with her ship for a second before it punched into the nose of the fighter. Carla's ship bucked to the side from the proximity blast. "Good,", she said. "But there's more." I watched as Carla closed on the surrendered ship and blast it out of the sky. Then she turned and fired on the damaged pirate. The fighter exploded in a red blaze.

"What are you doing!?!", I screamed over the radio. Carla's annoyed face appeared on my VDU. "If any of them survive, they'll be back to kill us. We have to make sure none of them survive." I didn't like the idea of killing surrendered fighters, even if they were pirates. Carla turned towards the convoy of merchant vessels. "Now, let's blast these cap ships and get out of here before more arrive.", she commanded. I formed on her wing and targeted the closest of the pirate cargo vessels. The turrets on the cargo vessels began to hail defensive fire on us. Carla turned up her 'burners a bit and closed on the cap ship. As I waited for a missile lock announcement, a huge missile streaked away from under Carla's wing. "She's got torpedoes!", Snake announced in amazement. The large munition struck the capital ship in the flanks and punctured the shields and armor. The other side of the ship burst outward into fragments and fire.

Carla's Razor slowed to regular speed and turned towards another ship. I watched the dying cap ship, firing my laser to finish it off quickly. As long as the ship was firing at me, I was firing back. Another torpedo streaked away from Carla's wing. I watched as it plowed into the front of the other ship. The pirate cap ship bloomed into a ball of flame. Carla let out a scream of aggressive tension. I decided to take on one of the other ships. Snake turned and fired on another ship. The defensive turrets began to eat away at our armor. We continued to trade fire with the ship until Snake finally put a hole deep into the guts of the ship. The ship leaned starboard for a moment, then broke in half in a terrific explosion.

There was one ship left, and it was the biggest. Carla unleashed her devastating torpedo attack while I unloaded a missile I had managed to lock onto the cap ship. The radio came alive as the communications officer of the pirate vessel sent out an SOS "Mayday! Mayday! Under attack! We won't last long! Mayday!" I heard people in the background of the cap ship's bridge. One officer was reporting the incoming torpedo that Carla had launched. The torpedo struck the ship in the side just before my missile impacted just a little closer to the front. "Mayday! Mayday! We're hit! We can't . . .", the transmition started getting scratchy. "We. .. sys. . . ure! We . . . down!" Explosions rippled up the spine of the ship until it came apart. A giant, visible shock wave flashed out just before the flaming hulk of the ship erupted into a brilliant light, making a false dawn.

Carla appeared on my VDU again. "Good. Let's keep on to the jump point. Two more jumps to the Markins system. Next jump takes us into Tellison. We shouldn't run into any more pirates.", she said. I looked at her for a moment and wondered what kind of life she lived. "Such big toys for a cute girl like yourself.", I said. She grinned slightly for a moment. "They come in handy when I need them.", she said. "But they usually just make sure people don't mess with me too much." I gave her a lopsided grin and closed off the comm signal. Snake climbed up out of the turret again and began to open the rations box. He pulled out two quick energy bars and began to munch on one. "Banana flavor.", he said. I reached for the other bar, but he jerked it away. "No.", he said with his mouth full. "Thith one'th mine. Ge'cher own." I ignored him and turned back to set the plot for the jump into the next system.

At the jump to Markins

I waited for Carla's Razor to jump into the Markins system before I entered the jump point. Her ship vanished in a flash. I moved into the blue sphere and pressed the button on my console. "Jumping.", I muttered, exhausted. We hadn't run into any more pirates, but the local police decided to pull a random cargo search for illegal material. We didn't have any cargo, and Carla was only carrying some wood to the base at the end of the route. I still didn't appreciate having to be stopped.

The space ahead faded into the pink and white clouds of a jump tunnel. I gritted my teeth while the feeling of being flung across the universe in a matter of seconds surged through my whole body. When the jump ended, I breathed deeply and tried to relax my muscles as much as I could. Every part of my body was protesting from the torture of jumping. Carla began talking. "Okay, run's just about over. All we have to do is make it to the Gaia Bio-sphere colony and we're all done." I hated bio-spheres. They were full of a bunch of new age weirdos or health freaks. I set my nav computer for the colony and pressed the autonav button.

At Gaia Bio-sphere

I settled into the booth in the bar. Thank God for space-ports. Snake sat on the other side of the booth and handed me a soda and a wrapped burger. I unwrapped it. It had the unmistakable smell of synthetic meat. I hated synthetic meat. I bit into the burger and waited for the taste of artificial cow. I got it.

Just then, Carla walked into the bar. She looked around for a minute, then spotted us in the booth. She walked over to us and sat down next to me in the booth. I threw Snake a quick glance. His brow was raised. "Good job.", Carla said. "And, as I promised, here's your five thousand." "Thank you.", I said politely. "Now tell me; why did you attack the defenseless pirate ships?" She gave an amused snort. "Those were the pirates who pulled that ambush a few months back. I was commissioned by the sector government to eliminate all pirate craft. I was getting paid twenty thousand for the mission. I figured that I would need a wingman, so I hired you. But I wouldn't get paid if any pirates were left alive."

I nodded my tolerance. "So,", I began, feeling a little lucky, "how 'bout I buy you a soda.." Carla cut me off. "Forget it, flyboy. I only needed you for the mission." She stood up and began to walk away, but turned back around and put her face nose to nose with mine. "Besides,", she said, "your friend is the cute one." With that, she turned and began to walk off again. I looked at Snake and scowled. He looked at me, then at Carla, then at me again. Then he got up and followed Carla. "Hey, baby, wait up!" I allowed my mouth to smirk and took another bite of my burger.

"Snake's Story"

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Snake's Story"
by David Dixon

I yawned. This was becoming very, very boring. I was sitting down at one of the many tables at the "Third Star Bar," a cheap and disreputable establishment on Dunatis, close to Phonos E, and scanning through the "Help Wanted" section of the Dunatis Chronicle. Staring at the screen on my wrist computer was making my eyes tired and my head hurt.

Perhaps that was what caused me to take one of the ads seriously. It read like this:

Excellent pilot, Excellent ship.
Ball turret gunner requested. Pays well.
All interested parties should meet me at table four, at the Third Star Bar at 1900.

Any other time I would have snorted, chuckled, and moved on, but on that day something possesed me to check it out.

I glanced at my watch: 1855. I shrugged my shoulders and looked around for table four. It was over in the corner, unoccupied. I stood up, left a credit on the table and walked over. Seeing that no one else was even remotely interested in the table I sat down and sprawled out in the booth.

I had been sitting there a few minutes when a tall, grizzled man covered in dirt strode up. He looked as if he hadn't shaved in days and his breath stank. I started to say something, but after a while in my line of work you start to realize it's best to keep your mouth shut.

"You the one that advertised?" the man asked callously.
"Yeah . . ." I answered, just to see what would happen.
"I'll work for ya', no matter what the pay, alright?" he interrrupted.

No unshaved, drunken, stinking, bum was going to get my job. "Tough," I said, shrugging my shoulders, "I've already got who I need. Maybe next time."

He muttered something foul under his breath and slunk away. Oh, well.

I sat there a few more minutes and checked my watch: 1912. This guy had better show up, I thought.

As I was thinking that, someone else walked up and stood in front of the table. I quickly evaluated him. He was wearing that traditional privateer/pirate outfit so popular in the movies: fake leather jacket, dirty shirt, and what at one time were jet black pants. He had one of those rediculous looking implanted watches in his wrist, the remnants of a fad that had swept the Outer Rim a few years back.

He stood with an air of authority, although over what, I wasn't sure. I just looked at him, once again waiting for someone else besides me to say something. He did the same thing. Cool customer, I thought.

To break the silence, I decided to make the first move: I raised my eybrows, as if asking a question.

At first he just stared but then his eyes narrowed. Small alarms begin ringing in my head; I stupidly ignored them.

"Are you the guy trying to hire a gunner?" he said suspiciously. The alarms were getting louder, like a missile lock tone.

I once again resolved that no one was going to get my job, not even this tough sounding pirate wanna-be. "Yeah, I am, what's it to ya'?" I responded just as suspiciously.

"What do you fly?" he asked.

Uh-oh, think quick. "Filian C-9," I answered, sounding more sure than I felt. This wasn't going good at all. "It doesn't matter anyway," I began, "I've already got the guy I-"

"What!?" he roared, "I'm the one who paid to advertise, you scum, and you pretended you were me!? I outta' shoot you!

"If you've taken my gunner, you bag of-" This was really not going well. I'd met people who would shoot people over something like this. I decided to end the conversation.

In one swift motion, I jumped up, grabbed my E14 Combat Knife from its sheath in the small of my back and extended it to his neck.

At least, that's what was supposed to happen. In reality, he saw it coming, jumped back and pulled an old style matter propulsion pistol from his side holster. Idiot! my mind screamed, why didn't you pay attention to the fact that he had a holster?

"Ahhhh!" he yelled, not moving his pistol. "First you take my place in the advertisement I paid for, and now you threaten me? What's going on?!

"Drop the knife, you piece of space junk!" he warned.

I looked around for some help. The bartender was the only one even looking; he looked as if he could care about as much if he knew an ant was going to die. Hey, I said the place was cheap and disreputable.

"Drop it!" the privateer/pirate said again, this time it was a threat. There was little I could do: I was a good five steps behind a table away from him; I had a knife and he had a gun.

My knife clattered to the floor. "All right, all right," I began, trying to untangle myself from what was rapidly becoming a very, very bad situation.

"No, it's not all right, punk-" he began.

"Punk?!" I cried, for a moment forgetting that the man who I was talking to had a gun on me, "I'm not the one walking around in clothes like I'm an extra from Jupiter's Warriors and pulling guns on everyone.

"Punk?! I'm not walking around with a watch stuck in my wrist!" When I commented on his watch he seemed to scowl in an embarrased sort of way.

He raised the gun to my forehead. I suddenly remembered that he was the one holding all the chips. Oops, Dummie, I thought, annoyed at myself.

"Yeah, punk," the man said, emphasizing 'punk', "you pulled a knife on me first, if you remember, and you're walking around pretending you're me!"

"Look," I said, talking quickly, "I can explain. I actually don't fly a ship, and I actually came here looking for a job." The man's expression turned from one of rage to one of amused interest.

"I just didn't want anyone else getting the job, so I pretended I was you. When you walked up, I was going to be the only one applying, so you'd have to hire me. See?" I queried.

He looked me over again. "Brilliant plan, Doctor, Just one question: how were you supposed to know when 'you' was going to get here?" he asked sarcastically. "You must not have thought that one out, or else this wouldn't be happening."

For the first time since we'd met, I couldn't think of anything to say.

"Anyway," I continued, "you're late, and I'm the only one here, so it looks like you've got to hire me-"

He laughed; it was good to hear him laugh but not so good to watch as his gun jiggled up and down with his laughter.

"And since you've got to hire me, would you get that blasted gun out of my face?" I asked as good naturedly as was possible.

He holstered his gun and sat down. I picked up my knife and sat down also, ignoring the triumphant smile on his face.

"What makes me want to hire you, anyway, Mr . . ." he asked, leaning across the table at me.

"Snake," I said, "everyone calls me Snake."

"Aside from the fact that you've shown yourself to be of excellent moral fiber," he continued. The last line was quite sarcastic.

"Well," I said, brushing past his barb, "aside from that, I'm not scared of danger . . . umm . . . I'm a halfway decent mechanic, a crack shot, and most significantly, I need a job." "If you're such a crack shot and mechanic, why don't you already have a job?" he countered.

"The same reason that with your excellent piloting skills, awsome ship, and large amounts of money to pay a turret gunner, need a turret gunner."

It was his turn to not say anything.

"I'll admit, Snake," he said awkwardly, "I kinda' lied a bit on the ad."

"Really," I asked sardonically, "It had better not be about the pay, your piloting, or your ship."

"What else is there to lie about, then?" he asked frustratedly.
"Good point," I admitted.
"Listen, I'll pay you 1,200 credits for this one mission I've got-" he offered.

"Are you crazy?" I asked, "I'm not talking single missions, I'm talking partnership here. Flying single missions is too dangerous; no incentive to bring back the gunner or hire him again.

"Partners; 60/40 split." I finished.

The man snorted. "I didn't ask for partners, I asked for a gunner-"

"Well," I countered, my anger rising, "I'm all you've got and I say-"

"Who's doing the negotiating, me or you?" the prospect boss asked, his voice getting louder.

"Well, Mr. I-kinda-lied-about-the-ad, I don't see a ton of gunners lining up to work with you, so you figure it out," I practically yelled, punching a finger in his chest.

"I ought to-" he spat, his face becoming red.
"Hire me," I cut in defiantly.

Despite his best efforts, his face broke into a smile. "Snake, you know, I really shouldn't trust you; but I'll hire you. Partners; 70/30 split."

"Renegotiable in a couple of months?" I asked suspiciously. I had a feeling I was forgetting something, but I couldn't remember what it was.

"Yeah, I guess so," he conceded reluctantly.
"If it helps you out any," I said shrugging my shoulder, "you're just the kind of person my mom told me to stay away from."

"A lot of good she did," he muttered, "you're a virtual saint."

"Hey," I returned, "at least I don't lie about business proposals to perfect strangers."

"Yeah, but you do pretend you're somebody else and pull knives on perfect strangers."

"I have a good reason," I said, trying to surpress a smile.

"What's that?" he asked in disbelief.

"My mom told me to stay away from people like you," was my answer. I smirked. He rolled his eyes and smiled.

I suddenly remembered what it was that I had forgotten when settling our busines proposal: "Let's see that 'excellent ship,' of yours."

He didn't say anything but nodded his head reluctantly. Uh oh.

We walked out of the "The Third Star Bar" towards the ship docking area. I suspected something was amiss when he led me past rows and rows of Hawks,

Kunoon 12s, Tamil 660s and other ideal craft. We soon walked down further to the cheapest docking spaces of all: Docking Area Z-9, Deck 1.

There in that docking bay, I got my first look at the ship that was destined to be my new home in a matter of speaking: somehow I knew, unfortunately, which one was his as soon as I saw it.

It was ugly, scarred, paintless, beaten, and looked overall like a flying deathtrap. I searched my memory for what type of ship it was; I drew a blank.

We stopped right in front of it.

"Here it is," he said, sounding more proud than he looked, and jesturing with his hands towards the ship.

"Oooohhh," I said in mock wonder. "I guess I know what you were lying about in the ad, aside from the pay."

"Hey," he protested, "you accepted the offer, I sure wasn't twisting your arm for you to take it."

"Fine, fine. Just one little tiny question: what in the universe is it?" I replied, also jesturing at the ship.

"A Black Sun 490," he replied, once again sounding surer than he looked.

"Oh," I said, remembering something I'd read. "That ship that they sell for about ten credits these days?"

"Hey," he argued as he crossed his arms, "the Black Sun's a good ship-"

"About five years ago," I interrupted. He shrugged his shoulders as if he could care less. Like many pilots, this one disliked people making fun of his ship, I could tell.

"You want a look at the turret?" he asked. I nodded, still taking it all in.

We climbed aboard, squeezing in the tiny hatch and then up into the cockpit. The cockpit was dirty, just like the rest of the ship, but was spacious enough. It was a remarkabely well laid out ship, suprisingly enough, with good cargo space, maintainance accesses, and, what I was most concerned about, a good sized turret, as turrets go.

The turret "hole" was located just behind the acceleration couch. It looked like it was originally there, which was good; it's not very comforting to climb into a turret that someone has just taken upon themselves to weld together. I was beginning to feel better about the whole thing.

Better until I actually climbed inside the turret. The first thing I saw as I sat down in the ripped false leather chair was a single laser in the dead center of the turret surrounded by four dirt-covered, scratched and scarred VDU's. That one laser was not originally installed, I could tell, because it was held to the turret face by "flexi-weld" and "vacuum tape."

Then I noticed the type of laser. It was a RWF-IF7, just one step above a flashlight, no, not even that, make it a very powerful flashlight. I reached out and grabbed its handle. A piece of the "vacuum tape" fell off into the floor and I could see light coming in through the hole in the turret. I looked up at him with a "you-must-be- crazy" look.

"What?" he asked shrugging. I held the look. "Ok, ok," he conceded, spreading his arms, "it needs a little work-"

"How'd your last gunner die? Did he fall out through the gaping hole?" I asked sarcastically, sticking my finger through the hole inbetween the turret face and gun.

"He quit. And that's never happened before, never," was his reply.

"There is no way, and I mean no way, that I'm gonna' get down in a turret and use a gun that's held on the to the ship by a bunch of freakin' tape!" I said, shaking my head in disgust at the overall situation.

"Look," he offered, "we'll put up some money and get it fixed: I'm sure somebody can do it cheap."

"Maybe," I agreed reluctantly, "what about that gun? That thing's an RWF-IF7-"

"Yeah, so?" he interrupted, "I heard it was good gun. I spent 1,500 for that gun."

"Who told you that?" I asked increduously, "This gun is a piece of junk. I've seen candles that are more powerful-"

"Shut up! Just shut up!" he practically exploded, "you are working with me now so there's no use complaining. I can't help it you're ungrateful, but you've already signed on.

"Tell me what it is your Highness requires and I'll see about it, but all I'll promise is to fix the turret."

"Fine, fine," I mumbled, "a new gun would be nice. If those VDU's don't work, they need to be replaced."

"They work," he assured me sullenly. "I-we-have a mission we've got to run tomorrow, so I'll go and get the turret fixed. In the meantime, load your stuff aboard."

He started to walk away but turned around, "And hurry up about it, will ya', we've got some work to do aboard."

Yeah, no kidding, I thought, scowling under his rebuke.

I got back to my room just above the Third Star Bar and loaded all my clothes into my ugly, dirty, green duffel bag. Just to spite my new employer, I laid down on my rock-hard bed and took a nap.

I awoke several hours later: it was dark outside now, as Dunatis's sun had set. I got up, yawned, grabbed my duffel bag, and left, not bothering to pay on my way out. The room wasn't worth paying for.

I arrived back at the ship and noticed that he was inside, the engines already fired up. Intrigued, I climbed aboard.

"Glad you could make it, Snake," was his greeting; actually it sounded as if he felt exactly the opposite. Oh, well.

"Yeah," I muttered in excuse, "I got . . . um, caught up."
"Mmm-hmmm," he said nodding. "Anyway, while you were getting caught up, I got the turret fixed, uploaded some new software and set the turret calibrations."

"Why are the engines fired up?" I asked, not bothering to thank him for what was probably three hours worth of work.
"We've got to leave early. The guy who hired me wants it done ASAP."

"Looks like he hired one to me," I said with a smirk.
"So did I," was his quick reply. My smirk was gone. "Now, get ready, 'cause we're leaving." With that, we were off.

I found, about thirty minutes later, that our mission was to take out a pair of pirate craft that sometimes inhabited a nearby jump point. I was down in my turret doing my calibrations which he had said he'd done earlier, when the action started.

"Two hostile CF-11s at three o'clock low!" came his yell.
"Tell 'em to wait 'till I get done calibrating this turret. I thought you said you calibrated this thing!"

"I did," he said, "what's wrong with it?"
"Oh not much, except for when I try to turn left I get whiplash, and when I turn right I get next to nothing," I replied.
"Picky, picky," was his reply.

According to my radar, they were about three thousand klicks out and it still wouldn't give me a good lock or scan. I couldn't even bracket them for target identification. Even so, I spun my turret around to face them.

He turned the ship in a radical right even as I was getting ready to let them have a mouthful of laser fire. I was now getting ready to give Phonos E, millions of klicks out, a mouthful of laser fire.

"How about telling me before you do that, will ya'?" I yelled.
"Sure," he yelled back.

The ship begin to shake as lasers buffeted our forward shields. I once again spun around to face the pirates. Finally I was able to bracket one. Above me and slightly forward, I could here the front laser capacitors firing, cooling, and firing again.

The enemy craft broke off and split up. One pulled up high out of my field of vision and the other bored straight in.

"Gotcha," I whispered as I bracketed him and then fired. The laser vibrated with each split second burst as crimson bolts flashed out. I saw several impact against his front shields. According to my "Target ID" VDU, they were now 89%. Now he was firing. His shots were green, indicating vastly surperior Zeon19's. What I wouldn't give for some ot those, I thought. As I was pondering that, a couple of his shots hit our shields right in front of me.

I flinched involutarily as they bored steadily in. Even so, we continued towards him. I punched a button on my lower left VDU console. According to it, our shields were at 20%.

"Hey, Boss," I screamed in semi-panic, "get out of his way, unless you want a dead gunner; our shields are at 20%!"

"I know that," he screamed back in total panic, "my controls are stuck!"

I swore. The enemy was getting closer; his shots were too. I pointed my gun at him and gave him several long bursts in the nose. His shields were now at 50%.

"How's that feel, sucker?!" I yelled at him in my excitement.

The pirate blazed by close enough for our shields to scrape and I tracked him all the way. My shots reached out and struck him right on the nose again. Evidently, his shields were weakened by his little brush with us, because as my shots collided with his ship I excitedly watched several black scorch marks appear in his dimond shaped cockpit area.

My boss's, or should I say, our, Black Sun 490 shook again. I rotated the turret around so that I was facing our ten o'clock and saw why. The other pirate flown CF-11 was giving it to us in the front. Once again, all the shots seemed to be aimed at me, the poor little turret gunner. Our shields have to be pretty weak, I thought, not having time to check because I was to busy aiming at him.

I jumped as a shot ripped open some metal on the bottom of the hull right in front of my turret. Yep. I fired at him, missing him as he weaved. I swore again.

"Got those controls fixed yet, ace?!" I called, still firing and missing.

"Not yet!" I heard him say, somehow even above my laser's capicitors. Another shot hit us and my top right VDU flickered and went out. I heard him swear, this time.

"Get those guys off of us!" he yelled, "Unless you want to die!"

"I'm trying, I'm trying," I said as I tracked and continued firing on the closest pirate. I finally hit him and he broke off from his run. That was no relief, however, because it was his buddy's turn. At least I had done some damage to him earlier, though.

He came up from our six o'clock and I noticed that his shields weren't coming up past 75%, probably as a result of the hits I'd given him. Either that or he was in a ship that ran like ours. I fired at him repeatedly, hitting him again. He flew straight under me and I lost him, not being able to turn fast enough.

"Where is he?!" I called up to my employer.

"Dead ahead and I've got the punk!" he yelled back. No sooner had he spoke, than the ship shuddered slightly and I was treated to a wonderful view of sparks and smoke as a missile left our forward launcher.

I couldn't see where it had gone, but it obviously hit becasue I heard a long "Yessssss!" from above me.

As I was spinning around to face the other pirate I posed a question: "Why in the world didn't you use that before?!"

"Targeting was out," he replied.
"Figures," I muttered, still firing. "Is that guy you hit with a missile dead yet?"
"No," he answered, "his controls are just out."

"Boy," I said sardonically, "I'd hate to be him." For the first time in the fight, one of us laughed. "Even so," I complained, "I can't hit him, because our controls are out too, and I can't bloody see him!"

"Not my fault, Snake," he called back. Our shields were now at a whopping 43%.

The other pirate was lining up on us and taking advantage of our inability to manuever by coming at us from above. I couldn't see him, much less shoot him. I watched as our shields began marching back downward.

Our ship was hit again and all my other VDU's went out. Just as I was about to curse the ship, guns, pirates, computer, calibrations, pilot, sun, space and anything else I could think of, we turned.

"The controls are back on line!" he yelled joyously.
"Great. Now point me where I can see the enemy, fool!" I yelled.
"Roger!" he responded.

Our pirate friend was evidently quite surprised that we were, in fact, able to do something but be a target because he didn't change course till it was almost too late. We narrowly missed each other, flying so close that I think I could read his name painted below his canopy. His shields were stronger at the moment than ours, so we went spinning away. As we tried to regain control, I noticed the disabled enemy craft to our six.

I turned and fired. Evidently, his shields were out as well as his controls becasue each one of my shots turned into a fountain of sparks as they hit. Finally one broke through, releasing the flammible oxygen. The next shot ignited it, turning the ship into a flaming torch for a brief moment. Then the fuel caught on fire and it exploded into shards, sending glowing pieces of metal cascading off our shields.

"Boooooommm!" I yelled in exultation. "Where is that other pirate punk, Boss?" I asked, now ready to take him on.

"He just jumped out, the coward," my boss answered in disgust. "Shoot. Now we only get half of the money." He swore, and I joined in.
"Just jump after him, why don't we?" I queried.

"Are you crazy?!" he asked, "On the other side of that jump is an uncleared aseroid belt; we'd be asking to die. Our controls have already gone out once, I don't want to have that happen near a bunch of rocks the size of your ego-"

"Yeah, yeah," I replied good naturedly. "Like I said, you're the one who goes around like a Jupiter's Warriors extra-"

"What is it with you and 'Jupiter's Warriors' extras, anyway?" he asked.

Great job, bozo, I thought. "Ummmmm . . ." I answered uncomfortably, "I'd rather not talk about it . . ."

"I'll bet you were an extra for 'Jupiter's Warriors' weren't you?" he asked as if he'd just thought of something.

"Shut up."

"Heeeeyyyy," he began, "you were an extra in Jupiter's Warriors!" His laughter filled the ship. "Maybe you shouldn't be 'Snake' but, 'Man-Who-Stars-In-Cheesy- Movies!" He guffawed. I started to laugh despite myself.

I stood up out of the turret, quietly grabbed my duffel bag and threw it at him. It missed, instead hitting his toolbox and knocking it over.

I sank back down into the turret to sulk. I heard something scrape along the metal floor towards me and looked up. A white handled wrench hit me in the nose.

"Owwwwww!" I screamed in surprise and pain. He merely laughed again and again, both at me being an extra in 'Jupiter's Warriors' and his hitting me with the wrench. On our way back to Dunatis, I sat in my turret and plotted my revenge.

"Drop Dead"

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Drop Dead"
By Nicholas Mahaffey

I rubbed my face, glad that the ordeal was coming to an end. Mr. Kepler hadn't been very cooperative; no, not at all. I'm a privateer. My partner, Snake, and I fly missions for hire. When we complete a mission, we usually prefer to receive full payment . . . actually, we always prefer to receive full payment. Plus some. Mr. Kepler, however, wasn't terribly satisfied with the quality of the ore we'd just delivered to him. Iron ore isn't very common here on Tersa IV, the "Obsidian Sphere" as this planet is sometimes called. Most of the surface was covered by large mountains composed of semi-precious stone. It had been terra-formed over a century ago, but it wasn't capable of supporting a wide variety of vegetations. The main exports were precious stones and ultra high-grade silica. Nearly everything had to be imported to the planet; food, fuel, clothing, and building materials. This shipment of ore we'd just delivered was apparently too low-grade to build the mining equipment that they'd intended it for. Mr. Kepler, a man in his early 50's with greying red hair and a firm grip, had insisted that we "return to sender."

The problem was that we had another job lined up and were eager to load our new cargo and head out. His majesty wasn't too pleased, then, when we told him to take up the issue with his supplier and then asked for our payment. After a debate over contractual obligations (and a few threats of legal action), he finally offered half of our original payment. I was furious, but didn't have time to argue with him. I was already late to meet with our next employer for the contract signing, and Snake was busy checking over the local publications for more job opportunities. Fortunately, our next employer's office was located in this same commercial building, just a few floors up. I, personally, was eager to return my pistol to its holster. This particular commercial structure allowed individuals to carry weapons on them as long as the weapon wasn't concealed. However, I had agreed to leave my sidearm in a cardboard deposit box just outside Mr. Kepler's door. My hip felt naked without the weapon in its holster. I kept it on my hip because it was much more "ergonomic", or, I could get to it more quickly when I felt the need.

Mr. Kepler finally handed back the manifest with "Paid" stamped at the bottom. I would have preferred "Paid in Full". I took it from his hand and headed for the door, perusing it on my way, still seething. "A pleasure doing business with you.", he said to my back, sarcasm dripping in his voice, and then a muffled cough. Normally, I would leave without a response, but today I just felt game. "Drop dead."

Thud.

I spun around quickly enough to make myself momentarily dizzy. There, on the floor, with a gaping, bloody hole in his forehead, was Mr. Kepler; stone dead and oozing brain matter. My first instinct was to hit the deck. I dropped to my knee and rolled onto my side, looking the room over once as I did. My eyes came to the door and found a black-clad man holding a smoking pistol, much like mine, only newer . . . and with a silencer. Before I could get a close look at him, he turned and ran down the hallway. I jumped up and ran out after him, grabbing my pistol as I passed the box. Thumbing the safety off, I cocked it and fired one shot at him as he rounded a corner; it took him in the torso. Instead of crumpling as he should have, he regained his footing and kept running; the bullet embedded in some kind of body armor. Before I could fire another shot, he was around the corner, and had too much of a lead for me to chase him.

I turned back to the body of Mr. Kepler, which by now was lying in a pool of blood; the hole in his forehead clogged with remaining chunks of brain. I walked calmly and stood by the corpse, too confused by the sudden happenings to really know what to do. I just stood there, with my smoking .45 in my hand. It was my bad judgment, I guess, not to make an attempt right away to contact the authorities. A few seconds later, a young secretary peered through the doorway to see Kepler’s body with me standing over it; gun still smoking. I’m sure it didn’t look too good. I know for certain that she didn’t like the looks of it. She screamed. Loud. She dropped the folders she was carrying and ran. I still stood there, now dumbfounded. It couldn’t have been ten seconds later that Snake burst into the room; his new E-14 combat knife drawn and ready.

“What the bloody heck?”, he demanded as he surveyed the same thing the girl had seen. I looked at him, shrugged, and replied. “He got shot.”

“Why on earth would you shoot him?”, Snake continued to demand. Not being in a terribly coherent state of mind, I thought briefly and said, “Well, he only gave us half our payment.” Snake’s eye’s widened and his jaw dropped, lips in a frown: an expression of surprise. “So you put a bullet in his head?!?”, he asked incredulously.

“Well, I didn’t.”
“Who then?”
“The black-clad man.”
“The who? What?”

“I was reading the manifest and I told Kepler to drop dead. Then he did. I looked up and there was a black-clad man in the doorway holding a smoking silenced .45.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. Maybe he didn’t like him.”

Snake backed up, stuck his head out of the door, and glanced both ways down the hall. When he was sure that no one was immediately on top of us, he looked more closely at Kepler’s blood-soaked head. As soon as he was satisfied with whatever it was he was hoping to learn, he stood up and announced, “Well, the half payment is a motive. The wound will suggest your gun. Did you fire a round?” I nodded. “Yeah. The black-clad man took off, so I took a shot at him. He was wearing body-armor.” Snake thought hard. “So, you have an empty chamber, but no bullet holes to prove that your shot wasn’t the one that killed Kepler. And did anyone else see this ‘black-clad man’?” I shook my head. “I doubt it.” With that, Snake shook my hand. “You, sir, are officially screwed; and I'm not entirely sure I believe you, to be honest."

I must have looked like a child; I admit it. I was certainly scared to death. I looked at Snake, my eyes suddenly blinking uncontrollably, and said, "You gotta believe me, Snake. I didn't shoot this guy. The last thing we need is to get entangled with the authorities again." Snake took another long look at the corpse and sighed. "Well, murder has never really been your style, so I guess I believe you." He shook my hand again, then continued. "The police, however, will be another story. Let's book."

I've noticed that, for some reason, we always seem to get caught by aggressors at the most inopportune times. Just as Snake and I turned to leave the room, four security guards came bounding down the hallway opposite the black-clad man had fled down. Luckily for us, three of them were only armed with big sticks. The third, however, was wielding a low-yield neutron rifle. By "low yield", I mean low enough yield to avoid destroying an entire section of wall if you miss your target, but certainly strong enough to turn a squishy, fleshy human into a squishy, fleshy splatter across said wall. The sight of that gun brought me back to composure, and we decided not to stick around to see if that particular guard was a good marksman. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”, he announced. “Fat chance!”, I retorted. With that, we ran down the hallway; doubled over as we ran to present a smaller target.

I’m glad we’d chosen to do that. The sound of a neutron weapon is unmistakable: something akin to the sound of a huge balloon popping, amplified through a p.a. system, with the bass response turned all the way up. No buzz, no fizzle, no pitch slides reminiscent of sci-fi movies. Just a deafening cross between a boom and a pop. That sound rang out a good three or four times in two seconds, and I felt two pulses of scorching heat zoom over my back. The other two must have been too high. The fourth shot hit the right side wall just five meters in front of me. A me-sized section of the wall shattered and sprayed across our path in fragments of plasti-brick, drywall, and electrical wiring. The lights in the hallway went out. “Oh, good.”, Snake heaved as we dashed the next few meters. “Less light to aim by.”

I felt a little better about it, too. That is, until the next volley of shots thundered after us. We had just reached the corner (the one that the black-clad man had escaped around) when the guard fired again. I dove around the corner to safety. Snake dove in the opposite direction, slamming himself into a wall, barely avoiding two shots that were intended for him. The shots instead tore two chunks out of the wall. As soon as the debris had fallen, Snake dove across the hallway and behind the corner; I was already a good ten feet ahead of him, probing for an exit. I could hear the shouts and footsteps of the guards chasing after us.

The thought suddenly occurred to me that I was carrying a .45 pistol, and that I could probably drop the three of them as they rounded the corner, and maybe even out-shoot the one with the neutron rifle, so long as my aim was better than his. The problem was that my .45 only held six shots, and I’d already fired one. Another problem was that, if I killed any security guards, I’d lose any chance I had of proving any sort of innocence. Gunplay was not an option; we had to make an escape.

Rounding another corner, Snake peered through an open doorway and spotted our salvation: an open window with a fire escape. I had already run past it when he called out to me. I turned my head to see him scrambling backwards to get to the doorway, and I did the same, hoping to dive through in time to avoid being seen by the security men. The room was an office, complete with a desk, cabinets, computer, and all other such office things. Snake and I quickly hugged the wall a few feet away from the door and prayed silently that none of the guards would peer in here far enough to see us hiding. It couldn’t have been more than seven seconds until the guards were past us and rounding the corner, but it felt like seven years. Snake and I traded glances and heaved a sigh of relief. Now that we had a moment of breathing room, we’d be able to make use of the fire escape and possibly make our way back to our ship. Snake must have read my mind for what he said next. “Well, I guess we won’t be attending our meeting upstairs, huh?” If we hadn’t been running for our lives, I might have chuckled at that.

When we were certain that the guards had indeed missed us, we scrambled to the window, and I proceeded to crawl out onto the metal fire escape. Just as I had gotten myself entirely through the opening, a fat businessman strolled casually into the room; this must have been his office. Imagine the look of shock and confusion at seeing two rough-looking characters like us making use of his window and the fire escape. Fortunately for us, in his shock, he didn’t speak. Snake, acting decisively, reached through the window and grabbed my gun from its holster.

The man’s eyes grew wide as he mumbled and stuttered, fearing the worst as Snake purposefully crossed the room, weapon in hand and trained on the man’s head. Just as I feared the man was going to scream like a little girl, Snake pistol-whipped him, leaving him out-cold but otherwise unhurt, aside from a cut on his forehead and the probability of a severe headache when he came to. As the unconscious man started to slump from his standing position, Snake gave him a gentle push so that he slid a few feet along the wall and away from the door: the same spot we’d been standing in less than thirty seconds ago. Snake handed my gun back to me. “That’ll learn ya to show up for work.” I commented. Snake smirked and climbed out the window.

We climbed quickly down the fire escape, making a half-hearted attempt to duck under the windows we passed in an effort to avoid being seen and intercepted. I paused for a brief moment to survey our surroundings. This building was part of a small cluster of similar buildings, which stood in the midst of a barren, sandy basin about ten kilometers wide. Unfortunately for us, the spaceport, along our ship, was five kilometers from where we were. We’d taken a makeshift rail-train to get here from the spaceport, but I suddenly realized that we wouldn’t be able to take the train back if the actual planetary police were alerted to the incident with Mr. Kepler. I grabbed Snake by the shoulder.

“Snake, we don’t have a way back to the ship! We can’t go on the train if the cops come out after us.” Snake frowned. I frowned. It was turning into a frowning day. We both looked and took another survey of the area. This time, my eye caught something: a two-man cargo land-buggy parked near a utility shed about a hundred meters away.

I pointed without speaking, and Snake nodded. We continued our way down the fire escape without much event, other than me banging my shin when I missed a rung. More frowning, plus mild cursing. We jumped the last story instead of climbing the rest of the way; hitting the ground pretty hard as we did, but shaking it off. We jumped up and sprinted to the unmanned buggy, hoping that the security guards hadn’t yet figured out where we’d gotten to. We reached the buggy in record time, though out of breath, and Snake started looking for a way to hot-wire the ignition.

“Any luck?”
“Uhh . . . hang on . . . it looks like this wire can be cut to by-pass the-”

The shock wave hit before the sound even reached us. Sand sprayed up everywhere, and I feared that one of us had actually been killed. About a second later, the sound of several neutron rounds rang out from the building. The guards. When the sand settled, I checked to make sure that all of Snake was still there, and then that all of me was still there. We were fine, but it looked like the guard with the rifle had spotted us from a window high up and was sniping at us. His rounds had hit the ground all around us, kicking up sand and small, glassy, purple rocks. I drew my .45 and fired back at the building, knowing that I’d never hit the guard because of the range. I was just hoping that he didn’t know that.

“Snake, hurry the bloody heck up!”, I demanded. Snake didn’t speak, but rather grabbed his knife and cut two wires. The guard appeared to have ducked behind cover at the sound of my fire, so I kept the gun trained on the building and watched for his head to reappear. As soon as it did, I fired again, hoping that Snake would have the buggy cranked before I had to reload. I only had three shots left.

Just as I prepared to fire another shot, Snake announced triumphantly, “Yes!” and the buggy growled to life. I fired the shot at the building to keep the rifleman at bay, and then climbed into the passenger seat. Snake climbed into the driver’s seat and took a quick look at the controls before hitting the gas and sending up a spray of sand and dust as the wheels spun. We turned in the direction of the spaceport and accelerated, and I fired my last two shots at the building as we vanished over a hill.

Wind and sand are a bad combination. “This buggy probably wasn’t designed for this speed”, Snake casually commented as wind-blown sand swirled up and stung any part of our flesh that wasn’t covered. I noticed that Snake was handling the vehicle like a pro. “I didn’t know you could drive one of these.” He grinned as much as the stinging sand would allow. “Another ‘course’ I took on the Braxton. One of the work release programs was to a mining colony similar to this one. The buggies I drove were quite similar to this one, really. Just bigger . . . and slower . . . and a lot harder to steal.” I chuckled. Deciding that it would be a good use of my time to reload my pistol, I reached into my jacket breast pocket and pulled six more rounds from where I kept them hidden. I kept two reloads on my person at all times, just in case of emergencies like this. I thumbed the bullets into the chambers and tucked the gun inside my jacket. No need to put it away just yet, but I wanted to keep it out of sight, just in case.

Five kilometers isn’t a very long way when you have a vehicle, so I’d pretty much figured on us getting to the spaceport without any further harassment. I was wrong. We’d gotten maybe halfway there when a high-pitched whine in stereo filled our ears. I’d recognize that sound anywhere. Small anti-grav units. Only big enough to support the weight of, oh, say, a one-man speeder. As surely as I had the thought, two hover-bikes appeared from just over a knoll in our path and flew past us in a blur, kicking up sand, dust, and rocks. I swore. Snake swore. It was becoming a swearing day. The two speeders made a wide turn to the outside and swung around to settle in behind us; sirens blaring and lights flashing. “Friends of yours?”, I asked Snake. “Nope.”, he replied, “Must be on your guest list.” Snake pushed the stick throttle to the maximum and we gained a little speed, but we both knew that there was no way this little buggy would outrun two hover bikes. Not without strapping on afterburners or something. The two speeders held position behind us.

After about fifteen seconds, I was beginning to wonder if these two bikes were actually going to do anything to stop us, or just follow us. I had almost opened my mouth to say something to Snake when I heard a familiar sound again: neutron rounds. These were warning shots. I could see the blue muzzle flash from the front-mounted neutron guns on the lead craft, and the shots went a little wild and plowed into the sandy terrain around us, spewing up more sand and grit. I pulled my pistol, pointed it at the lead bike, and unloaded two rounds. The result, much to my surprise, sounded like clang-ping-pang and a small chunk of something fell out of the bike. The whine of the anti-grav unit stopped altogether, and the rider made a swift dive from the bike just before it nosed into the ground, crumpling on impact and skidding across the basin floor, leaving a deep furrow.

When it came to a smoking, fiery stop, I looked back beyond it to see the former rider picking himself up off the ground and giving us the finger. I chukled to myself and returned the gesture. That is, until the second craft lined up for a shot to blow that finger off of my hand. Actually, to blow my arm off of my torso. And then some. “Snake! Break! Break! Break! He’s gonna shoot!” Snake took the que and swerved to the left just as three shots thundered past us and into the spot we’d have been hadn’t we moved. I cocked my gun and fired round number three at the bike, probably missing. I couldn’t tell. For some reason, I suddenly caught on to the irony that Snake was piloting this buggy and I was playing ‘gunner’. It’s amusing what you’ll think of when you’re playing a life-or-death game of dodgeball. I snapped out of my reverie just as Snake swerved around a large, dark rock jutting out of the ground. Another volley flashed after us, one shot striking said rock and throwing it into the air as a shower of pebbles. I turned in my seat to keep my eye on our tracker, switching my gun into my left hand in order to keep it trained on him. Too bad I’m not left-handed. I awkwardly cocked the gun and fired the fourth bullet, missing yet again. Swerving again, we dodged in between the rounds of another volley, one of which actually passed between me and Snake. Switching hands again, I turned completely around in my seat and stood, cocked the gun, aimed as well as I could under the conditions, and fired shot number five.

Plang

Better than nothing, I thought. Suddenly, I felt the urgent instict to sit back down. I dropped down as low as I could and felt two pulses of heat pass so closely over my head that the hair on the back of my dirty, unwashed neck curled. Had I been standing, that spot would have been my stomach. I peeked my head back up and glanced over at Snake. He looked rather nervous. I was too.

“Boss, we’re coming up on the spaceport. You might wanna lose that speeder bike if you want to make it inside. Once we have to ditch this buggy, he’ll run us down for sure.”, Snake said over the sound of another volley, which sprayed a mere foot over our heads. I nodded. Standing again, I aimed and let loose shot number six. Nothing.

Snake cursed, and I didn’t blame him. I couldn’t reload my gun in these conditions, and we were still a good thirty seconds out from the spaceport. We couldn’t hope to evade the bike’s shots that long, much less lose him on foot when we got to the base. “Any bright ideas?”, I asked Snake earnestly. “Uhh . . . maybe”, came his reply. “Hang on!”

I didn’t particularly like the implications of “hang on”. In all likelihood, whatever he had in mind would involve us flying violently from the buggy and landing in an unpleasant manner. However, obediently, I sat properly in the seat and fastened the safety belt securely. Snake swerved wide, taking us way off course to the left, and let off the throttle. I watched behind us as the hover-bike began to make the same swerve, when Snake suddenly jerked us back to the right, still slowing. The rider and I must have thought the exact same thing when we realized that we were going to collide: That maniac! Before I even had time to swear at Snake, my side of the buggy collided with the hovering speeder, sending it into the air and the rider flying several meters away. I remained firmly in place, though only because the plastic belt had kept me in my seat.

The bike came back down and hit the ground with terrible force, sending flaming pieces and fuel, dust, and sand everywhere. Snake and I instinctively ducked as the shower of parts rained on us, but continued on towards the spaceport, which was now within walking distance. Within a few seconds, we were at the outer fence, and Snake killed the engine. That’s when I noticed the smell. I looked over at Snake only to see the hair on top of his head burning and smoking. I stared.

“What? What are you looking at me like that for?”
“Hair’s on fire.”
“Wha?”

That’s when the fire must have actually heated his scalp. “AAGGH!” He swatted his head to put the fire out; wincing at the pain. I was tempted to swat it once or twice myself, for all of those times that I should have but didn’t. When he finished swatting, I inspected his head and laughed to see the bald spot on the very top. The smell was horrible, but the sight was incredibly funny. Tiring of my ridicule, Snake hopped from the buggy and started scaling the fence. I followed suit.

Ten minutes later . . .

I peered around the corner of the building cautiously, keeping my hand on my holster. Snake and I had managed to cross the open expanses of the spaceport grounds without being noticed. I’d reloaded my gun, and we were slowly making our way to the hangar where our ship was parked, but we weren’t sure if the planetary police were actively hunting for us or not. We’d gotten past their bikes, but if any armed guards caught up with us, we’d be hard-pressed to make it to our ship and get off the ground.

“The coast is clear”

We walked at a normal pace around the corner, angling towards the open door of the hangar. A few people strolled past, but no one that would recognize us. The two of us marched right up to our ship, as if we hadn’t a care in the world. We hadn’t had any repairs made, so the only fee was docking and re-fueling. The small terminal next to the ship winked to life as I neared it and produced the electronic key device. Snake opened the hatch and climbed in as I entered my account number to pay for the services. This machine was also used to schedule your take-off, up to three hours in advance. I selected a slot about ten minutes ahead and turned to start prepping the ship.

I was proud of my Black Sun 490. She was a good ship, even though she was an older model. The 490, of course, was nearly twenty years old. The newer 560 model had a lot more bells and whistles, and the design was a little different, but Black Suns had always been reliable in the hands of a skilled pilot. Even ones with outdated gadgets.

Closing the hatch, I ducked through the narrow space and slumped into my acceleration couch. It was a light brown false leather, well-worn, and had become very much conformed to my shape. Flipping all of the proper switches, I started the engines and began booting up sub-systems and secondary devices. VDU’s and readouts blinked on and gave off their hazy glow as the screens warmed up. It was starting to look like we’d get off-world without any further incidents.

Ten minutes later, out on the runway, things were still looking
good. No security teams had come snooping to find us. No odd delays in our take-off. All we needed to do was get into space and we were home-free from a crime that I didn’t even commit. The tragic irony of that was staggering, I was absolutely certain. As I taxied the ship and lined up on the centerline of the runway, Snake muttered something aloud. “I wonder if this planet has signed the Articles of Confederation.” I didn’t like the sound of that question; Snake had a way of thinking of the worst-case scenarios on-the-fly, and he was usually right, and they usually started with questions like that one.

“I don’t know. Why?”
“Well, Confederate law requires the use of non-lethal force except as a last resort when capturing suspected convicts. But, if this planet isn't governed by Confederate law, they might not do that."

"Well, that would certainly explain the live ammo being fired at us on our trip here, wouldn't it?" Snake snorted as I pointed out that little detail. "Well, I suppose you're right.", he concurred. "But, what are we going to do if they come after us in space?" I hadn't really taken the time to think about that. "I dunno. If this system isn't confederated, they won't have confederate fighters. I wonder if their insys space patrol has decent equipment." Snake sighed. "Hopefully, we won't find out the hard way." I voiced my agreement and pushed the throttle to the firewall.

We accelerated slowly, at first, but started picking up speed within a few seconds. When we'd reached the maximum ground speed of our engines, I engaged the afterburner and pulled back on the stick. I was terribly relieved when I felt the landing gear come off of the ground. Within a minute, we were climbing past forty thousand feet, and would soon be blissfully cruising through vacuum.

An Hour Later . . .

"You know, I'm quite glad we're close to the jump point.", Snake announced from his turret, unbidden. I couldn't help but agree with him. "Me too." We'd managed to wade through the usual traffic without any disruptions. The insys patrols had come by and done their scans, but didn't give us any trouble. I was becoming confident that we were going to get away from this mess in its entirety. Confident, that is, until I heard the announcement come over broadband frequency that we were to be detained "for questioning". The call detailed our ship, our ID, and our approximate location, based upon our time of takeoff. My mind flashed back to the terminal I'd used to schedule our takeoff. "Oh, crap." I heard Snake mutter.

Surely enough, said crap was hitting the fan, and we were about to be caked in it. Fortunately, we'd gotten past the contraband patrols nearly twenty minutes ago, so, if we hurried, we might be able to make it to the jump point and get through before those fighters caught up with us. And, of course, we'd taken time to notice that they were indeed decent quality hardware. Without sinking further into the thought, I punched the afterburner and locked it on. Snake's head popped up through the turret hatch. "Doesn't our nav computer have an E.T.A. monitor that compensates for afterburners?" I doubted it did, but, since we'd "acquired" this new computer upgrade, I wasn't absolutely sure that I hadn't just overlooked that option, so I turned my attention to the console on my right and started pressing buttons. It showed me the estimated time of arrival to the jump point at our maximum cruising velocity, but not with the afterburner engaged. I shook my head as I responded. "Nope. Doesn't look like it. You got your calculator?" Snake glanced around for his ugly, dirty, green duffle bag. He'd had that duffle bag ever since I'd known him. Throughout all of the decompressions, cockpit fires, boardings, and regular rough treatment from day to day, the bag was miraculously still intact. Tough stuff.

Snake climbed completely out of the turret and began rooting around the clutter underneath the passenger couch that usually doubled as a bed when one of us needed a nap. The duffle was indeed there, full of dirty laundry and Snake's personal items. He pulled out his trusty calculator and I tossed him my scratch pad. We started crunching numbers, but our first few calculations showed that, in all likelihood, the patrol fighters would still overtake us. "Well", I sighed, scratching my beard, "we can't outrun them . . . most likely can't out-fight them . . . any bright ideas?" "Why do you always ask me for the ideas, Mr. Big-Bad-Space-Captain? Does it ever occur to you that I don't always have the answer?", Snake spat angrily. I grinned. "Each and every time, Snake." Snake scowled, and my grin became quite smug.

"As to the situation at hand, though" I continued, "what are we going to do?" Snake furrowed his brow, and I wasn't terribly comforted at seeing that. "Well, there aren't any closer jump points . . . too many witnesses for us to hide . . . not much we can do." Perplexed, I turned to the console and stared at the distance readout at my mind scrambled to piece together an escape plan. Moments later, I still came up empty. "Well, Snake, I guess we're going to have to run for the jump point as best we can and hope for a miracle." At my use of the word "miracle", Snake's expression changed from one of perplexity to one of minor disbelief, but he said nothing. I shrugged in response to his gawk. "It's all we've got."

Sixteen minutes later . . .

The fighters were only seconds out of firing range, and neither Snake nor myself had taken notice of any miracles, so far. They had easily caught up with us, and we were still too far from the jump point for any hope of being able to outrun their aim.

“How long?”, I asked Snake. His only response was a swear. I took that as my cue to start juking. Indeed, just as I changed our vector, orange beams flashed past us. “Those Starburst lasers, like ours?”, I asked; my mind somehow coming up with that question to ask while I changed our vector again. “You know, you seem to have the innate ability to ask the stupidest questions at the entirely wrong times.” Snake punctuated every other word with a volley of fire at our pursuers. The four police craft moved into a diamond-abreast formation and continued to close. Snake kept me informed. “They’re trying to flank us.”

My scanner was showing me just that. Using their respective cones of fire as barriers, they were boxing us into a confined corridor that was sure to tighten when our shields got thin. I continued to juke as best I could, but their concentrated fire was quickly lapping up the capacitors of my rear shield emitters. Normally, Snake’s fire would keep lone attackers at bay, but our power plant couldn’t provide enough gun juice to break down the defenses of four maneuverable vessels simultaneously. Within a few more volleys, our shields were at nill, and we were defenseless.

“Alright, captain, this is your last chance to surrender yourself, your crew, your ship, and your cargo for investigation concerning the murder of Citizen Kepler. Be advised we have been authorized to prevent your escape by any means necessary.” I turned my head and asked Snake, “Murder conviction or vacuum?” Snake’s reply wasn’t what I expected. “I don’t know about you, boss, but I don’t intend to go back to jail. For what it’s worth, it’s been nice working for you.” Before I could even open my mouth to respond, Snake opened fire again, actually puncturing the shields of the second ship in formation. An instant later, the missile warning chimed. That was it. We were dead. At this range, we couldn’t evade that missile, and, without our shields to soften the blow, it would rip my precious Black Sun 490 into pieces. They had us dead to rights. I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, and waited for the impact as the chiming grew louder . . .

Thump-clank!

I jumped at the sound, but quickly took note of the fact that I wasn’t dead. “What the-”

“Holy piece of- It’s not a warhead!”

I turned in my seat, straining to get a look at the spot above our second engine where the thing had impacted. I caught a glimpse of some sort of a clamp, and, from it, a lengthy cable trailing back to the lead police unit. After just that brief glimpse, however, the visual enhancers flickered off, and the artificial gravity winked out in an instant. “We’re being drained!”, I announced. The lights in the cabin blacked out, and I could hear the engines slowing. “Nice observation, Mr. Obvious.”, came Snake’s rebuttal. “Grab your sidearm! And throw me my knife.” A few second later, Snake reconsidered. “Actually, don’t throw me my knife. I don’t want it flying at me in the dark.” I reached over to Snake’s duffle, fished out his knife, and gently floated it in the direction of his turret hatch, hilt-first. “It’s floating your way, hilt-first. Get your flashlight.”

We floated there in the dark cabin for what felt like an eternity. Using Snake’s flashlight to see by, we made an attempt to initiate the ship’s emergency batteries, but the only result was a few seconds of light and a brief flush of gravity. Just enough gravity to slam us into the floor and then allow us to float freely again. We were painfully aware that it was just a matter of time until the “paddy wagon” shuttle arrived. I had read an article a few years before about a handful of outer-rim systems that had developed strategies for disabling craft and boarding them without damaging the vessel. The “paddy wagon” was a shuttle of armed law enforcers who would arrest us and confiscate our ship. Our only possible chance was to overthrow the troops inside, and fly both the ship and the shuttle back to the planet, and then somehow plot an escape from there . . . assuming that the fighters didn’t require some sort of special codeword to ensure successful capture.

In all reality, it was probably thirty minutes while we waited and prepared for the shuttle’s arrival. We’d done our best to rig the cargo bay door so that it wouldn’t open, and then to rig the double airlock door to the cabin, as well. When the shuttle arrived, I was hunkered down in the turret hatch with my pistol trained on the door, and Snake was floating by the door; knife at ready. The proceedings began with a most dreadful realization. They had no intention of just unlocking the bay door. They used torches to cut through the locking mechanisms around the outside. That infuriated me, because, if we somehow survived this, and ever got out of prison, and ever managed to get my ship back, that was going to cost a lot to fix!

The cargo bay wasn’t pressurized, but we could hear the clank-clank-clank of what sounded like a half-dozen police troops stomping around inside my ship with magnetic clamp boots. The fighters were still outside, shining searchlights into the cabin; most likely reporting what they saw to the troops inside, hoping to give them a tactical advantage. There was another clank, and then the sound of the door locks creaking open. I saw Snake glance back in my direction, his face illuminated by a passing sweep of searchlight. He mouthed “magnetic countermeasures”, and I knew he meant our locks were being forced open by a magnetic device. A few seconds later, the locks stopped creaking, and the door slowly and quietly swung open. I was rather surprised, to be honest, that the cabin didn’t depressurize. Apparently, the troops had replaced the bay door and pressurized the room, as not to kill us without giving us yet another chance to surrender. I cocked the gun and prepared to fire at the first figure that showed itself . . .

Nothing. No one came through the door. I couldn’t see very far into the bay, but it looked like there wasn’t anyone in there at all. The effect was actually rather spooky, to be honest; like something out of a horror flick. The suspense was certainly horrible. Snake looked back in my direction, hoping I might have some insight for him. I silently shook my head and then nodded towards the door, and, with the slightest of sighs, Snake nodded back and positioned himself to peek through.

No sooner had the whites of his eyes passed the frame of the door when a fist-sized ball flew through, just missing his head, and bounced off of the back of my acceleration couch. Snake and I both recognized immediately what it was: a grenade. Frozen in sudden fear, we both screamed out loud, but our screams were cut short when the weapon went off . . .

One week later . . .

I signed the paper and handed the clipboard back to the technician. The repair on the door had been costly. The impound fees had been much more costly. However, the court charges and lawyer fees had been the most costly of all, I’d say. The grenade thrown into the cabin was none other than a non-lethal stun grenade. It knocked both Snake and myself rather unconscious, and the cops then had no trouble at all taking us, and our ship, back to the planet. The door had been clamped in place for the trip back, but the locking mechanisms had to be replaced. Upon arriving back at Tersa, we were promptly put in a holding cell, questioned, tried, and eventually released.

As fortune had it, the police were familiar with the “black clad man” I’d had my encounter with. Turns out, he’s something of a notorious hitman on Tersa, and was under the employ of a rival mining operation in another system. His existence had been a well-kept secret, as the local government didn’t want knowledge of his existence scaring away businesses who were planning to open up a branch here. Also, the information I gave them from my experience with him aided the police in catching the man. Just so happened that, even with body armor, that .45 slug punched him pretty hard in the kidneys, and, a handful of hours after I explained the story to the local police, he was arrested at a local restaurant when an off-duty officer noticed him peeing blood in the restroom. The courts, then, of course, couldn’t convict me for the murder of Mr. Kepler, but they did convict me of resisting arrest. Snake and I were fortunate, though, because laws here were pretty lenient in that area, and we were merely slapped with a fine and sent on our way. There was a reward for assisting in the arrest of the black clad man, and it just barely covered our court fees and fines, lawyers’ bills, and repairs. Getting my ship out of impound was what dug into our credits.

I climbed into the side-hatch to check on Snake. He was in the process of re-stocking our food supplies. We’d also taken the opportunity to get our laundry done, which was nice, I must admit.

“Repairs done?”, he asked nonchalantly.
“Yeah. We’re officially in the hole, of course.”
“Any luck finding a run?”
“Eh, some precious stones to a planet a few systems from here. It’ll get us back on our feet.”
“Well, good, I guess. I think we’re pretty good on supplies. Unless you have more business, I think we’re good to go.”
“I think so . . . by the way, did you pick up the ‘special’ supplies?”

At my question, Snake chuckled and reached into a small crate full of supplies, fished out a small box, and tossed it in my direction. “Yeah, I got your ‘special’ supplies.” I smiled at the reassuring weight of the box as I read the label: 120-count .45 Bullets

"Strange Bedfellows" part 1

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Strange Bedfellows"
by David Dixon

The Ogre headed straight for us a couple of dozen klicks out, upper and lower turrets blasting past our Black Sun 490 and dangerously close to me. My turret was facing rearward, and I sweated in my cramped quarters as I tried to throw off the aim of the Jasper 12 who was in the process of eating our rear shields for lunch.

The boss faked a climb and then dove, exposing the Jasper to the full fury of the Ogre’s guns. The larger ship’s lasers stripped the Jasper’s shields in a scant half a second and peeled his armor back a half a second later. The Jasper tried to pull off his attack run, realizing his mistake in veering too close to the massive cargo ship’s guns, but didn’t make it. I winced as the ship came apart in a bright conflagration—front half disintegrating into rivets, exploding oxygen, armor plating, and probably pilot parts while the rear of the ship flamed briefly and then went dark, still continuing on its present course.

“Got one diving on us, Snake!” the boss called from the cockpit and rolled the ship.

I swore and slewed my turret around to face the threat—some variation of a Razor combat shuttle. The most vulnerable part of the Black Sun is the rear upper quarter—where neither the turret gunner nor the pilot could see or fire on the threat—the turret gunner and pilot, in this case, unfortunately being the boss and I, not respectively.

The Ogre again came to our rescue, driving him off before he could do serious damage to our shields. I got a few good shots off before he dove out of my field of vision and saw his port engine flame out as he disappeared below the artificial horizon formed by the bottom of our ship and the white-pinpricked blackness of deep space.

The boss again rolled the ship on its horizontal axis, to bring the Razor back into view for me. I felt our ship veer hard left and saw the Ogre flash past us through the corner of my right eye. The Razor pilot was good, though; he cut his throttles to full reverse and nosed upward, spraying us with laser fire which knocked our shields out and scorched our bottom armor—one of the ship’s computers beeped—an electronic expression of pain that indicated his shot had penetrated the armor and damaged something—I hoped it wasn’t vital, or expensive.

This catfight was shaping up to be quite a nasty one: us, the Ogre, a pair of tricked-out Hradi’s and the Young Bronson versus an ad-hoc hit squad of about the nastiest two dozen mercs, bounty hunters, and outright killers money could hire.

People say politics makes strange bedfellows—and for once, people are right. If someone would have told me the boss and I would be flying on Blackie Crisk’s Ogre’s wing three days ago, I’d have laughed in his face, and probably hit him, just for being such an idiot. But, in the business of interstellar privateering, the near impossible is a standard occurrence and the impossible is just rare—in fact, the highly unexpected happens so often, it is expected.

That said, the boss and I still never saw it coming. We’d taken advantage of the brief humanitarian sanction lift during the UNF’s recent siege on Oceana Roho and made some serious cash. We’d raked in about 14k on a single run, shipping bulk foodstuffs and toiletries to Oceana Roho after the UN caved to public pressure about supporting Domingo Raul and cutting off the planet for a month and half. As soon as we heard the UN promise they’d lift the sanction and blockade, we bought all we could store in the hold and headed off for the H115 jump point and waited in line along with about 450 other merchies to jump into Oceana. More ships were streaming in even as we were leaving, so it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that the Ogre took advantage of the sanction lift.

The boss and I figured, in a rare smart moment that predictably horribly backfired on us, that we would stay legit—we’d ship only goods that could in no way be used against us. The UNF had announced that while ships would be searched, none would be stopped unless they carried items on the standard blacklist. This meant, technically, that frowned-upon “grey” list items could be shipped—things like legal weapons, ground combat armor suits, vehicle and ship repair parts, and weapon targeting software. We figured that while the UNF was being rather generous, they’d probably find some typically Federation way to hold it against us. Plus, we figured, correctly, that there would be plenty of weapons for sale, and that maybe the residents of Oceana Roho might want to do something besides fight—like eat. Dry land only accounts for less than an eighth of the small planet’s surface, and most of it is rock, so land grown food is a fairly precious commodity.

The cause of the rebels on Oceana Roho didn’t much concern us at the time—Domingo Raul, the Planetary Chancellor, supposedly had his prime rival in the upcoming election bumped off and then after he was nearly assassinated in retaliation, he put down a riot or two with what some might call excessive force, which pushed most of the planet’s security forces over to the opposition side and forced him to flee the planet surface and left security forces loyal to him in quite a pinch. He’d appealed, as was his right, to the UNF, and they sent troops, which clashed in a few bloody battles with the people and security forces of Oceana Roho until they retreated and cut off the planet until the UNF could sort everything out and figure out who was in the right and in the wrong.

I figured that this guy Raul was probably a crook, but that was just because he was a politician, so it was no big deal—I mean, if every planet’s population rose up every time some sneaky bureaucrat dipped his hand in the public till or tipped the scales of justice in his buddy’s favor or offed an opponent there’d be no governments left, right? What gave the people of Roho the right to rebel just because they got the same unfair treatment everybody else did?

Anyway, this whole bizarre, twisted, team of us, some unknowns, and our sworn worst enemy “recruited” us, to use the word recruited very loosely, from Gringo’s, one of the few English language bars on Oceana Roho, just as we were patting ourselves on the back for our recent success.

“Good beer,” the boss said, looking intently at the bottom of his empty mug. The beer was Dos Grande Zapatos, a local planetary microbrew which I believe means something like “Two Big Shoes,” but despite its name, the boss was right—it was good beer. Stuff made on just one planet is so much better than those major galactic brews.

“Yup,” I agreed, downing the last of my own mug. “Funny name, though. Wonder why’d you’d name a beer after shoes…”

“Probably so dunderheads like you would waste their time wondering about it and drink more of it,” the boss replied from his barstool next to me.

“At least I know some Spanish,” I retorted. “You asked me what day Cinco De Mayo was.” At that, there was rather loud laugh from a patron two stools down the bar. The boss glared at him.

“Shut it. The only reason you know any Spanish is because you had to take it while you were in prison.”

I shrugged. “Never been to prison, jefe—that means boss in Spanish, just to help you out—I just did two tours on the Braxton, which they relentlessly beat into you, is not prison—you just wish it was.”

The boss ignored my little explanation of the way things really are, as he’s prone to do, and instead flashed four fingers at the waitress who nodded and disappeared to get us four more beers.

A hand clapped softly on the boss and my shoulder simultaneously. I tensed, briefly, waiting for the knife—long years of living a rough life combined with being on a war ravaged planet, especially one which seemed to have plenty of alcohol, made me nervous. I tried not to show it, though, being the privateer I am.

The voice was low, and held a slight Spanish lisp. “Gentleman, I am Constable Perez of Oceana Roho customs—could you please come with me?”

Oh boy, I thought, we’re in some real trouble now.

Constable Perez’ next words confirmed it: “You’re in no trouble, I assure you. We just have a matter to discuss with you.”

The boss and I shared a look—we knew that this was less of an offer than it was a polite command.

“Sure, man,” the boss sighed and we stood to face the man who had spoken to us. The man was about a head shorter than me, making him roughly the same height as the boss and had brown eyes, and close cropped dark hair, a five o’clock shadow, and slightly brown skin, which betrayed his Mexican heritage—a local, for sure. His suit was a conservative grey, with a subdued and unimportant looking badge tucked into the jacket pocket. Behind him stood two blank faced men in the same suits, with the same badges, but underneath their jacket, I could see handguns bulging. The goons.

Perez pointed at the bar, and one of the goons withdrew his wallet and paid our bill, which was displayed on the glass bartop next to our seats. He didn’t even leave the waitress a tip, the cheapskate—at least that told me that these guys really were the government.

“This way, please,” Perez said, as we followed him out the back door of the bar and into a narrow street where a pair of grey nondescript government hydrogen fueled cars waited. The rear one had a driver already, but the first one was empty.

Perez opened the rear doors for us and climbed into the driver’s seat himself. I was surprised to see him shift the car into manual control—most governments, even backwater planetary ones, use autopilot to avoid the spectre of lawsuits.

Perez gently started off and left the boss and I in uncomfortable silence as he pulled out onto the main street and headed right—towards the government complex the boss and I had spotted on our approach—but the opposite direction from the main spaceport and customs office. The other car with the goons followed us at the perfect distance.

As he drove, I noticed Perez had the tendency to not look where he was going except out of the corner of his eye and that he frequently slowed down early and missed making passes he could have—he was driving as if he wasn’t driving—mimicking an autopilot on its low priority setting. I began to get worried. Secrecy and subterfuge when you’re dealing with government officials usually meant you were in way over your head.

The boss cleared his throat. “Ahem, mister—ah, Constable Perez, where exactly are we going? I mean, what are we being, umm, held for, I guess?” That’s the boss, ever the eloquent one.

“You are not being held,” Perez then called us both by our names—which meant he already knew more than we wanted him to about us. This wasn’t a random thing then. “This is actually a rather lucrative business opportunity.”

“Ah. I see,” I answered tersely. “I’m guessing you’re about as much a customs agent as I am a rich man, then, eh?”

“Well,” Constable Perez replied, turning around to face me, which given that I knew he was driving the car, unnerved me quite a bit, “if everything works out, perhaps you will be a rich man, Senor. And then, perhaps, I will be a customs agent…”

I snorted and plopped back in my seat. Ten minutes of silence later, Perez slowed the car and pulled us into a below building parking deck. He deftly swung us into a spot and even beeped two short beeps before turning off the car—mimicking an autopilot down to the last detail.

The other car parked beside him and we exited. Perez led off again, with his two thugs trailing us as we filed into an elevator. Perez inserted a cardkey into the slot and the doors closed and we descended into what the elevator said was the second subbasement.

The doors opened and we stepped out into the foyer of a typical government office. The place was poorly decorated, over lit, and fairly crowded. Nothing like in the movies—no holoprojecting walls, no ceiling projection screens, no retinal scanners, and no armed guards visible, save the ones that came with us.

I did notice that the crest emblazoned on the desk said Agencia Federales Proctection de Republica de Oceana Roho, or something like that. I figured it was roughly “Federal Protection Agency of the Republic of Oceana Roho” or something like that. The planetary government’s security organization. Great.

“Let me guess,” the boss sighed when he saw the crest didn’t match Perez’ badge, “this is a lot worse than customs.”

Perez turned to us and smiled a wan smile; I just nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “We’re about to be asked to something unpleasant, dangerous, illegal, or, more than likely, all three.”

“Actually, gentleman,” Perez said somehow both softly and threateningly at the same time, “you aren’t being asked to do anything. I’m afraid if you refuse you’ll be spending quite a bit more time than you’d planned—time measured in years, comprende?”

“Si,” I muttered.

“So much,” the boss mumbled, “for good ‘ole Spanish hospitality.”

Perez led us down a hall, inserted his key into a rather old looking lockslot and the door lock clicked approvingly. He twisted the handle and led us into the bizarre world of politics.

The boss stepped inside and then stepped immediately backwards and onto my foot. He moved like he’d seen a snake.

“What the?” I asked as I stepped back into the goon behind me, who rather roughly shoved both the boss and I forward.

I recoiled just as the boss did when I saw the seven men sitting at a conference table in the room. Or rather, I recoiled at the sight of one of them and never even saw the other six.

Staring at me was Blackie Crisk. This unnerved me the way few things can for any number of reasons. Reason one, of course, was the fact that years ago he’d sworn he’d kill me after I abandoned his crew before my tour was up. Reason two was that he’d sworn he’d kill the boss after the boss turned him in for chemical weapons smuggling on Rio Blanco. Reason three was that he’d tried to kill us both the last time he’d seen us on Greenly and very nearly succeeded. Reason four was that because of that little flap, the last I’d heard he was still supposed to be in prison. Reason five was that a couple of months ago he’d sicced a particularly persistent bounty hunter on us to try and finish what he didn’t accomplish on Greenly.

Crisk didn’t look any more pleased to see us than we did to see him, although he wasn’t afraid of us. Instead, he had the same kind of look a mad dog gets when whatever juicy bit of meat he wants to eat is just too far out of where his chain will let him go.

“You!” Crisk, the boss, and I said at the same time, although with predictably different emotions.

The boss’ was a whispered “you,” as if he’d had the life scared out of him and was about to go into shock.

Mine was only slightly better—“you?” like Caesar said “Et Tu, Brute?”

Crisk’s “you” was a raspy snarl, as if he wanted to spit at us.

Perez was visibly amused. For a moment, if it’s possible, I hated him worse than I did Crisk.

“You three are acquaintances?” he asked in his usual soft tones. He looked from Crisk’s mask of rage to the boss’ terror and my utter state of disbelief. “Mr. Crisk does have a lot of enemies—I suppose you two are some of them?”

“I’m not working with those two,” Crisk growled.

The boss and I nodded a silent assent.

“See,” Perez said, obviously enjoying this turn of events, “agreeing already.” Suddenly his tone changed—still soft, it was distinctly threatening—it promised a soft painless death, but death nonetheless—think of verbal poison gas. “You will work together, mi amigos, or else you will spend the rest of your life enjoying our fine penal system, if something most unfortunate does not happen first.” He glanced over at his blank faced guards who, while not changing their expression, changed their demeanor from one of boredom to one of a jungle cat about to strike—silent, still, but poised. Perez pointed at two chairs across the table from Crisk. “Sit.”

The boss and I sat down glumly. I noticed as we sat that the boss’ hand was on the holster on his belt and I unconsciously found myself reaching behind my back to where I kept my knife. Crisk often has that effect on people.

“These are the last members of our team,” Perez announced from his seat at the head of the table. He nodded to us and waited for us to introduce ourselves.

“I’m Snake,” I said, as confidently as possible while sitting across from Blackie Crisk, “and this is my partner, and my boss… sort of,” I finished, pointing to my friend. The boss nodded weakly.

“Since you two are the last to join, I’ll introduce everyone else,” Perez told us. “This,” he said gesturing unnecessarily to Crisk, “is Mr. Crisk, and his first mate Mr. Thorton.” Only then did I recognize Thorton—he had been first mate when I’d flown for Crisk years ago and he didn’t look any happier to see me than his boss did. “This is Lieutenant Simon Perez—no relation to me—and Lieutenant Carlos Montes, of the Ocean Roho Defense Force.” He pointed to two military looking guys about the same age as the boss and I near the head of the table. “These three men are the crew of the Young Bronson—registered out of… well, it really doesn’t matter in your trade does it?” The three guys he was referring to looked slightly wealthier than the rest of us, excepting Crisk, but no more reputable. The oldest of the three nodded at us when they were introduced.

“I am Agent Perez, of the Federal Protection Agency—the Oceana intelligence and security service. As I’m sure you’ll be glad to know, I am no more a willing participant in this venture than the rest of you, but just as this will pay well for you, it will pay well for me—you will all make a nice sum of money, and I will get to live and keep my position.

“As you all know, I’m sure, Domingo Raul is currently accused of murdering his opposition in the upcoming Chancellor’s race, Fernando Chavez—this charge is quite true, among the other equally true charges made against him.” Perez’ declaration was very matter-of-fact, and it was clear that the veracity of the charges meant very little to him. The two lieutenants sitting next to him, however, seemed rather disgusted at his glib treatment of Raul’s crimes, although I sensed they were familiar with Perez’ views. “This matters very little to me,” Perez continued, confirming my earlier observation, “but it does to some.” He nodded slightly to indicate the world outside the building. “If the UNF finds out these charges are true, the rebels will be vindicated, and Raul will face a lengthy prison sentence, or worse, since Oceana still has the death penalty.

“Unfortunately, in this day in age, data is easily forged. We have, here in this building, information which will seal Raul’s downfall, however; information which must get to the popular press and the UNF.

“My agency had quite a large part in gathering this information, and—“ one of the lieutenants snorted contemptuously, but Perez ignored him, “and in doing some of these unpleasant deeds. The opposition which now controls the planet is fully aware of this, but have given me and a few others a chance to right these wrongs and escape the fate which will surely come to Raul.

“If we fail, I will never see the light of day either. So, mi amigos, we are all in this together, you see? If you fail, then I fail. This data must get off Oceana.”

I was disliking agent, constable, conductor, or whatever this guy Perez was more and more. I don’t trust people who can calmly discuss betrayal of their boss and death as if they were ordering lunch at a nice restaurant.

“If it’s data you need, why not just transmit it or post it on the ‘Net?” asked one of the crewmen on the Young Bronson.

“And, since you’re the one in trouble here,” Crisk said in his usual lethal tones, “what exactly do you over us—and why put all of us in this together?” I sensed his last remark was aimed at us, but I found myself agreeing with him. I’d rather fly with the devil than with Crisk.

Perez smiled again. “First—as I said, data is easily forged, so transmitting it and posting it on the ‘Net does not guarantee its acceptance. Remember, Raul is a powerful businessman in his own right—and the rightful Chancellor of this planet. What would bring down a private citizen or common thug will not necessarily bring down someone of his stature.

“The data we have here, in its present form, cannot be a fakery.” He pointed at the wall behind him and the projection wall lit up. On the screen was what appeared to be a three foot by three foot glass cube, which shimmered and sparkled as the light filtered through it, as if it contained thousands of internal prisms. I didn’t recognize it, but apparently the boss did. His eyebrows rose in appreciation. Perez continued.

“You see here, for those uninitiated with modern data storage techniques, an IBM Photomemory Molocube. The data is indelibly written by a special laser on the tens of trillions of the cube’s internal vertices at the molecular level. The data cannot be written over without destroying the vertice, and the timestamp written on the vertices cannot be forged, based solely on simple radiation carbon dating methods. This is the original data, recorded by this agency’s central computer. This data, is, as I said, completely genuine, and cannot be construed otherwise. You now, no doubt, begin to see the reason why the opposition needs this. With this in reliable hands and presented to a Federation court, Raul cannot escape.”

He turned to Crisk. “As for your question, which was, I believe, simply stated, ‘why should you work with me?’ the answer is obvious—I have something on all of you. That, and one other reason, is why you were selected.

“All of you are listed in UNF records as bringing foodstuffs to Oceana when the sanction was lifted. This is good, because while the UNF let you bring them in, I assure you that those who shipped us weapons will have quite a bit of trouble leaving this planet—the scans will be invasive, time consuming, and the slightest mistake in record keeping or violation of equipment or safety protocol will result in fines or jail time. Of course, one of the crews here did not ship only food.” I knew immediately that Crisk, no matter what the records said, had shipped weapons—food just wasn’t his style. Perez calmly stared at Crisk. “You, of course, used some rather sophisticated smuggling technology to ship us weapons, which we appreciate, but the UNF might not take quite as well.

“This is especially true for you, Mr. Crisk, given that I believe shipping weapons, even legal ones, is a violation of your probation terms, which are, I might say, already quite generous given your previous history.”

The boss and I grinned, despite the situation—seeing Crisk hamstrung, even by this guy Perez, was a rare treat.

Perez turned to the crew of the Young Bronson. The screen changed behind him to display a picture of a middle aged man wearing a very nice blue suit and bowler hat. The picture looked as if it were taken from a press release or news holo. “I am sure you recognize this man. The authorities in several systems are very interested in what might have befallen him.” A look at the faces of the crew told me that they did indeed recognize him, and that whatever had happened to him, it must have involved them. Perez then swiveled to face us.

I had the distinct feeling that the boss and I weren’t going to like what was coming next.

“Uh oh,” I heard the boss whisper.

On the screen flashed a copy of a ship’s owner’s title—I recognized immediately. The boss groaned. “I see,” Perez said in his trademark tones, “that you still recognize the title to the Romulus. I am glad—there are people who would like to know more about the particulars of what happened to it.” I was sweating bullets—the people he was referring to could do some very nasty things to people. I looked to the boss—his face was blanched white. Perez seemed to be pleased at the reactions he had gotten from all of us.

“Now that I have secured everyone’s full cooperation, let me explain the plan.”

The plan wasn’t that complicated, in all actuality. Our ship, the Ogre, and the Young Bronson were all loaded with identical Molocubes. The two lieutenants would fly civilian Hradi fighters modified with the latest military and civilian defense technology as escorts. They were, it seemed, the only willing contributors to this cabal, if what Perez told us about his and his agency’s part in all of this. We were to fly in convoy through the initial UNF military blockade—and we wouldn’t be scanned, according to Perez, because we’d shipped foodstuffs in which made us clean coming out to the military. From there, we’d fly the opposite direction as practically everyone else, away from the H115 jump, through the Rock River asteroid belt, to the Salt Station jump Point and then jump to Salt Station and give the data cubes to the Turner-Fox-Warner media conglomerate sector headquarters, which Perez assured us was the closest place with a computer capable of reading the Molocubes and that was safe from Raul’s influence. He vetoed outright Thorton’s plan to fly right up to the nearest Federation cruiser and just turn the cubes over to UNF directly. According to Perez, Admiral Mall, whose 3rd Fleet was running the blockade, was a good friend of Raul’s, so the data would never make it to UNF courts. Once we completed the seven standard day trip to Salt Station, each crew save the two patriotic lieutenants would be paid a full 35k for our troubles.

Oh yeah, the catch. Actually, there were three.

The first was that while the Federation wouldn’t try to hunt us down, Raul probably would. His agents, according to Perez, had already tried to destroy the data during fighting on the planet surface, and would probably be on the lookout for the rebels to ship the cubes off world. Perez practically guaranteed that we’d be jumped, which I wasn’t looking forward to.

The second catch was that there was only one Molocube with real data. The other two were filled to capacity with random numbers—static, basically. Of course, without a computer to determine which was which, no one could be sure if they had the right one, thus discouraging any of the three cargo crews from flying off and selling Raul’s data back to him. That wasn’t all, either.

Thus comes the third catch, the real clincher: Molocubes weren’t all our ships were being loaded with. In addition to the Molocubes in their large sealed shipping crates was something else—a thermite bomb, the kind the military uses to destroy damaged equipment they don’t want to leave behind. The 700 kilogram thermite bomb loaded into each of our ships inside the Molocube shipping crate was rigged to melt our ships from the inside out if the transmitter attached to the real data Molocube stopped transmitting, or if any of the ships left the designated flight path and tried going to a different system or jump point, or if the shipping crate was tampered with by someone other than the opposition contact at Salt Station who had the proper code. Basically, the only way any of us were going to survive this is if everybody played by the rules and nobody got any bright ideas, because if anybody tried anything fancy, we were all going to go from flying starships to flying million degree miniature suns as the thermite bombs turned our ships and everything in them a single solid piece of metal.

“Don’t worry,” Perez added as he finished his briefing, “if a ship is destroyed, as long as it is not the one with the data, the thermite bombs will not go off—the death of one of you is not necessarily the death of all of you.”

“Thanks,” the boss snorted. “So the only thing standing between us and a horrible death is our reliance on a man who wants us dead? I’m not liking this one bit.” The boss glared at Crisk.

“Well,” spat Crisk as he stared daggers at both of us, “I’d be glad to save you the trouble of worrying about it and do the deed right here.” His skeletal face tightened and I could see murder in his eyes. His right hand snaked slowly underneath the table, where I knew his Colt neutron gun lurked in its holster. From my vantage point, I could already see the boss’ hand on his .45 in his belt. It may be less powerful, but at the range of three feet, the first shot was going to win. The tension between the two was palpable. Part of me took some comfort in the fact that Crisk seemed more obsessed with killing the boss than with me, but it was only a small part.

I tore my eyes away from Crisk’s death glare and to the head of the table—if Perez didn’t step in, I had no doubt there was getting ready to be a brief but bloody gunbattle right there across the table.

“Try it,” the boss said icily. “Touch that neutron gun, and I’ll blow you right out of your chair.” Perez still wasn’t stopping anything, so I prepared from the worst. I figured if the boss was determined to take Crisk on, then that meant Thorton was my responsibility. A glance at him really made me desperate for a diplomatic solution: he was already leaned back in his chair, left hand wrapped around the grips of whatever pistol he had tucked under his right arm in a shoulder holster. I had no better chance of beating Thorton to his pistol with my E-19 combat knife than I had of winning the Nobel Prize for physics.

“You don’t have the guts,” Crisk replied, words full of venom. The muscles in his jaw tensed and his hand continued to reach beneath the table.

“Enough!” roared the captain of the Young Bronson. “I know your reputation, Crisk, but if you can’t forget your grief with these two for long enough to do this mission, I’ll kill you myself. And you two—“ he gestured at the boss and I—“are small fry—so don’t try to make your entry into the big league with my life on the line.” Though I bristled at being called a small fry, it was true, and I was relieved that at least someone was stepping in—I couldn’t see any good way out of this—the boss would shoot Crisk and then Thorton would shoot the both of us. While it’d be nice to see Crisk dead, he was probably headed the same place we were, and knowing our luck, we’d probably be eternal cellmates or something like that.

“Stay out of this, Stine,” Crisk ordered the captain of the Young Bronson without looking at him, “or else I’ll deal with you next—and it won’t be quick.” I shuddered. Crisk had a well documented mean streak as wide as the sky and as deep as ocean trench.

Perez finally stepped in; his tone was, as usual, soft and seemingly aloof. “Oh, mi amigos, there is one more condition—the thermite bombs will go off if you don’t reach Salt Station within eight standard days. Given the contact I expect you to make, your timeline will be rather tight. Your ships have not yet been loaded, and that will take at least an hour—I suggest you stop wasting time.”

Crisk let out a noise like a low growl and the boss ground his teeth. Neither man moved for a brief second but then relaxed. I breathed a silent sigh of relief and slowly backed my chair away from the table. The three man crew of the Young Bronson stood; I glanced up at them and saw the fear in their eyes. I agreed—with allies like this, who needed enemies?


Seventy-Four Hours Later

We’d gotten off world without too much more trouble, but it had been a tensely silent trip thus far; of course, who do you talk to and what do you talk about when your worst enemy is flying on your wing, your ship is rigged to blow, a hit squad is somewhere lurking with your death on their minds, and you’re racing against the clock. Transmissions between us, the Ogre, the Young Bronson, and our fighter escorts were kept to the minimum necessary and even mine and the boss’ usual banter was strangely absent.

I had spent most of my time thus far trying to sleep to make the time pass and trying to figure out if there was any way out of all this. I hadn’t been able to come up with one just yet. The only thing we had going for us was that we’d been making good time thus far. The Hradi fighters were plenty fast, the Ogre was almost as fast as the fighters in open space, and the Young Bronson was fairly speedy Grey-Allen Stellarliner XL; in fact, our aging Black Sun 490 was the slowest one, and we weren’t all that shabby. We were approaching the entrance to cleared nav lanes in the Rock River belt.

“Crap,” the boss called from the cockpit. “Here they are… figures.”

“What we got?” I called as I switched my upper left VDU to display targeting data. My software still couldn’t acquire—the ship’s radar was much longer range though, so the boss usually beat me to acquisitions.

“Right at the edge of the asteroid field—they’re moving too much to be rocks. Got looks like… ahh… maybe fifteen or so acquisitions,” the boss replied. “’Bout 100k out, looks like. They aren’t easy to pick out, but that’s got to be them. Who else but a bunch of headhunters would hang out in the ‘roid belt?”

The commlink crackled; it was Stine’s navigator. “Targets at twelve o’clock. This is probably Raul’s boys. We’ve got good looks at six of them, but even with the Hotspurs we’re carrying, they’d probably evade by the time they missiles got there.”

“Roger,” the boss replied. “We can’t touch ‘em at this range, either.” He didn’t mention that unlike the Young Bronson and the Ogre we didn’t have anything but short range missiles. No multistage Hotspurs or Cat III imrecs for us.

“I’ve got ‘em too,” Crisk’s voice said over the commlink. “I’ve got a passive torp lock on that Avenger—he’s a good distance out from the asteroid field—I could probably get him…”

I swore—Crisk’s targeting radar was top notch if he could identify ship types at this range, and against the backdrop of the asteroid field!

“Yeah, I know,” the boss said to me. “I wonder what kind of system he’s running. No wonder the Ogre’s such a tough rig…”

“Roger,” one of the lieutenants called from his Hradi, “we’ve got a tally-ho on eighteen bogeys. Looks like seven class III powerplants, ahhh, two class II powerplants, and nine J rated fighter engines. We cannot engage at this range, and we’ve got no passive lock capability. None are transmitting valid IFF signals.” Valid identification signals probably meant something to him, as a military pilot, but in our business you learn that identification signals meant very little, valid or not. Of course, if they weren’t transmitting, that probably meant they were up to no good since they didn’t want any local military trafficsats or navsats tracking their location.

“That’s some serious heat, Snake,” the boss told me unnecessarily from the cockpit. “Sounds like a pretty powered up crew… and why, for crying out loud, if Oceana has anything better as military ships, are our escorts Hradis? Even up gunned ones? I mean, couldn’t they scrape anything better up?”

I shrugged. “Probably didn’t want to draw too much attention—and, if you’ll notice, those Hradis aren’t registered as military craft. I’d say they belong to the Agencia de Protection Federales or something like that.

“Ask Crisk what else he’s got out there.”
“No,” the boss replied.
“Look,” I said, “I hate the guy too, but we need to survive this—just ask him what other ship types he’s got. C’mon, everybody knows his ship is better than ours, it’s no big deal.”

“Huh uh,” the boss obstinately insisted. I grit my teeth—here we were about to face at least eighteen bounty hunters with our nemesis on our wing and he was involved in some pointless anatomy measuring contest with the only man who could help us.

“Ask him!” I ordered.
“No,” the boss said. I poked my head up out of the turret and looked through the cockpit door. The boss was shaking his head. I could almost hear the rattle.

“I’m serious—I need to know what we’re facing!” I yelled at him.

He turned around to look at me. “Get back in the turret, you idiot! And I’m not asking Crisk for anything—so just forget about it!”

I swore and plopped back down into the turret. I still couldn’t acquire.

“Missile tracks!” the boss called. “Looks like we’ve got twenty-one inbound!”

“Twenty one vampires inbound,” one of the Hradis called.
“Moving out to interdict; launching countermeasures and jammers on. We should be able to keep the missiles off you… vanya con Dios, mi amigos.”

The Hradis fired a score of mini-pack anti-missile rockets each and also launched a pair missile sized ship decoys which my targeting system incorrectly identified as the Ogre and the Young Bronson. I was impressed—I had heard military ship decoys could perfectly imitate the signature of a ship, but I’d never seen them in action myself.

The Hradis hit their afterburners and sped away from the three cargo ships and rocketed towards the hit squad waiting for us. The two ship decoys flew out a dozen clicks in front our formation and then dove. I could now see the flaming engines of most of the missiles; the few that didn’t get destroyed by the anti-missile rockets went after the decoys with little success. Long range missiles generally didn’t hit, but if they did, you were still dead.

“Torp launch,” Crisk called.

“Roger,” both lieutenants answered almost simultaneously. The boss and Stine didn’t reply—we weren’t used to fighting with anybody else.

Crisk’s torpedo streaked out much faster than the missiles and I gave a low whistle. “Good model…”

“Uh huh,” the boss agreed. “Oh boy, here they come. They’re all coming to meet us now… guess they don’t want to risk us trying to make a run into the belt when we get close enough.”

I reflected on this. On one hand, I didn’t relish marching straight at them while they ranged us with multi-stage missiles, but on the other hand I wasn’t too pumped about eighteen bad guys coming out to mix it up with us either. I’d rather everybody just went home. I could only think of one thing to say, so I said it.

“You said it,” the boss replied. “Get ready—they’ll be on us in about a minute and a half.” I did a last minute capacitor heat check and slewed the turret all the way around just to make sure the actuators were responsive.

“Boom!” the boss called excitedly. “Scratch one Avenger!”

I couldn’t see which radar dot Crisk had shot at, but I could see the explosion. “Yep. Looks like he got it from here too.” I was not only glad that the Avenger was gone but that there was one less torp Crisk could shoot at us someday. Streaks of light flashed beside me and I jerked instinctively. “Tell him to tell us before he does that!” I called to the boss. The streaks of light were missile launches from the Young Bronson.

“Firing,” the lieutenants called and I saw a pair of missiles streak out from the Hradis towards our opponents.
My targeting system finally decided everybody was suitably in range and suddenly I had targeting information. I was tracking no fewer than 78 targets between our five ships, their seventeen, and the numerous missiles, decoys and countermeasures out there. The good news was that my software hadn’t identified any locks against us.

“Looks like everybody’s worried about the big guys or the fighters, boss,” I told my partner.

“Yep,” the boss said, as he began juking anyway. “Got a Banshee in range!”

“I got him,” I called and began firing at him. The Banshee was a fast ship, but maybe a little too fast for his own good. By the time he was in range of our guns, he had been in range of the Ogre for quite some time, but Crisk had held his fire. As soon as I opened up, so did the Ogre from off our right side a dozen kilometers out. The Banshee dove to escape the Ogre; simultaneously, the Young Bronson surged forward using its afterburner and dove after him. The Banshee rolled left to evade, but that put him nicely in my cone of fire.

I plastered him with my twin Powerpoints and when my targeting system said his shields were at zero percent, the Young Bronson hit him with a burst of rapid fire green bolts from a hitherto unnoticed turret on its right side. The Banshee exploded and sent part of a wing sparking of our shields. Our Black Sun 490 climbed and pulled left.

“Whoa!” I called up to the boss, “the Young Bronson’s got a quad mounted! On the right side—looks like a computer autoturret—but still, a quadmount! Everybody’s got a nicer rig than us, man!”

The boss grunted, partially in agreement, and partially in dismay. He was very sensitive to comments about the Black Sun 490.

By now, the comm was all chatter—the lieutenants talked to each other in Spanish, Crisk, the boss, and Stine were all calling up shots and targets. It was too much for a poor turret gunner like myself to listen to and shoot.

“Cutting off my comm!” I called up as I tracked a Juno as he flashed past our lower left quarter. “Just tell me if anything important happens!”

“Gotcha—Snake, twelve high!” The boss rolled the ship and I gave a Yangtzee Blue a dozen bolts to his nose, even as he took our shields down to 85% with a burst of his own.

There were ships everywhere. Fighters flew everywhere, between the rough triangle formed by our small cargo ship, the midsize Young Bronson, and the hulking Ogre. Along the outside of the battle, combat shuttles and corvette class fighters roughly the same size as our Black Sun ran strafing runs or tried to line up missile shots without hitting their own fighters. Our two Hradi escorts were everywhere, twisting and corkscrewing after Raul’s hired guns or popping up close to the combat shuttles to draw fire off of us.

I had plenty of targets, but unfortunately, that meant there were plenty of targets to shoot at us too. There was fire everywhere, and with as many fighters and shuttles as there were flying around, it was difficult to focus fire on a single ship. They weaved in and out, taking damage to their shields and then withdrawing outside of our gun range to let them recover.

In the meantime, since we were the most maneuverable of the cargo ships, we tried to follow the less skilled fighter pilots or home in the few combat shuttles without rear or bottom turrets. The Ogre maneuvered to avoid the long strafing runs but generally kept the swarming smaller ships at bay with the large volume of fire it put out in all directions. The Young Bronson played a dangerous game, swooping close to the Ogre to draw fighters near the larger ship’s turrets while trying to dodge friendly fire from the Ogre and then at the last second rolling right to expose its computer operated quad turret, which, like all quadmounts, drained its capacitors in seconds, but drained enemy shields just as quickly.

“Cut that out!” the boss yelled into the comm.
“What?” I called up, while I scorched marks in a FRL99’s belly as he desperately tried to avoid my fire.

“Stine’s an idiot—he keeps masking Crisk’s fire when he pulls in too close to him. Crisk’s so crazy he’ll probably light him up if he does it again. If he—one high!” The boss rolled, dove left, and hit on the afterburners at the same time.

I lost my mark on the FRL99 but picked up the ship he’d warned me about. Another Banshee, firing his three lasers forward and juking quite well to avoid my fire. A lot of good it did him, as a missile from one of our wingmen obliterated him in a ball of flame.

The boss swore at something and we heeled left. Red lasers flashed past me and I heard my right VDU beep a warning about our low shields. I spun my turret straight down and caught the nose of a combat shuttle I couldn’t identify as he lit us up, rocketing straight up at us, filling space with fire.

“Roll right, roll right!” I screamed, and the boss did so. The shuttle barely missed us and we scraped his shields, arcing brightly against our hull and killing what remaining shields we had.

The ship shook from several hits and I heard the boss yell something incoherent.

Meanwhile, I was trying to blast a Delta who was tailing one of our Hradis. His shields must have already been low, because after a short burst, the Delta’s right rear engine flamed out and he went into a barely controlled flat spin left at top speed. Seven klicks out, a heavily modified military surplus C Model Interceptor Corvette tried to move ponderously out of the way and still keep away from the Ogre who was pounding him, but couldn’t move quite fast enough. The Delta smashed right through the shields and punched into his hull. The ship split right down the horizontal axis, venting flame and then nothing. The corvette was out of the fight, its crew of six just as dead as the ship itself.

“Oh yeah!” I gloated. “That’s one for the books!”

The computer beeped again, as a Jasper started hammering us from the rear. The boss hit the afterburner and rocketed us straight towards the Ogre as, he couldn’t shake him. I tried to fend him off, but the guy was good.

So here we are. Jasper on our tail, Ogre ahead, and on our side, and a massive battle swirling around us. The Jasper blew up as the Ogre tore him trim to stern.

“Got one diving on us, Snake!” the boss called. Our shields went out, and the computer beeped.

The boss rolled and the Razor diving on us fired a dumbfire at us, which missed, and then locked onto us with an imrec.

He lost his lock as soon as he got it, though, as one of our Hradis scissored between us and the Ogre, flashed past us on the right and afterburned right at the Razor. The Razor climbed instinctively to avoid being hit by the Hradi, and I scored some good hits against his belly armor.

The Hradi that saved us, however, paid for it—in full. The Razor’s rear turret lanced into his right engine, and it blew up, taking the rest of the ship with it.

“We lost one of the Hradis, boss!” I called.

The boss swore and gave me some more bad news. “We’ve got
more inbound from the belt too—and we’re not getting any closer to the nav lane, not with all this!” The situation, which wasn’t exactly great, was about to get a lot less exactly great.

My VDU chirped a warning—a missile lock. The boss got the same warning in the cockpit and hit the afterburner, swerving right to avoid a large piece of debris that looked like it used to be a large fighter. “The Young Bronson’s lost an engine, Snake, keep those fighters off of him—crap!” We dove to avoid something else and our Black Sun’s internal lights blinked out and then on again as more bolts tested our armor.

I spun the turret and what I saw made my heart skip. The Young Bronson was about twenty five klicks out, and slowly heeling right—probably due to its damaged right engine—but worst of all was that it was being swarmed by fighters and broadsided by a Crescent Warrior corvette. While that gave our shields a chance to recover, it also meant that we were close to finding out the hard way whether or not the Young Bronson had the real Molocube.

“Turn us around! Turn us around! We’re going to lose them!” I cried desperately.

“Can’t,” the boss yelled, equally as desperately. “I can’t shake this lock! We turn around and whoever that is has us for sure!”

I looked around for a fighter tracking us, but couldn’t find him. I figured one of the shuttles had a rear mounted autotracking rack system or that the Warrior had us locked on from one of his turrets. I swore. Even though he was probably too far out for accurate fire, I fired a long burst at the Warrior, which had the fortunate, sort of, effect of pulling some of his turret fire off the Young Bronson and onto us.

The Ogre passed underneath us, moving back towards the Young Bronson and firing with everything it had at the Warrior. The Warrior was almost as big as the Ogre—classified legally as a corvette but it was built on the Crescent Navigator spaceframe, which means it’s really a small cap ship. The Ogre launched four torpedoes at the Warrior; the Warrior returned fire with all of its turrets, buying the Young Bronson some more time. I too kept my fire up on the Warrior, thinking of the kilos of ship melting explosives a few meters away and desperately hoping for a miracle to save the Young Bronson.

The Warrior pulled off the Young Bronson and accelerated away from the fracas even as one of Crisk’s torpedoes made it through the Warrior’s defense system and took his shields down to nothing. I felt slightly better—our opponents’ biggest ship had apparently decided that no matter how much money he was getting paid, it wasn’t worth dying for. I hoped the other mercenaries developed a similar self-serving duty concept, and quickly. A pair of fighters followed the Warrior away. The missile lock warning disappeared and the boss quickly heeled us around and turned on our afterburners.

I noticed to my dismay that we were overtaking the Ogre. Either Crisk wasn’t pouring on full throttle, which I doubted, given the situation, or the Ogre was damaged.

Apparently the boss was thinking along the same lines: “Snake, what’s the Ogre’s hull look like? Its shields haven’t come up past 60% and I think they’re leaking coolant.” The boss chortled. “Sucks to be them, eh?”

I shook my head. “Hey, genius up there, as much as it’d be nice to see Crisk’s monster ship in pieces, that wouldn’t exactly be a great thing right now, okay, so just work together now and kill him later, okay?” As I was talking I noticed that indeed, the Ogre was indeed leaking coolant; it formed a trail of vapor out their number two engine.

Almost as if the universe was unwilling to cripple someone else without crippling us, our ship shook from a hit, and as I slewed the turret rearward to find our attacker, another twin orange set of bolts flashed narrowly past my turret. I heard a cacophony of warning tones from my VDU, but didn’t have time to check them—I was too worried about finding whoever it was that was pounding us from our six to concern myself with whatever expensive part of our ship they’d shot off this time.

My turret was surrounded briefly in a cloud of blue vapor—engine coolant, blowing out of the reserve tank. Oh, the irony. “Snake! Take that guy out—I don’t know where he came from and he’s not showing up on radar, but—piss off, bugger!” he yelled in frustration at our opponent. The boss juked left, then dove right, cut his throttles, and then afterburnered almost straight up from our previous plane of flight, rolling the whole time, but to no avail.

The guy was good—his gunnery was almost surgical. He didn’t try to fill space with laser fire; instead, he just lined up his shots perfectly and cut chunks off our ship. What’s more, he was staying just out of my cone of fire; the boss was rolling the ship around its horizontal axis in an attempt to expose him to our belly, and thus to my turret, but every time we rolled, the pilot corkscrewed around at exactly the same speed, always staying maddeningly out of my vision.

I watched in morbid fascination as he peeled a meter square of our armor about a foot and a half from my turret, revealing the rather sensitive-to-laser-fire innards of our ship. I still couldn’t see him.

“Snake!” the boss cried, “I can’t shake him—and we’ve got no shields left—this guy must be out of missiles, but he won’t need them at the rate he’s going! Do something down there!”

I almost literally threw up my hands. “What do you suggest? I can’t see the bugger! He’s good, man, real good!” As I was talking, the boss was still putting our ship through the craziest maneuvers he could think of, even as more ships strafed us from the front, sensing that we, like the Young Bronson were in serious trouble.

“I dunno! You’re always talking about how you’re the thinking one, so you figure it out!”

The boss snap rolled and climbed to avoid gunfire from the front and we got a lucky break. The Delta that was lining us up in his crosshairs poured on the afterburners to follow us and must have gotten in the way of the Red Baron behind us. As the Delta blazed after us, I caught a brief glimpse of a red angular ship as it flashed out from behind our six o’clock high and slipped to our six low to avoid the Delta; he then pulled off tailing us as his ally’s errant flying made his earlier corkscrew maneuvers too risky. Our opponents were fairly good, but they weren’t used to working together, which meant they crossed each other’s line of fire and interrupted missile locks—the chaos of the melee worked against them. Of course, no one on our side had worked together either, but we had a stronger incentive to learn to do so—they were working for money, we for our lives.

I took advantage of the stupidity of the Delta pilot and scored a hit or two against the shields of the red ship—a late model Mitsubishi stealth fighter, I think, and hoped he didn’t want to scratch that pretty new paint job.

A bright glow from our front got our attention and I risked turning the turret to see what it was. The boss, meanwhile, pulled up sharply to throw of someone’s aim, so I got what I figured was a great last view of my life.

The bright glow was the Young Bronson exploding, throwing shrapnel, and burning debris outward from an expanding plasma cloud. A fighter that was too close went up too, and everyone else afterburnered their way away from the explosion. I saw, briefly, the Ogre as it dove, only a scant kilometer or two away from us.

I tensed, awaiting the inevitable searing heat from the cargo bay. Nothing happened. After a second or two passed, I figured we were safe. Well, not really safe, at all, but safe from that one particular danger.

“Yo, Ace! We just lost the Young Bronson! Guess he didn’t have the real one, though, as we’re still alive! ‘Course,” I added as a morbid afterthought, “that does numerically reduce our chances of survival by quite a bit, as they’ll all come after us now.” As proof of my statement, the brief pause in the laser fire following the explosion of the Young Bronson came to an abrupt end, as the mercenaries sought new prey—us and the Ogre.

The boss grunted at the news of the Young Bronson’s demise, and swore at someone or something as he suddenly hit the afterburner and rolled the ship right. “Yeah, and we also lost our other fighter escort—it’s us and Crisk now and—Snake, two o’clock low!”

I swiveled around and got a beautiful angle on the FRL99 I had been working on earlier in the battle. He was apparently running from the Ogre, but in doing so, he exposed his upper rear quarter to my guns and in a good ten seconds of gunfire sawed off the twin tail fins he needed for atmospheric flight. That must have unnerved him quite a bit, because he dove—or rather he tried to dive. The Ogre appeared fast underneath us, and less than a kilometer away.

I nearly crapped myself: I hadn’t seen him coming up from beneath us, being so concentrated on the FRL. The Ogre filled my view and I heard the collision sensor from above me in the cockpit start sounding a warning. I could see the forward top turret on the Ogre so well that I could tell what kind of guns he had mounted by the oddly shaped heat sinks—Raptor 225s.
The FRL realized he couldn’t dive, unless he wanted to suicide right into the Ogre, so he pulled up again, right back in front of me. He tried to punch his throttles and escape, but I didn’t let him get away. A few more shots breached his hull, a spurt of flame shot out, and then a secondary explosion blew the FRL99 to smithereens—most disconcertingly, a few pieces of his ship scratched my turret polymer and one cut an inch deep furrow in our armor diagonally from left to right, starting just under the cockpit and ending just short of my turret.

“I’m trying, I’m trying, but if you can’t hold them off with that star cruiser of a friggin’ ship you’ve got what makes you think I can help?” the boss roared.

“What?”
“I’m talking to Crisk—turn on your comms, we’re going to need all the coordination we can get…”

I switched on my comms just in time to hear Crisk call: “Got another one. Radar’s out—how many targets are you showing—and back off the Ogre you idiot—you’re masking my fire!”

The boss didn’t reply, but pulled us up off the Ogre, allowing their top forward turret to damage a scarred Yangtzee Red so badly that he pulled away and limped out of the fight, headed back to the asteroid field where all our trouble had deployed from in the first place.

Our earlier opponent in his red Mitsubishi blazed past us between ourselves and the Ogre. I couldn’t fire for fear of hitting the Ogre and was instead forced to watch as he got a nice long burst off, fortunately for us, he decided the Ogre was a more attractive target, and he scorched black blast marks down the length of the huge cargo ship. When his shots reached the forward turret, a brief bit of flame shot up—the Ogre had lost at least one turret; it was good for them, and us also, I guess, that their gunners, unlike me, kept the maglock on the turrets closed, preventing a full hull breach when they got hit. I figure, if I’m going down, so’s the boss, because its probably his fault anyway. Crisk swore vehemently over the comm channel that we weren’t doing our part.

I fired a few shots at yet another fighter trying the same maneuver between us and the Ogre and I felt the ship shudder as the boss fired a missile at an unseen target ahead.

“Where’s that been the whole time?” I roared. I was soaked in sweat, trembling from the violence of the battle, and my partner just now decides to start fighting?

“Not exactly easy to fly and fight, you know,” the boss replied angrily. “You can come up here and try it next time!”

Instead of dignifying my partner’s ridiculous excuses with a reply
I did something useful: I picked up a Yangtzee Blue lining up on the Ogre from the front and shot off forward mounted radar dish which caused him to think better of his attack run. He broke off to retreat, but a missile leapt out of a launcher on the underside of the Ogre and finished him off.

Our ship shook again as an enemy Hradi strafed us from above; the boss rolled and looped upward simultaneously, catching the hapless Hradi inside our loop and keeping my guns on him the whole time. My Powerpoints blasted a hole in his left wing and must have scored a hit on one of his missiles mounted in the hardpoint on the other side of the wing. There was a pretty explosion as the warhead cooked off and then an even prettier explosion as the whole ship followed.

“Scratch one Hradi,” the boss called to Crisk.

“Roger,” Crisk called up, “we just got another Delta off our two o’clock—watch it! Got one diving on you!”

Hearing Crisk warn us seemed surreal, but I figured, if he’s helping, why question it?

{See the rest in part 2}

"Strange Bedfellows" part 2

The Privateer Stories
"Strange Bedfellows"
By David Dixon
Continued . . .

The boss rolled and we traded shots with the diving Razor briefly, but he thought better of it, cut hard left, and throttled away from us. I noticed, to my chagrin, that his last burst had done something to our computer system—my VDU screens displayed the all to familiar “relay missing or inoperative” message, meaning he’d either blasted a relay or a subcomputer or our targeting radar itself. I knew which one it was—whichever would be most expensive to fix if we ever made it to Salt Station.

Suddenly, things seemed calm. No laser fire, no missile tracks, no explosions. I’d hoped it was because things were calm and not because I was dead or something similarly horrible.

“Hey, Snake! That was the last of them! Everybody else has broken off! Oh yeah! Score one for the good guys! We’re still alive, oh yeah!” The boss exulted.

I had a prickly feeling in my stomach, though, that told me we had better save the gloating until after we’d safely reached Salt Station and after we and Crisk had gone our separate ways. I’m not a fatalist, but I am a realist. There was still a very good chance that this whole misadventure would end in us sucking hard vacuum, turned into cinders by the bomb in our cargo hold, or staring down the wrong end of Crisk’s neutron gun.

“I’d just save all that, for later, you know, when we know we’ve made it, aight?” I replied and began the tedious process of trying to reboot the targeting computer.

Ninety-Six Hours Later

“Salt Station! Finally—we’re only a few hours out, Snake. And no problems since, well, you know, the battle from hell.”

“Uh huh,” I agreed darkly, “from which I am still recovering, thank you. You sure it only took fifteen minutes? Felt like three days.”

“For the seventeenth time, Snake, yes. It was only fifteen minutes, and I’m sorry to hear, again for the seventeenth time, that you were traumatized by the fact that you suck as a gunner and nearly died for it.

“Note, by the way, that I’m not sorry you’re traumatized—I’m just sorry to have to hear it again.”

I sighed. The boss and I had been arguing the whole time about how he could have flown better and I could have shot better—the bottom line was that we estimated about 19k in repair costs, conservatively, and there was no way either one of us was accepting blame.

“Well,” I retorted. “I’m sorry that while I may be a sucky turret gunner, you’re an idiot, who forgets to turn off the coolant pump and instead pumps it all out into space, thus causing serious damage to our number three powerplant and venting 200 liters of coolant at 45 credits a liter. I’m sorry about that.”

My pilot started to say something stupid, but was interrupted by a beep from the comm computer: incoming mail.

The boss read it aloud. “’Good work back at the jump point.’ Yeah, thanks, bud,” the boss interjected sardonically, “’As long as you make it in, the mission is accomplished. The money will be split two ways now, since Stine is gone. You have the Molocube, so do not endanger yourself to defend Crisk.’ It’s from Perez,” he finished unnecessarily.

“Yeah, well, no crap, there, Miss Marple. Who else would it be from? Nice of him to tell us now, though, that we’ve got the real Molocube, seeing as how we nearly got ourselves killed trying to save Stine and Crisk. But why tell us?” I wondered.

“Dunno,” the boss said. “Maybe he’s getting nervous that we’ll get ourselves blown up and he’s this close to the finish line.”

A chilling thought struck me. “Or maybe he sent an email just like that to—“

A multitude of alarms went off as our shields dropped to almost nothing in an instant. I slewed the turret around to where I knew the fire must be coming from—the Ogre. Sure enough, Crisk was only 2k out below and behind us, blasting us. The boss cut the throttle and dropped us down almost right into the Ogre. Since the Ogre’s top forward turret had been destroyed in our earlier fight but their ship was so big, the only safe place for us was the dead space formed by the front of their ship as we hid from their fire right in front of their bridge, using the bulk of the Ogre to mask the bottom forward turret and the top rear turret. The side turrets also couldn’t reach us, and apparently Crisk didn’t have any guns mounted forward, or they had been damaged. Either way, we were safe, but only momentarily. As soon as the Ogre started moving, we were going to be hard pressed to stay right where we were, and when Crisk unmasked his turrets, it as taps for us. All the same, I poured on the lasers right at the bridge, despite the fact that their shields were way too tough for us to even think about penetrating without a lot more time than we were going to get.

“Are you crazy!?” the boss roared at Crisk over the net, “You’ll kill us both, you idiot!”

“Fool!” Crisk shot back, “I’ve got the real data—Perez just told me, and I already owe you a painful death!”

“Perez just sent us the same message! I don’t know what he’s thinking, but—“

I interrupted the boss. “I know what he’s thinking! He’s trying to cut down on the number of people he has to pay! I’ll bet he sends an email after we’re dead telling Crisk he’ll keep our piece of the cash—we must all have had the data—and there’s no thermite bombs at all—that lying son of a—” I was pretty bitter about being double crossed twice in less than two minutes.

The Ogre dove suddenly and I cried out—“Dive! Dive!” The boss obeyed and we stayed covered.

“Left! Left! Hard left—climb!” As Crisk continued to maneuver, I kept pouring on the fire and trying to keep us covered. I was successful, more or less, although a stray bolt or two melted holes in our armor and our number two engine cut out completely.

I heard the lock warning and then a second later heard the collision warning. The boss killed the throttles and the Ogre almost rammed us. I also heard a loud crash as the missile Crisk fired at us skipped off our armor—at the less than half a kilometer range the boss’ last desperate maneuver had put us from the Ogre, the missile didn’t have time to arm. That was a wonderful turn of events, but not wonderful enough for me. I was sort of looking for angels to come down out of heaven and start whooping up on Crisk, as it seemed that was going to be the only thing to save us.

I wasn’t that far off, in all actuality.

Orange laser fire flashed under us into the Ogre, along with a streak of light that could only be a missile. It impacted against the Ogre’s shields about midway back, and the lasers blew off several pieces of armor plating nearby. The Ogre dove to prevent exposing the damaged area of the hull any further and got raked by the orange lasers along the spine of the ship in response. I felt our ship surge forward as the boss hit the afterburner to try to put as much distance between us and the Ogre while Crisk was focused elsewhere and to put our mystery savior between us and Crisk. While we appreciated the guy’s help, we didn’t appreciate it enough to help him—we’re sort of selfish that way.

Hoping Crisk would appreciate the gesture, I stopped firing at the Ogre. I didn’t want to, but I also wanted to make sure they would focus all their attention on whoever it was that was firing on them now, and not us.

I slewed the turret around and tracked the red Mitsubishi we’d tangled with earlier before the jump point. “Oh yeah, it’s the Red Baron! Take him out, my man, take him out—and then stay far far away from us!”

The Ogre turned away from us and turned around, as Crisk tried to keep his functional rear turrets facing his new opponent.

“See you around, Crisk; actually, wait, I hope I don’t,” the boss called tauntingly over the comm, “I hope you don’t survive this—been nice working on your wing, until you know, you tried to kill us and all.”

The Ogre kicked on its afterburners, and quickly began fading away. I watched the pilot I termed the Red Baron nimbly pick his way around the Ogre but didn’t breath any easier until they disappeared completely from our sight.

Four Hours Later

We landed at Salt Station without further incident, which was good, because I’m not sure our Black Sun could take too much more.

To my surprise, and utter dismay, I might add, Agent Perez was waiting for us in the hangar bay as soon as we maglocked our ship down to the deck.

He smiled an insincere smile. “Mi amigos; I am glad to see that you made it thus far. I heard about your… troubles. I appreciate your earnestness in doing the job, and I’m sorry I could not have been equally as earnest and up front.

“I apologize also, for the whole bit about the thermite bombs. I had to insure that you would bring the Molocubes here and not to Raul, you understand.”

The boss mimicked his soft voice: “And I’m sure you understand that if we ever see you alone in a dark alley, you won’t be walking out unhurt—if alive at all.”

Perez laughed quietly. “Yes, yes, of course. Although, I have something that may take some of the sting out of all this. Since Stine is dead, and Crisk has presumably gone to sell what he believes is the only real data set to Raul, I will pay you 35k, with a 15k bonus.”

“A fifteen grand bonus?!” I asked incredulously. “That’s it?! And you pocket the rest of the money for the Agent Perez Charitable Trust, I guess? You’ve got 105,000 credits to pay three ships, only one of them comes through for you, and the best you can do is 50 grand?”

“Yeah,” the boss agreed indignantly, “you lie to us, set us up with the wingman from hell, then try to get us killed by said wingman, and we’re supposed to let you pocket 65k?”

Perez lowered his voice to a deadly whisper. “Well, gentlemen, it is either that or…” He flicked his eyes to his left. The boss and I followed and noticed his two goons waiting beside our ship, hands tucked into their jackets. That deflated the boss and I quite a bit.

Satisfied that we knew he was firmly in control, he smiled again and resumed his earlier quiet tones. “So, gentlemen… our business is concluded, si o no?”

“Si,” I agreed flatly.

“Perhaps you would also like to know that Mr. Crisk is going to make no money off his treachery; I must admit that while I anticipated his attack on you after I sent the mail message, I did not expect him to go to Raul. However, he will probably be most unhappy to learn that Raul is no longer in a financial or legal position to buy the data from him.”

I almost grinned, thinking of the look on Crisk’s face when he found out he had a now worthless bit of data in the hold of his quite damaged and expensive to repair Ogre. I almost grinned, as I said, because Perez ruined it for me, as was his way.

“Of course, he will probably take that out on you two, given your prior business history, but… that is not my affair.” It was Perez’ turn to grin—this time sincerely. “Good day, gentlemen.”

Monkey Business

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Monkey Business"
by David Dixon

Let’s see, must have been about a year or two ago, when the boss and I were flat broke; not, of course, that that’s any different from now or any other time, but that’s neither here nor there. Anyway, we were looking for some work on New Libya, a tropical planet. Why they named a tropical planet after a 20th Century African country that was desert is beyond me, but I’m no cartographer, I’m a privateer. Thus, as I said, I was broke.

However, the boss and I found what appeared to be at the time, a great deal. On the face of things, it didn’t really seem all that threatening. Of course, like blonde hair, women, and suntans, things were not what they seemed. We had been taking turns all day checking the local message boards from our ship’s computer that was hooked into the New Libya server and doing minor ship repair. The boss made the discovery, as I was back in the cargo hold barely squeezed through the maintenance hatch in the ceiling of the hold and into the all-too-narrow maintenance crawlspace, testing wires and breakers trying to find the short that kept restarting our number one engine’s coolant refresh cycle.

“Hey, Snake!” the boss, who flies our ship, a beat up Black Sun 490. “I found something for us; here’s what is says: ‘Cargo Run to the Planet Pleasure Resort-guaranteed profit of 1,500 credits per cargo unit shipped-limited transport needed-reply ASAP.’ Sound good?”

I tried to crawl backwards away from the circuit breaker I was currently testing and squeeze myself back out of the maintenance hatch. All I did was give myself a nasty scrape on my right arm. The sweat that was already pouring off my body in gallons made it sting. I swore.

“You know,” I called back exasperatedly, “even for a guy named Snake, there ain’t a whole lot of room up here.” I grunted again as I inched myself backwards and towards the hatch. “Ad sounds promising though; who took it out?”

I cut myself and swore again. The “crawlspace” as our Black Sun 490 sales literature termed it was only about a foot and a half tall and at most three feet wide. It was tight enough to give an anorexic midget claustrophobia. I heard the boss walk on the cargo bay beneath me and saw, barely, his flashlight shine up the hatch. “Tight up there, eh?” And then, “The ad was put out by an ‘Exotic Animals Corporation.’ I think we ought to check it out.”

I shrugged, or tried to, in the tight space. “Sounds good to me.

“And you really gotta’ lose some weight there Ace, I know you can’t fit in here now, but I’m not going back in this glorified ventilation duct again. I’ve drunk out of straws that were bigger around.” With that, I finally extricated myself from the crawlspace and dropped down the eight or so feet from the ceiling of the cargo bay to its floor.

My pilot, and co-owner with me of the rust bucket we call our ship/home/office, shined his flashlight up into the hatch again. He nodded slowly, as if he was just now realizing how tight it was up there. “Tight, huh?”

I stared at him and came to attention. I snapped to a mock salute. “Captain Obvious, Snake reporting for duty!”

The boss nodded and proffered a sarcastic smile. “I’ll tell you something obvious: I’ve had three mechanics and one Black Sun tech look this ship over in the past, and I couldn’t convince a single one of them to climb up there to do any work.”

“Yeah?” I cut in. “What’s so obvious then?”
The boss smiled a wide grin, obviously savoring what he was about to say. “It’s obvious,” he said, pausing after every word, “that . . . you’re . . . a . . . chump.”

I just shook my head, wiped the sweat off me as best I could, let myself out the large hatch between the cargo bay and the rest of the ship.

“Where are you going?” the boss called after me.

“To check on that ad you’ve been talking about, you retard.”

About an hour later, we had found the office of the “Exotic Animals Corporation” and had been escorted by a rather cute looking secretary into office of a mid level manager named Costas; Bill or George or something.

“I take it you two are here about the ad we placed requiring some transportation for the cargo to

Pleasure Planet resort?” he asked once we’d sat down across from him.

“Yeah,” the boss asked. “We’re interested, but we’ve got a few questions, of course.”

“Of course,” the man replied and raised his eyebrows as if to prompt us.

“First off,” I asked, “where exactly is the Pleasure Planet Restort; what system, what planet?”

He chuckled. “Its in the Planet Pleasure System on the Pleasure Planet; actually, the resort is the planet.” He must have noticed the boss’ and my bewildered expression, because he chuckled again and continued. “A private real estate group raised a ton of money, paid for their own exploration and then found a suitable planet outside federated space, claimed the planet, terraformed it, cleared the nav lanes, and set up the most luxurious, and I might add, expensive, resort currently in existence. Everything is legal; every pleasure, every vice is available; for a cost.”

I raised my eyebrows in appreciation and the boss whistled; it would take several enormous fortunes to do that kind of work. “So,” the boss asked, “since its outside of federated space but a recognized claim, Confed doesn’t have jurisdiction? Who’s the law; we don’t want to get jumped.”

Mr. Costas nodded. “Of course. There is no law, as such, its true, but because of that there’s no crime, either. The company that owns the planet does their own patrolling and enforcement; there aren’t any second chances or plea-bargains. I hear they’re quite ruthless, but I’ve never had a shipper say anything but great things about there. I get the feeling the Planet Pleasure Corporation is pretty hard on pirates and the like; they don’t like riffraff. Remember, the people that come to Planet Pleasure wear watches that are probably worth more than your ship.”

My partner snorted.

Mr. Costas looked alarmed. “I didn’t mean anything-but I’m serious-its just that-“

“No, don’t sweat it,” I replied. “He wasn’t taking offense to anything; most watches this side of a wrist sundial are worth more than our ship.”

Costas furrowed his brow quizically. “Uh, well, yes. Anyway, security is a non-issue, I assure you.”

I looked at the boss. “Doesn’t sound bad to me, but where exactly is it? The planet I mean.”

Mr. Costas smiled. “Six jumps past Perkins.”

“What?” the boss asked incredulously. “They couldn’t find anything closer than that?”

I shrugged. “They probably could, but given the pace of expansion of federated space, they probably realized the only way they could hold onto the system for any length of time was to put it way out there.”

Mr. Costas looked at me and nodded in surprise. “You’ve got a good head on you; not too many people pick up on that; pretty perceptive.”

I shrugged and shot a sidelong glance at the boss. “Well, somebody’s got to be around here.”

“Shut up,” the boss replied wryly. “So what’s the cargo?”

Mr. Costas smiled again. I was getting tired of his smiling. In my experience, people who are always smiling are almost always the sort who are trying to pull something over on the world. “Monkeys,” he replied.

“Monkeys?” the boss and I asked together.

“Yes,” he said. “Monkeys. They’re putting in a huge gaming preserve stocked to look like the jungle. They just need monkeys for the effect.”

“Payment?” I asked.

“I don’t know how big your ship is; that determines the payment. They’ll pay 1,500 credits a head for 20 or less, but 2,200 for more than twenty. The reason is that they’re wanting to get the preserve running as soon as they can, and, well, obviously, there aren’t a whole lot of monkeys running out that way every day.”

“How big are the cages?” the boss asked before I could get it out.

Costas stood up and motioned for us to follow him out of his office. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

As we followed him down the corridor, I pulled the boss a few steps behind Costas to talk to him privately. “How long will it take to get there? Six jumps, that’s a long friggin’ way.”

The boss nodded as we walked. “Yeah, I remember reading about that planet now; I’d forgotten. I read somewhere that it takes about a week or so once you jump out of Perkins, depending on your speed through the nav lanes, although they did say they were well cleared. I figure it’ll take us another five or six days to get to Perkins from here. All told, it’ll be almost a two week trip.”

We followed Costas through several doors, down a set of wide, well cleaned stairs, and finally through a set of swinging hospital style doors into a large, bright room with white tile floors and plastic walls. The room smelt faintly of cleaning chemicals. It was, I had to admit, the cleanest looking pet shop I’d ever been, even if it was, and it was, stacked from floor to ceiling with small wire cages, each holding a sleeping organ grinder monkey; you know, the kind that are like a foot or two tall.

There were a few aisles to walk between the stacks of cages and workers walking about in white scrubs with “Exotic Animals Corp” stenciled on them tended to the stacks.

I motioned to the crates. “They all right? I seem to remember monkeys in the movies being a little more active.”

Costas smiled his smile again. “Yes, they normally would be a little more active. They’ve been sedated for the trip.”

“Not a bad idea,” my boss mused, “I know a certain turret gunner that could use sedating every once in awhile.”

“Uh huh,” I agreed, “but unlike a certain someone I know, it takes more than a conversation with someone with an intellect over 65 to put me to sleep.”

The boss ignored me, as he is wont to to do on ocassion, and asked Costas another question. “How are these guys with payment; I mean, they will pay what they say, right?”

Mr. Costas smiled and nodded. “We’ve shipped them several different shipments of animals over the past two years or so. Never had a problem. They’ve always paid us on time and as stated in their contracts. They’ve already paid us for the 7k per animal anyway, and its standard in our contracts with our shippers that if the client doesn’t pay you, we’ll pay you and get it from them in litigation.”

I looked over the crates of sleeping monkeys and did a quick estimate. The monkeys were smaller than I expected and their cages even more so. They had a large water and food tank attached to the side of each cage with a mechanism on the side I guessed would distribute the right amount of food and water per day. I estimated we could haul between 25 and 30 cages in the cargo bay.

The boss motioned me over out of earshot of Costas. “Well, what do you think?” he asked. “That’s a good contract, good payment, and an easy job; when’s the last time we got that? A bit of a trip, but it isn’t that bad.”

I shrugged. “We’ve never had good contracts, good payment, and easy jobs . . . ever. But it sounds like a good deal to me. If its any kind of legitimate contract at all it will be better than the folks we usually work for. I say we go for it. Who know shipping and selling primates was such good business?”

“I sure didn’t,” the boss replied, “or I’d have pawned you off a long time ago.”

“Riiiiiigghhhhttt,” I replied, “if they weren’t so expensive, you could afford one . . . as a date . . . or a tutor.”

The boss ignored my insult again and walked off to talk to Costas. I sauntered over to a cage and looked at what was to be our cargo. The monkey lay asleep in his small cage, breathing slowly. I almost stuck my finger through a whole in the wire to touch him but had a thought: “Hey,” I whispered to a worker nearby, so as not to disturb my partner’s deliberations with Costas. “Hey, are these things safe; I mean, diseases and stuff, you know?”

The worker nodded-“Yes, they’ve been screened for anything, and they’re clean, but all the same, I wouldn’t be putting my finger in there. These are wild organ grinder monkeys, and they’ll bite the crap out of you if mess with them.”

I nodded and winced. Good to know, that.

“Snake!” the boss called. I turned to see what he wanted. He jerked his finger in the direction of the door. “Go tell the front desk where the ship is docked so they can send a truck to load these cages aboard, and I’ll handle signing everything here. We’ll leave as soon as we can, I guess.”

“Gotcha,” I said, and headed off towards the door, before I remembered something. “Hey, bossman, did you ever replace those water filters? We’ll need them to keep our water fresh for two weeks.”

The boss swore. “No, I forgot to do that, but I’ll-“

I waved him off. “Naw, don’t worry about it; I’ll make sure they-“

The boss cut me off-“Thanks a lot.”

“Make sure they’re still there for you to do when you get back,” I finished.

He sighed and glared at me. “Fine, fine, fine. Just get the ship ready to head out when I get back.”

I had a chuckle at his expense, pushed open the double doors and followed the signs to the front desk.

It took about an hour for the Exotic Animals truck to show up with two workers to help me load the cages aboard. We fit 28 monkeys inside, with a narrow aisle between the two walls of cages for the boss and I to slide between them to administer the sedative throughout the trip. According to the workers, all we had to do was put a syringe full of the sedative into a small valve designed for the purpose on the side of the water tank on each cage every two days. After that, I was assured, the monkeys would sleep blissfully until it was time to administer it again. I stacked the two glass tanks of sedative and the spare syringes carefully next to the internal cargo hatch door and made sure they wouldn’t fall.

I was fiddling with the ship’s main computer from my turret trying to filter the cargo hold’s air and our own quarters’ air separately when my pilot arrived. Our air filters weren’t the best, and I wasn’t going to smell monkey for two weeks if I could help it. I was down in the turret but I knew the boss had gotten back, because I heard the external cargo bay door hydraulically shut itself and heard him open the internal cargo bay door, above and slightly behind my turret hatch.

“Whatcha’ up to, Snake?” he asked.

“Trying to get the air to filter separately from the cargo bay and our part of the ship.”

“Good idea,” he replied. I saw him briefly as he stepped over the open turret hatch and climbed through the small opening to the cockpit. “Got it working yet?”

I shook my head. “Nope. I can’t figure out how to reroute it; I’m not sure the Black Sun is even equipped to do it.”

I heard him flick a few switches and tap away on a keyboard. “Oh, yeah, there it is. I think I know how to do it,” he said. He flicked a switch or two more and I heard the ship’s computer chime softly in response. The sound of the airflow from the ship’s life support system changed slightly, and a dialogue box appeared on my screen-“Separate Filtration Begun,” it announced.

I was impressed; usually my boss wasn’t nearly that handy. “I have to say,” I told him, “I’m impressed.”

He laughed. “With you, Snake, that isn’t hard. Why, its only yesterday you learned to walk upright, isn't it?”

“At least I’ve learned,” I retorted.

“Not very well,” he shot back, and then the ships’ engines roared to life. “Time to go.”

Four days into our voyage, disaster struck, as it always does with us.

The boss and I were plenty bored. We had spent most of our time redistributing the ship’s power, because our power usage was up several percent above normal. We didn’t usually keep the cargo bay pressurized and heated during flight as we did this time, so we had to reroute power from several other systems to cut down on our power usage. It was boring enough, but by the second day, we’d figured it all out and then we were left with nothing to do but set the ship on maximum speed during autopilot and read magazines we downloaded or thumb through copies of the same six or seven worn paperbacks we’d always had. We alternated checking on the monkeys every six hours or so, and alternated sleeping in the small space between the cargo bay hatch and my turret hatch.

The boss was flying the ship, because the area we were flying through was crowded with traffic. I was in my turret, drifting off to sleep, again. My watch beeped. I stirred, opened one eye, and checked it. It was my turn to check on the monkeys.

I climbed out of the turret and let myself into the cargo bay. The monkeys were all asleep, save three or four of them which looked about groggily.

One of them at the bottom of a stack of cages stared up at me and chirped softly. His eyes were wide and brown and he seemed to smile at me. I shook my head at him. “No, no,” I told him, checking my watch. “You’ve still got a few hours yet until I drug you again. I know you’d like some more sleepy juice, but I can’t give it to you yet. I’m sure the people at Planet Pleasure don’t want any stoner monkeys in their jungle.”

He chirped again. Against my better judgement, I bent down to look at him closer. He seemed to grin at me and pressed on of his little hands through the cage. “Hey there little fella,” I told him softly, “go back to sleep.” I cautiously touched his hand. He held my finger and I laughed at him. “Yeah, that’s right, its my finger,” I told him as his eyes widened. I stuck my finger through a hole in the wire and rubbed him under his chin. The monkey chirped at me again. And then it bit me.

Hard.

I shrieked like a little girl and yanked my finger out of the cage, knocking the monkey’s cage over and the several cages stacked on top of it down to the cargo bay floor with a crash. Four of them popped open and a few startled, drugged monkeys suddenly awoke to find themselves free. Most of them wandered stupidly around in the small aisle, still feeling the effects of the sedative, but the monkey that had bitten me was climbing up the other stacks of cages, screeching and hissing at me.

“Snake!” I heard the boss roar from the cockpit. “What did you do back there?”

I was too busy staring wide-eyed at the little devil that had bitten me; he now stood atop the stack of cages on the left side of the cargo bay, where he glared at me malevolently and bared his razor sharp fangs. He hissed and I jumped back, knocking over a dozen cages from in the stack behind me. More monkeys screeched their freedom cries.

“Boss!” I cried as I the organ grinder monkeys I had inadvertently freed began climbing all over the cargo hold. “Boss-help! Help! They’re everywhere! The little buggers are getting out!” One of them climbed up my leg and I looked down at it. I shook it off my leg and looked up, just in time to see the monkey that had bitten me jumping off his perch and right at my face. I swear, I nearly fainted. I yelled a blood-curdling scream of panic and hate and threw up my hands. He hit them, rebounded and knocked over a few more cages as he bounced of my arms. The cargo hold was now full of monkeys.

I felt the ship bank sharply to the right out of the busy nav lane and heard the boss swear. “I’m coming, Snake, just try not to get killed by a bunch of five pound monkeys before I can get back there to save you.”

I was a wreck by this point. What had, only a few minutes earlier, been a cute little organ grinder monkey was now a raging mutant monkey demon that I will always see in my dreams. It took the boss’s appearance in the cargo hold to shake me from my panic-induced paralysis.

He swore loudly as he climbed into the hold over several fallen cages. “Snake! Snake! What’s with you?” he said looking at me strangely. He grabbed me and pulled me an inch from his face. “GET THESE MONKEYS CLEANED UP OR YOU’RE GOING IN A CAGE WITH THEM!” he shouted at me.

“That monkey-it-he-look at my hand!” I protested, holding up my finger from which gushed blood from two distinct fang holes.

The boss narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Snake,” he shouted above the bedlam of the half-drugged-yet-totally-liberated monkeys, “it’s a little bite; now get them!” With that, he grabbed one of the drugged primates by the scruff of the neck and tossed it into an empty cage and slammed the door shut.

Scared as I was by the little scruffy simian bundles of death, I was not about to be outdone by the boss. We’re competitive like that, and I was not going to let it be said to our friends, assuming we had any, that the boss was better at me than anything, unless it was getting shot down by the ladies. Of course, I’m not too sure that the title “Best-Monkey-Returner-To-Cage” is really something to brag about, but hey, when you’ve got as little to be proud about as the boss and I do, its something.

Galvanized into action, I grabbed two by the feet and chucked them into the nearest empty cages, cursing them, their monkey mothers, and anything else I could think of the whole time. As I was making sure the two cages were shut I heard a dull metallic thud and turned to see the boss laying flat on his back on the hold floor. He had tripped backwards over the two glass jugs of sedative.

I smiled at him cheerily. “What’s the matter; the monkeys got you too?”

He made an unrepeatable remark and gestured from the floor at the jugs of sedative. “Set those up there-“ he pointed to several stacks of cages at the far end of the hold that we hadn’t knocked down and whose monkeys were, for the most part, still asleep. In fact, most of the monkeys were asleep again. Even those that had escaped were now curled up on the cargo bay floor. I guess they weren’t used to moving around much, seeing as how they’d been sedated for quite some time.

Seeing this, I ignored the boss’s request and snatched an organ grinder off the floor and flung him into a cage. He only looked asleep. As soon as I touched him, he tried to run off, but I already had his tail and all he did was scratch and flail pointlessly as I got him back to his little prison home. Earlier in the trip I had felt sort of sorry for them, all locked up in their cages. Now I was about as sorry for them as I was for double axe murderers.

The boss grunted as he got off the floor and set the sedative out of the aisleway far enough to where we wouldn’t trip over it while conducting our little monkey rodeo.

It took about an hour for us to get the remaining monkeys back into their cages. Apparently curling up is just an old monkey trick to deceive humans into trying to grab them, because those little organ grinding buggers are pretty good at scampering away when you get close.

“I swear,” the boss said to me, as he shoved what appeared to be the last monkey into its cage, oozing aggravation from every pore in his body, “you have got to be the dumbest man alive. You’re supposed to be several steps above these cretins in the evolutionary chain, and yet, they outwit you and escape . . . while drugged.” He shook his head. “We’re in a spacecraft for Pete’s sake! A spaceship!” He leaned closer to me and gestured towards the bay walls as if you could see through them. “Mankind has discovered fire, built civilizations, developed governments, fought wars and finally conquered the stars, but wait! Here comes Snake, proving that it was all a bloody accident!” He finished up his speech by smacking me in the back of the head.

I would have come up with some snappy retort, but the fact that I had been outwitted by bunch of animals usually seen wearing junior size Shriner outfits giving out handshakes for a penny at planetary fairs had hit me pretty hard. I came back with all I could: “He bit me!”

The boss just ignored me and began restacking the cages. I looked at my finger; the bite didn’t seem so bad now, and it hardly even hurt. I felt more than a little stupid and wondered just how loudly I had screamed.

Until I saw it.

There was one cage, laying under three others, that was still empty. My blood ran cold. It was the cage of the monkey that had bitten me. Somehow, I just knew that even though we’d been throwing the critters into random cages, the monkey that had it out for me was still on the loose. I looked around the bay but didn’t see him.

“Uh, boss . . .” I said quietly.

“Huh?”

“There’s still one out,” I whispered, pointing at the empty cage.

“Why,” he asked through clenched teeth, “are you whispering?”

“It’s him,” I said. “Its him . . . He’s still out there . . .”

My intrepid pilot put his head in his hands. “You have gone off the deep end. Do I need to check the oxygen to nitrogen ratio in the air mixture? What’s the deal? Its one monkey; he’s probably at the far end of the bay curled up in a little ball . . . and what makes you so sure it’s the same one?”

“I know,” I said, “I know. It’s him; I’m telling you, that little fiend is still out there.”

The boss looked incredulously down the row of cages. “Out there? Out there? In case you haven’t noticed in the couple of years you’ve been aboard, this ship ain’t exactly roomy; there’s no ‘out there’ for him to be. Its like fifteen feet from here to the end of the cargo bay. You stack these cages up and I’ll go get that pint sized ape.”

I stacked the remaining cages where they went, with the empty cage for the evil monkey ringleader at the top. I couldn’t tell you then what I feared so much from one little organ grinder monkey, but I can tell you now: you’ll know shortly.

“Snake,” the boss called to me, “check and make sure he didn’t get out of the cargo hold. I don’t see him down here. He can’t have gone far, anyway, he’s drugged and there’s nowhere to go, obviously.”

“He isn’t drugged,” I replied as I exited the cargo bay. “I’m telling you, there’s something about that one; just be glad it was me and not you that checked, it could have been much worse,” I finished weakly. I closed the internal cargo bay hatch so that I wouldn’t have to hear his reply.

I poked my head cautiously down into my turret; no escaped organ grinder; then into the cockpit; no monkey there either.

I opened the cargo bay door and stuck my head in to tell the boss that the escaped monkey wasn’t in the crew compartment. He stood at the far end of the bay, craning his neck looking up at the ceiling above the stacks of cages. I craned my neck to see what he was looking at.

“Hey, man, he’s not in the crew compartment, where do you think-“ I saw what he was looking at and it answered my question.

He was staring intently at the open maintenance crawlspace. I had left the small hatch open when we were loading the cages aboard because I didn’t feel like getting the small stepladder out from its storage under a panel in the floor while we were trying to get the bay loaded. The opening was about a foot and a half short above the top of the stack of cages.

“I think,” my crew mate began.

“No you don’t,” I interrupted.

“I see,” the boss said wryly, “that you’re back to yourself; glad to see you’re over your harrowing near death experience at the hands of a berserk five hundred pound gorilla-“ he put his hand to his ear, feigning listening in an earpiece-“what’s that Cindy? Not a five hundred pound, but that’s right, a five pound gorilla.” He grinned sharkishly. “As I was saying before you interrupted me . . . I’m pretty sure he’s up there.” He pointed at the crawlspace. “Know what that means, Snake?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You don’t? Let me explain. It means-“

”No, you dunce,” I interrupted again, “I know what you want, and forget it. Not in a million years. I hate going up there anyway and if you think I’m going up there in search of the monkey version of a cross between Ghengis Kahn and Harry Houdini, you’re out of your mind.”

“Oh, no I’m not. You’re going up there, because unless I’m very mistaken, you’re the only reason that little glorified jungle snack is up in the maintenance area anyway. You let him out, and you’re going to get him. I’m getting the stepladder. Lets get him down quickly; I don’t like hanging out next to nav lanes. It’s a busy route, but the way we’re just sitting here it won’t be long before some pirate comes by and thinks we’re easy pickings.” With that, he stooped to the floor and began prying open the panel to get to the stepladder.

I was keenly aware that I had very little ground to stand on, seeing as how this was all my fault, and though I was free to protest as loudly as I wanted, it’s sort of unspoken ship’s rules that if its your fault we got into it, you’ve got to be the one to get us out. Of course, usually it’s the bosses fault we’re in whatever trouble we’re in, so I’m usually a fan of the system, but this time it sure came back to bite me.

The boss got the stepladder out and in a few minutes we had moved the cages out of the way enough for me to climb up the ladder and reach the hatch. I looked into it with a sense of dread is almost impossible to describe. I was sweating already from just the thought of climbing back into that claustrophobia inducing duct, and the fact that there was some sort of simian satan up there awaiting me like some dark lord in his dungeon didn’t make it any more appealing.

I climbed to the top of the ladder and then hesitated before trying to squeeze myself back into the opening. I looked down at the boss, hoping he’d relent.

“Well?” he queried, gesturing to the hatch.

“Fine, fine, fine,” I muttered to him, “but when I die up here and start stinking, you know you’re going to have to be the one to climb up here and pull me out.”

“Start stinking?” he asked. “Start? Just get up there and get that thing out of there.”

I poked my head through the hatch. It was dark, except for a few red and green indicator lights twenty or so feet up the crawlspace. “Light,” I called. “I need a light. I can’t see anything up here.”

The boss pressed his flashlight into my hand. I turned it on and scraped my arm into the duct beside my head. I shined the light into the murk and saw no monkey. I knew that further up the crawlspace, about twenty-two feet, there were two small four foot passages that branched off to the left and right; left led to the crew ventilation system filters; right led to circuit breakers that one could use in an emergency to purge the reactor coolant. How you would ever get to them in a emergency is something the designers of the Black Sun 490 apparently never considered. Something I definitely considered though, was that evil creature up inside our ship pulling things like coolant purge master switches and the like.

I still wasn’t sure which bothered me more though: that evil organ grinder pulling switches in the maintenance area, or the thought of me trapped alone in a three by one foot space with a psychotic homicidal zoo animal.

“Get up there already,” came my pilot’s disembodied voice from cargo hold below me.

“I’m going, I’m going; you’re lucky you’re too fat to get up here.” I banged my shoulder hard on the edge of the hatch getting in. I swore. It was the same one I had banged when I was getting out a few days ago. It took some wiggling and wrangling, but I managed to hold my breath and make myself thin enough to squeeze my torso and arms into the crawlspace.

I scraped my left knee trying to get the rest of my body inside and then scratched the skin off my right shin on the opening. “Crap. I hate my life,” I called down to the boss.

He laughed. “Yeah? Well, maybe your little primate friend up there can end it for you; to hear you tell it, he nearly bit you in half the last time you ran into him.”

I ignored his laughter and shined the light ahead of me and moved, slowly, down the crawlspace. I could only move half of my body at a time: one shoulder first, until I was nearly wedged completely in place, and then scrape my other shoulder along the opposite side of the crawlspace. It wasn’t exactly a smooth wall either; the sadistic designers loved to place little ledges and switches and grates everywhere. They had worked hard to make it the most difficult, uncomfortable place ever created. It must have been a committee that designed it; no one person could have done it on their own.

As angry as I would like to have been at the designers, unfortunately I had even bigger concerns. Namely, what exactly was I supposed to do up here once I found the monkey? Just as I was pondering this question, it was answered for me. I had only crawled about five feet when I heard scratching on metal ahead of me. I froze. I heard a chirp; before it had sounded so innocent and cuddly; now it struck terror in my heart. The little cretin stuck his head out from the left passage. The light reflected off his eyes; golden orbs of hate and malice. He bared his little fangs and hissed.

I raced backwards down the tunnel. My head banged off the ceiling and my chin hit the floor at least twice. “He’s here! He’s here! I’m getting out!” I yelled as I worked my way back shoulder after shoulder as fast as I could. I moved faster than I think I’ve ever moved before. I didn’t care that I was bruising and cutting myself; all that concerned me was the presence of a deranged two foot monkey in a one foot hole.

The boss was yelling something up at me, but I couldn’t hear him above my own gasps for breath, my incoherent yelling at the slowly advancing monkey, and the monkey’s awful screeching. I swear, I hear it in my nightmares.

I almost fell out of the hatch, but luckily, in a matter of speaking, the hole caught my chest. It did keep me from falling eight feet to the floor but it also took about two layers of skin off of me from my navel to my neck. I slid out, and then down to the cargo bay floor where I scampered away from the hole, half expecting to see the malevolent monkey coming after me, eyes glowing.

For some reason, the boss thought all this was hilarious. He was leaning up against the cages laughing like a loon. “I have never seen somebody so scared of a friggin’ animal,” he managed to say between his guffaws. “Especially somebody who fancies himself a rough ‘n tough privateer! You’re one step above a pirate, Snake, and . . . it’s a monkey! A monkey, man!”

My heart was beating too fast to talk. As I got up, I noticed my hands were shaking. I’m telling you, you laugh at me, but you weren’t there. I clasped my hands behind me so the boss wouldn’t see. “I’m out, Ace. You get him down if you want to, but I’m not going back up there.” I exited the bay, closed the hatch, climbed down into my turret, closed the turret hatch, and then set the magnetic seal.

I heard the cargo hatch open above me and heard the boss step onto the turret hatch, still laughing. He closed the cargo hatch and took his place back in the cockpit.

“So, Snake,” he said over the intercom, “what’re we gonna’ do? It’s what, ten more days until planetfall? You want to leave him up there?

“Personally, I think he’ll come down when he gets hungry. I mean, he’s got to eat more than usual since he isn’t sedated.”

“I don’t think he’ll come down except to kill us,” I responded, as evenly as possible.

“Look,” my friend in the cockpit said, “it’s just an organ grinder monkey. It’s not a supernatural alien from the twelfth dimension or anything.” As he talked, I felt the ship accelerate and bank left, back into the normally traveled nav lane. “Get a grip. In fact, its time to sedate them again.”

“Yeah, so?” I replied from my turret. “It’s your turn this time, pal; have fun.”

“And who’s supposed to fly?”

“Um, let me see,” I countered, “the autopilot? I mean, that’s what its there for.”

I heard him sigh as he left the cockpit for the cargo hold.

About ten minutes later, I heard the door reopen and the boss’s worried voice: “Snake? What did you do with the sedative?”

I opened my turret hatch and stood halfway out of it. The boss was leaning in cargo bay doorframe. “What are you talking about? You set them out of the way somewhere. I haven’t touched them.” A uneasy feeling was grabbed my gut. “Why?”

“They’re not in there anymore. I looked all over and the little buggers are starting to wake up.” As proof, I heard a few chirps from the hold. “We need that sedative, Snake.”

“He’s got it. That little hellspawn monkey has it. I don’t know how, or why, or what he’ll do with it, but he’s got it,” I answered, confident that indeed, we, who had dealt with pirates, riffraff, corrupt cops, good cops, the military, private armies, double-crossing thieves, and even a few women in our time, were going to be done in by an ordinary organ grinder monkey with a god complex.

The boss sat down just inside the cargo bay. “That’s impossible. I mean-how-when? What in the world would he-he’s a monkey! I mean, he can’t know whats in those things.”

I just shook my head. “I told you, man. He’s the bloody Adolf Hitler of monkeys. He’s downright evil. Those eyes . . .” I trailed off, thinking of the glowing orbs in the ventilation shaft.

The boss glared at me. “You’re starting to creep me out. Now, instead of being your usual fountain of worthless nonsense, how about helping me solve this.”

I mimicked him: “Maybe he’ll come down when he’s hungry. It’s just a monkey.”

He ignored me and continued. “He must have those bottles up there in the-“

“No,” I interrupted. “I’m not going up there, not for ten times what I’d pay to have on holovid what that one chick said to you on Paris V after you asked her to dance with you. And that’s a lot.”

He scowled at me. “You, Jupiter’s Warriors boy, shut it. And if you ever mention that incident to anyone, I’m going to tell them about the time you crapped yourself facing a two foot tall cute little furry exotic pet. This is the gods paying you back for ragging on me about that whole Paris V thing. And, I might remind you, you’re stupid insults aren’t helping us figure out how to get that sedative back.”

I shrugged. “Who needs the sedative? We’ll just close the bay door and leave the monkey’s be. It’ll smell bad with them flinging poop around and stuff since they’re up, but its separate filtration, and they’ll be plenty of cash to have someone clean out the bay after this mission anyway. They’ve got food and water and you can hardly hear them through the doors anyway.”

Famous last words. Seven days later, life was miserable. We could hardly stand it anymore. While its true that you can’t hear one or two monkeys through the bay door, when all thirty odd of them are up and screeching, you can hear them quite well. Even my bit about the separate filtration wasn’t quite true. It seems our friend the escapee liked doing his business in the ventilation ductwork nearest the crew compartment, after the air had already been filtered. The ship had an overall smell of animal in it, one which we just couldn’t seem to get used to.

Every time I tried to go to sleep, I heard the screeching little devils and saw his golden eyes. Once, I finally did get to sleep, about three jumps past Perkins. I had a dream; in it, I heard my hatch open and above me stood the monkey. I reached for the combat knife I always kept in my belt. It wasn’t there and when I looked up, the monkey had it in his right hand, and the boss’s severed head in his left. Yeah, I probably need a psychiatrist, but, hey, we can’t exactly spare money for nonessentials like mental health.

The intercom crackled. “Last nav beacon here, Snake. From here its just a simple autopilot run for about-“ there was a pause while the boss checked his watch-“46 hours.”

“I don’t know if I can take this for another 46 hours, ace. Lets just hit the cargo purge button and blast ‘em all out into deep space. “We’ll see how they screech in hard vacuum.” A thought struck me and I grinned: “Space monkeys.”

“I’ve thought about it, honestly,” the boss replied. “Thing is, Costas had me sign the contract so fast I didn’t really read it all. But, as you know, I’ve had nothing but time on my hands, and this awful smell, of course. It seems that these little furry hate balls are insured. We flush ‘em and we owe Pleasure Planet 8.5k a head.”

I whistled. “That’s steep. Probably worth them sending a bounty hunter or two after us. That sucks. I was kind of looking forward to hearing that whoosh of the cargo bay doors opening and the bay depressurizing and sucking all those little horrors into the void.” I was smiling just thinking about it.

“Yeah,” the boss mused, “Screeeeeeeechhwhooooooooshhhh-silence. That’d be nice.”

I smelled something strange. I sniffed again. I couldn’t recognize it; it wasn’t monkey, but it wasn’t nice either. It had a strange chemical odor to it. I poked my head out of the hatch.

“Hey, ace, you smell that?” I called to the boss through the open cockpit hatch.

“Yeah, yeah I do,” he replied. “Wonder what it-holy crap!” I heard him start and try to move in the small cockpit. I climbed out of the turret and leaned halfway inside the cockpit. Immediately, I saw what had startled him.

Leaking from the vent directly above and to the right of his seat was a steady stream of yellow liquid. Whatever it was, it was also the source of the smell.

“That better not be what I think it is,” my boss/pilot said. “If that’s monkey piss, I’m going to beat the ever living crap out of that monkey and then you,” he finished.

I leaned forward to sniff the stuff. And fell promptly backwards, as the world spun wildly. I hit the floor hard, but didn’t feel anything. Wow, a detached part of my mind thought, this is kind of nice.

“No,” I heard my voice saying, from somewhere far away. “This isn’t monkey piss . . . I’m pretty sure the-the-the-whatever it is up in there broke the sedative bottle . . . try to-try to call-oh boy.” The world spun, went black and white, and then the floor faded away beneath me and I fell upwards towards the ceiling, which was now an ugly shade of green. I vaguely remember the boss making a garbled mayday call and seeing him slump strangely over his center console.

I woke up in a bed, a real bed. I opened my eyes and felt all awake at once. The ceiling above me was beautiful crystal glass and looked upward towards a pair of suns. The glass was polarized so the light wasn’t too bright, and it refracted brilliant rays depending on which way I turned my head.

“Nice to see you’re up, sir,” came a female voice from beside me. I turned and saw the hottest looking nurse I’ve ever seen. She looked like she’d just walked out of a holovid. “We gave you some hithamine-plax shots about two days ago, but we didn’t want to overdo it. If you come out too fast, sometimes it can be quite painful, and we hear at the Pleasure Planet infirmary are always wary of that.” The nurse smiled and my heart melted. No pain here, no sir.

“Your friend woke up an hour ago, and he said you had to leave as soon as you woke up. The effects should be quite gone by now. The hithamine was to counter the effects of the sedative and the plax was to make sure you slept through the painful period, but plax has very few after effects; you’re free to leave, just like your friend asked. I’m Molly, by the way, and have a nice stay.” She got up. I watched every step she took out of the room. I really really didn’t want to leave.

I slid out of bed, put on my clothes which were freshly washed, pressed, and sitting on a dresser not too far from my bed. I don’t’ think I’ve ever had my clothes pressed before or since. I looked around as I got dressed. The hospital room was the most extravagant I’d ever seen. Real wood paneling, state of the art electronics for business and entertainment were tucked away behind ornate carvings and paintings, and the room was fully furnished with hospital bed, a dresser, three antique chairs, an ornate table, and a full length mirror.

I stretched and mulled over the fact that this was the fanciest place I’d ever slept in, and with a beautiful woman by my side no less, and I didn’t remember a thing. Well, that’s life for a privateer I guess.

I stepped out my door and found the boss trying to make small talk with Molly. She seemed relieved that I showed up and took the boss’s distraction as a good time to make her exit. She disappeared around the corner and the boss looked distinctly unhappy. “Well, I see the sleep hasn’t dulled your edge,” I said heartily, “still got the touch, I see.”

I felt better and more rested than I had in years, at least until the boss’s next words: “Well, I hope I still have the touch, because right now it’s about all we’ve got. That nice little sleep we had, I hope you liked it. A bed in this joint runs 15k a night, apiece. All told, we’re looking at a monkey-induced nap that just cost us 60 grand. Plus the 900 credit towing and rescue fee, and we’re looking at a total profit of 700 credits.”

I no longer felt good at all. “What!?” I sputtered. “Sixty grand!? Is that legal? I mean-“

The boss cut me off. “We’re not in federated space, remember. Everything’s legal here. So legal in fact, that they’ve already deducted everything from what they would’ve paid us. Now c’mon, we’ve got a cargo bay to clean.”

I swore and sauntered off after him, vowing that if I ever saw another monkey again, I’d have his brains for breakfast.

Two Wrongs Don't Pay Right

The PRIVATEER Stories
"Two Wrongs Don't Pay Right"
by Nicholas Mahaffey

To put it bluntly, it was dark. Space was all I could see, and through the somewhat dimmed plastiglass of my cockpit's viewports, space itself was pretty dim. I could vaguely see the stars, which weren't even twinkling. Twinkling is an atmospheric effect on star light. Out here in the open ranges of the Outter Rim, they never twinkle. They just shine on diligently. Aside from the dark, there was also the cold. Along with the cold came hunger, which I remedied by munching on an energy bar. It was banana flavor. I detest banana flavor.

I'm a Privateer. My partner, Snake, and I fly missions for hire. In times such as these, freelance work of any type is a thankless (and nearly payless) job. We were currently on something of a stakeout. Mrykrah's Finest (that is, the local authorities in Mrykrah system) had hired us to investigate some drug smuggling at one of their in-system jumps. Our official charge was to wait for a vessel matching a certain description and ID, which was suspected of hauling illegal substances, confront them in the name of the Mrykrah militia and ask for their cargo manifest, and, if they were found guilty, escort them to Mrykrah militia forces for apprehension. Of course, we'd been instructed to escort them thusly by "any means neccessary", which was a lovely euphamism for "If they don't comply, you are to blast them unmercifully to stray ions". Oh yeah, working for local militias is a safe and thankful job.

For this task, Snake and I had agreed to sit outside the nexus in question (the nexus in Ramsweed system, leading into Mrykrah), amidst the floatsam of a small asteroid group there, and power down in order to spy on incoming traffic unawares. The light of the nearby star, while not angled into my cockpit, sadly, would illuminate, briefly, the hull of any ship that passed through the lane to the jump point. We'd been comissioned to find a Zenith ECC bulk haul with certain hull markings and a certain ID signal. We'd been out here for maybe six hours, and our estimated "window of opportunity" was almost expired, after which we would return to the planet in Mrykrah and look for our next "window of opportunity". I, for my part, was anxious to power up and get some heat flowing in the cockpit. Our tiny personal heaters had functioned decently for a few hours on their power cells, but now they were wearing down and the cold was becoming unbearable.

It was about the time that I'd gotten half way finished with my energy bar that I noticed a soft glow coming through the hatch of Snake's turret. I turned in my seat (it was easy in the lack of gravity, as our grav-units were shut down with the rest of the main systems) and peered down into his turret to see what he was up to. Lo and behold, Snake was quietly typing something on his periodical computer. Floating just beyond the flip-up screen of the small computer was a two-dee picture of Carla, a girl we'd met just over a month ago, who had shown some attraction to Snake, for reasons unknown. I kept quiet as I spied, trying my best to see what he was typing. "Dear Carla" . . . Why, it was a letter! Most likely a love letter. Oh, I thought to myself, I have no choice but to harrass him for this! As silently as I could, I floated myself down into the hatch of the turret, stopping just a few inches above Snake's occupied head.

"Whatcha doin, there, ol' buddy?", I asked in my cheeriest voice. Snake startled and swung about with the speed of a . . . well, snake, and planted the flat end of the periodical computer squarely in my temple. Of course, that blow sent me straight into the side of the turret wall, and the lip of the hatch caught my ribs hard. As soon as I stopped bouncing and cursing, I clubbed at Snake with my fist. "Hey, you startled me, idiot! Don't blame me because you weren't prepared for my reflexes." I opened my mouth to curse again, but more pressing matters took over.

A dull light swooped through the cabin, and was gone. "Company!", Snake announced as I turned to look out his viewport. With that, I pushed myself back from Snake's turret and floated myself back to my cockpit. Even as I strapped myself in, I could see the light of the system's star reflecting off the hull of the ship at different angles. Another dull flash of reflected light swept across my viewscreen, and I caught a glimpse of the hull and its markings. Indeed, this appeared to be our quarry. "Markings look good, Snake. Let's move in and check her ID."

I flipped the neccessary switches on the console to my right and pressed the starter. With a bit of sputtering and whining, the engines began turning over and the primary systems came online. My viewscreen lit up as the visual enhancers kicked in, and I could clearly see the Zenith ECC and her hull markings, slowly plodding her way to the jump point. I engaged the shield system, and set my weapon capacitors to start charging. Snake's turret swivelled as he limbered himself for the possible engagement. When everything was set in motion, I applied thrust and vectored towards the Zenith on a lead pursuit trajectory.

We caught up with them within a moment and took station about a hundred meters off her starboard flank; our weapons systems showing a full charge to any scans, and Snake's turret poised to unload a capacitor full of laser fire into the nearest of the four defensive turrets if they didn't cooperate. I held position as my scanner took a look at the vessel. Within a few seconds of the initial call, her scanner system responded with her ID, and I cross-checked it with the one we were looking for. It is, gruesomely enough, perfectly legal to open fire on a vessel which does not transmit an ID signal . . . at least, in this area of space, it is. Pays something of a bounty, too. I smiled, satisfied, at the confirmation. It wouldn't be long now until we were recieving our credits and taking a day or two off. I indulged a quick fantasy that included sunny skies, blonde hair, and cold drinks. The promised payoff for reeling in this smuggler was worth the risk of the "any means neccessary" clause. I held my smile and opened a frequency to the vessel.

"Good morning, Captain . . . Stills, is it?" The contract had included a packet on information about the vessel, named The Thinker, and her captain, J. Stills. The man who appeared on my vid screen was probably in his mid forties, bearded, and wary. "Good morning, Captain.", he replied. "What can I do for you?" "Captain Stills, in the name of the Mrykrah Space Law Enforcement Division, I hereby request that you surrender your cargo manifest, and, if anything illegal is found, follow me as I escort you to Mrykrah authorities." Snake nearly laughed out loud at the official nature of the language I'd used. I had a hard time keeping a perfectly straight face myself. Stills' face blanched noticeably in the pale green of the comm display. When he had regained his composure, the game of hard-ball ensued.

"Sir, I demand to see your authorization in this matter. I'm hauling furniture to Mrykrah, and I don't have time for punks and their pranks!" I cocked my eyebrow and did my best to hide a satisfied smile. "Punks, eh?" and I casually stabbed a few buttons, transmitting the electronic copy of the warrant. "I'll remember your name-calling if you have anything other than just furniture on that tub." He scowled, both at my words, and at the proof of my authority in the situation. At length, he scowled again and turned his head to speak to someone; muting the audio. I heard Snake chuckle. Everything was going according to plan. Within a moment, Stills returned to me. "We're transmitting our unaltered manifest now." Said manifest appeared on my monitor a few seconds later, and, sure enough, amongst the pieces of furniture, there was listed an item named "wood varnish".

The warrant had come with a few instructions. The police on Mrykrah were onto Stills' drug smuggling, and had confiscated, unbeknownst to Stills, one of his cargo manifests from a drug delivery. "Wood varnish" was his code-word for his illegal goods. In reality, the furniture he hauled wasn't made of real wood, but rather of a semi-organic composite that resembled wood in appearance, texture, and smell, but required no varnishing. Seeing the incriminating evidence, I muted the comm channel and said to Snake, "Looks like we're about to make money and help the authorities at the same time. How's that for irony, eh?"

Famous last words.

Even as I was gloating, the two turrets that we were exposed to opened fire.

"Ahh! Crap on a hydraulic wrench!", Snake bit out a mild epithet as the first shots spashed against our shields. He wasted no time in delivering said capacitor's worth of laser fire into said turret. The Thinker's shields blazed to life around the turret and surrounding hull with Snake's shots, and the thinner section of shielding over the turret collapsed altogether, allowing the last remaining shots of the volley to hull the turret (and probably the gunner inside). It fell quiet, and gave us a bit of breathing room, as now there was only one turret imediately neccessary to deal with. I changed our trajectory to throw off the turret gunner's aim a bit, and then swooped back in as Snake pinpricked a few shots off of the shields over the turret. The gunner was doing the same thing to us; peppering shots at Snake's turret in an attempt to cripple both Snake's ability to shoot back, and Snake himself. The hits and near-misses flashed across our fuselage, the shimmer of the shields washing over the hull.

"Get me away from this guy." Snake requested through clenched teeth as his capacitor ran dry again. I glanced at the shield readout, noticing that our bottom-side shields were down to roughly half capacity. "Sure thing, Snake" I pulled us away from the Zenith, with her one exposed turret still firing after us, and rolled us over to let the top-side shields fend off any lucky hits.

"Let me know when you're ready, Snake."
"Gotcha.", he replied. "And . . . take me back in."

I U-turned and dived back towards the vessel, who had now repositioned itselt to give line-of-sight to the remaining two turrets. "You've got your work cut out for you, buddy." I said to Snake as we made the first pass at the vessel; Snake's shots raining on the nearest of the three. Arcs of laser fire flashed past us as the gunners corrected their leads, and the three lines of fire began to intersect. I pulled the stick in one direction, and rolled the ship in the other, creating a corkscrew effect that threw the gunners through a loop (no pun intended). Snake's aim, however, stayed tight as his shots battered one of the three turrets. As we passed, it didn't turn to track us, but continued to fire; its actuators most likely burned into a fused mass of molten metal. Thinker rolled again, keeping her two remaining turrets towards us as we finished our pass, leaving our engines exposed. Shots thinned the rear shields and rattled my ship.

"Snake, the shields are getting thin. I'm going to make a wide pass and then dive in with a pair of infrareds."
"Copy that."

I did as I said I would. I gained way from The Thinker and made a wide circle back around to her rear section. Thinker tracked us, making a lazy turn to keep the turrets facing our way. After our shields had regenerated to three fourths of full strength, I sharpened my turn and afterburned in across Thinker's rear, pulling into formation in her wake. The turrets opened up again as soon as we were within range. "Snake, let's concentrate on taking down her engines. If she can't run, she can't escape the boarding party, and we'll get our pay." Snake's concise "Wilco." was the only reply. His Starburst lasers filled my forward viewscreen with bolts of bright orange, and I toggled my own weapons systems on, switching my scanner into "target acquisition" mode. I added my own forward-facing lasers to Snake's fire, mixing red with orange, and Thinker's shields flashed and sparkled as we chewed through her capacitors. Thinker's turrets also found us, and my own forward shields flashed into view as their shots found their mark. I held my course, though, hoping that the missile locking mechanism would work quicker than the aim of the opposition.

Snake bit out a tense epithet as our bottom shields grew thin and hits started bouncing him around in his turret. "Hang on, Snake." I called to him. "Keep pushing her shields down. I've almost got a solid lock." It was only a second or two after I said the words that the H.U.D. bracketed the Thinker's engines with a lock indicator. "I've got tone! They're away!" First one munition, then the other blasted away from their hardpoints and streaked towards Thinker. The first rocket slapped against her thinned shields, and the resulting explosion flashed across her rear quadrant as her shields flared to life, then died as the capacitors dried up. The second missile, just a scant second behind the first, plunged through where the first had broken the shield, and streaked into the engine housings. The Zenith's first and fourth engines sputtered momentarily, then blasted out the side as the fuel lines ignited. She slewed to starboard from the blast, and I could see her maneuvering thrusters overdriving to stabalize the motion. The fuel lines continued to spray fuel and oxygen across the flaming casing, blowing out an uncontrolled plume of fire and smoke which propelled Thinker deeper into a spin.

"She's spinning, Snake." I reported. "I'm gonna try to keep us in position to disable her other engines. Keep firing!"
"Yeah."

I engaged the afterburner and angled just outside of Thinker's arc, hoping that I could go around that arc faster than she was spinning. With any luck, we could damage the other engines enough with just gunfire to disable them. As I passed Thinker's direct six, I tightened the turn to give Snake the correct angle. His shots lashed out at Thinker's remaining engines as her nearest turret tried to adjust its aim to compensate for the spin. Snake's shots burned deep holes in her engine's armored casings; each impact softening up the defenses a little more. Her second engine visibly cooled down as the mechanisms inside melted and clogged. Within a moment, the turrets stopped firing; three of Thinker's four power plants had been disabled or destroyed, and there wasn't enough power to keep her turret capacitors charged. It was only a few shots more before Snake also disabled the third engine and Thinker was completely at our mercy.

Stills' face appeared on the VDU; a trickle of blood running from his forehead. He appeared to be screaming at us in rage, or desperation, but the audio signal was nothing but static. Pulling away from the arc of Thinker's spin, and dodging a small cluster of rocks, I waited for Stills' transmission to stop moving before I tried to respond. "Captain, it appears that your communications are damaged. We, therefore, assume that you're surrendering, and hereby-"

Kaboom.

Three small capsules jetisoned from Thinker's hull, and one of the turrets as well.

Thinker erupted into flames as small explosions blossomed up her fuselage. I recognized the pattern as a built-in self-destruct. The capsules and freefloating turret were the crew members who weren't interested in going down with the ship. Sadly, all four escaping criminals ended up dashing themselves against asteroids within a matter of seconds, and their pods were beaten open, exposing all living crew to hard vacuum. As for Thinker, her self-destruct charges managed to ignite the remainder of her fuel and oxygen supplies, which weren't far from the engines. The rear of the ship shattered violently in the explosion, and the forward section, or what was left of it, careened into the rocks, still spinning, and ended up wrecking itself against a larger one.

"And, that's that." came Snake's surmise of the situation as he crawled up from his turret; his brow somehow free of sweat. I used my sleeve to mop my own sweat from my brow and face, and turned to face him. "Gun cameras were on. I guess we used any means neccessary." Snake gave an amused snort and reached into his green duffle bag for his black book. "Do we count this one as a kill, or just leave the score as it is?" I pondered his question for a moment, grimacing at the sound of a small bit of Thinker's debris bouncing off our shields.

"Well, the destruction of the ship was a direct result of us attacking it, wasn't it?"
"I dunno. I think it's more of a direct result of Stills choosing to self-destruct, making it an indirect result of our attack."
"But Stills wouldn't have self-destructed if we hadn't attacked. Thus, we are still eventually directly responsible for the destruction of the Thinker, and that means we get credit for the kill."

Snake considered this for a moment, then marked his book and opted to take a nap on the passenger couch after we jumped back into Mrykrah.

Two Hours Later . . .

"Alright, Snake, wake up. We're here." Snake's only reply was a yawn as he sat up from his nap.

We had arrived at the rendezvous point, where we were supposed to either escort Thinker, or report back with news of her demise. In the interest of keeping Stills' capture a secret (and thereby giving the authorities an opportunity to use him to track down his suppliers), it had been arranged for us to meet our military contacts at a point just outside of Mrykrah's normal shipping lanes; not too far away, but far enough to avoid being easily seen. We'd been told to expect our contact to be flying unmarked craft (with the exception of military weaponry) and looking like a lost freighter with a small escort of armed civilian one-man craft. More hush-hush about capturing Stills, I had guessed.

We arrived at the point to find everything exactly as we'd been told. At the rendezvous was another Zenith ECC, but I could see extra turrets mounted on the hull, and the guns appeared to boast McMahon lasers, which are quite high on the laser food chain. Along with the Zenith were the three promised one-man ships. They looked like beefy hardware on the frame of a Puma SE 120 hotrod. Not exactly military spec, but obviously intended for shooting and fast flying. Snake, glancing over my shoulder, gave a low whistle.

"Those look like nice hardware."
"Yeah, they do, don't they?"
"Good thing we don't have to shoot them. They're probably too fast."
"You're just too slow, Snake."
"The only thing in here that's that slow is your cognitive capabilities."
"Would you shut up and find something to do?"

Snake gloated over my foregoing the match of wits. I had more pressing things on my mind. I opened a general hail and addressed the group.

"Hello there! Someone lose a shipment of fine wines?" That was the scripted greeting, to let my contacts know that I was the one they wanted, as opposed to just some random passer-by offering help. "Ahoy, strangers! Yes, we're a bit off course. A little wine would be good right about now." That was the countersign, of course. "Switch to channel 323 and we'll compare wine lists." I switched to the appropriate channel.

"Roger."
"Very good, Captain. Did Stills show?"
"Yes, sir. They resisted arrest."
"I assume that explains why you don't have him in tow."
"I have pictures of Thinker's wreckage, if you'd like."
"Actually, yes. Send me those, please."

I used the console to select a small segment of the gun footage and sent it to my contact. "Very good, captain. Very good indeed. Now power down and prepare to be boarded."

I had been nodding and smiling up until that last line. "Say what?! For what reason?"
"You are under arrest. You are in violation of Myrkrah Space Statute 472b."
Snake's confused face popped back out of the turret he'd just scrambled into. "Uhh . . . Boss . . . umm . . we've just been accused of serving illegally prepared foods on a luxury-liner."
"What?", came my incredulous response; whether it was to the accusation itself, or to the fact that Snake recognized that law so readily, remains to be seen to this day.
"They just picked that law out of the vacuum. Something isn't adding up here, and I'd suggest getting the heck out of here now, because I more than suspect we're about to get shot at again.", and he vanished into his turret, closing the hatch behind him. I swore.

"What kind of bogus garbage are you trying to pull on us?" I demanded.
"Just power down, chump! You're coming with us, one way or the other!"
Snake's voice crackled over the internal comm. "Boss, I think I know what this is. I remember reading that there was a rivalry between Stills' group and another group of runners. This group may not even be Mrykrah militia at all! They're probably the rival druggers, and we just eliminated their competition!" I swore again.
"Alright, Snake. I'm going to make a run for the main lane. Make the space around us unfriendly for them, would you?"
"Roge-O"

I came about, maxed the throttle, and punched the burner as Snake swivelled around and waited for someone to come into range. With those sporty hotrods, it didn't take the three escorts long to close on us. Snake opened up at maximum range to let them know that we weren't just going to let them take us. Of course, those bristling gun mounts they were carrying answered back in like fashion, and our rear shields lit up as shots found their marks.

"Snake," I instructed, "We're not going to be able to outrun them. See if you can pick one of them off. Maybe I can use a missile to knock out the next, and we'll be able to take the last fighter one-on-one." Without replying, Snake's fire concentrated on the closest of the three, and his shields flared to life as I came about. Resetting my scanner to lock-acquisition mode, I bracketed the next in line and fired off a few shots with my fixed forward laser. The first ship in formation peeled out and took cover behind his buddy just as the warhead acquired a stage two lock. I lined the up the reticle on the nose of his ship and depressed the button on my flight stick. The munition rocketed ahead, plowing into his belly as he attempted to pull up-and-away from it's path. The blast and shrapnel tore most of the armor from his underside. I watched his fighter stabalize it's rotation, but the engines were fried, so he had no way of accelerating or stopping. As his buddy careened off into the void, the first ship rolled out from behind the smoke and debris and dived after us again; the third ship tight on his wing and firing. I rolled out of their cone of fire just as my forward shields started collapsing.

"Snake, can you pick off the damaged one?"
"Funny, I was about to ask you the same thing", he replied through clenched teeth as he held down the trigger, giving said vessel a half-capacitor of laser fire. His forward shields collapsed and Snake's final burst scored the armor underneath deeply. I attempted to use my forward laser to augment Snake's accomplishment, but the fighter juked out of my gunsight and sprayed our barely recovering shields with lasers; puncturing the shields and returning the armor damage we'd inflicted two-fold.

"Dangit!", Snake snarled as the vessel peeled off his approach and avoided the Snake's next burst of fire. The third craft dived in from our starboard side, hoping to finish us off where his buddy had opened up our shields, but I climbed away from his firing arc and turned my rear shields to him in an attempt to buy us some time with them in order to finish what we'd started with his pal. I punched the afterburner and closed the distance between us and the damaged fighter as Snake emptied his capacitors into its rear shields. They collapsed, but only briefly, and the fighter afterburned away with his superior acceleration.

"I can't keep a solid bead on him at this range, boss!", Snake called out. I frowned, and shots from out tailing foe blazed across our port side shielding. "Well, Snake" I began, "I'll see if I can finish him off with another missile. But the third guy is all yours, you got that?" Snake's reply was a rather negative remark about my mother's temperament.

I allowed the fighter to stay out ahead of me, but kept him in my scanner's cone as I lazily followed his maneuvers. The fighter behind had exhausted his capacitors for the moment, so I had some breathing room, and Snake swiveled around and gave him some entertainment. The distance between us and the damage fighter actually helped the locking mechanism, and I let it fly with a solid stage-four lock, also known as the "sure kill" lock. It rocketed after the damaged ship and found its mark amidships as the fighter attempted to shake the munition by steering towards it. The explosion of the warhead rolled the fighter unrecoverably, and the G-forces of the spin tore the wings off. It only took a well-aimed burst from my forward laser to finish it.

Snake let out a snarl of frustration, which nearly caused me to jump out of my skin. "He's hiding in our upper quarter! I can't get to him! Roll me over!" Obediently, I rolled us over to expose the fighter to Snake's line of sight. The two of them traded fire at close range with devestating effect. Our rear shields collapsed completely, as did his front. His last volley scored marks up our belly, and even sheared some of the outter skin from Snake's turret. Our own shots punched into the front quarter of his ship, and he swerved away to give his shields time to recover. I punched the afterburner again and tried to keep us close on his six o'clock as Snake drained the capacitors again at his rear quarter. He dodged most of Snake's fire and accelerated away; once again out-performing my Black Sun 490's capabilities. I attempted to gain a missile lock on the heat signature of his engines as Snake's capacitors recharged, but the fighter slewed around, denying the locking mechanism the heat of his engines to focus on, and ignited his own afterburners in order to overcome inertia and accelerate towards us.

"Snake! Shoot him!", I screamed as he began his staffing run, but it was to no avail. Snake's capacitors weren't charged, and our forward shields weren't fully recharged either. Our only defense was my pitiful forward laser, our damaged front armor, our thin shields, and the mercy/pity of whatever deity is benevolent towards poor privateers like us who find themselves with a larger bite in their mouths than they can successfully chew. That deity, if he exists, is the laziest, most unreliable deity I've heard of to date, and owes us considerable back-pay!

The hail of fire came. His shots splashed across our flimsy shielding, and then washed away streaks of expensive armor underneath. My own shots miraculously found their marks, but his superior lasers carried easily quadruple the power of mine. My cockpit came alive in an orchestra of alarms and klaxons, along with flickering displays and flashing warning lights as my poor ship's systems failed one after the other. As merficul last, the fighter flew past us and Snake tracked him with his turret. As the fighter came back around, Snake laid out a trail of fire that intersected the fighter's front and finally, gloriously, tore it from his ship in a display of debris, smoke, and gasses. The pilot's cockpit ejected from the dying fighter at the last second, and stabalized itself a moment later with tiny maneuvering thrusters.

I slumped back into the acceleration couch, heaving a sigh of relief. The warnings and klaxons blared around me as I rubbed my eyes and face, but it was Snake's voice that interrupted my moment of triumphant recuperation. "Umm . . . boss? Boss!"

"What?!" I screamed back, irritated that he wouldn't allow me my moment of respite.
"Boss, that Zenith is closing on us! It's almost in range!"

I'd gotten so caught up with the three fighters that I'd forgotten about the Zenith ECC that they were escorting. I checked my scanner for its position, only to notice that my scanner wasn't working. I swore. "Where is it, Snake? My scanner's out."

"Seven o'clock low and closing. I'll have a perfect bead on him when he gets in range. How're we lookin', boss?"
"Not good enough to tackle another ECC today, Snake. Especially a heavily upgraded one. We gotta make a run for it!"

I turned us back towards the nav lane and pushed the throttle to maximum. Even though our ship couldn't outrun those Pumas, we were light enough to outrun a lumbering Zenith ECC, even heavily modified, and make it to a crowded space lane where we were sure to find some protection. Or, at least, under normal circumstances, we could. In reality, two of our engines were on the brink of overheating, which was one of the many warnings I was ignoring at the moment. After about fifteen seconds at maximum output, engines one and three shut down.

"Oh, crap!" Snake heard me say. "’Oh, crap’?", I heard Snake say. Suddenly, we both noticed that the Zenith, and its bristling, murderous gunmounts were closing the distance again. "Oh, CRAP!", we heard each other say.

"I poured on the afterburner out of instinct, but with only one of our three engines working, the afterburner didn't accelerate us away from our pursuer, but rather pushed the ship into a circle. Remember that when your thrust isn't distributed equally around your center of gravity, your ship doesn't accelerate forwards, but rather into a spin. Our three engines are arranged as a triangle around our center of gravity so that, when they all work, the three equal thrusts push us forwards. Now, with just one of the three points of the triangle functioning, we were just screwed.

I pushed with the maneuvering thrusters to try and counterbalance the thrust from the engine, but they aren't designed to do that. In fact, the owners’ manual specifically states that attempting just such an activity is not recommended.

“Snake, I think we’re sitting ducks.” Snake’s voice sounded a little distant over the comm channel. “Looks like it, boss. Unless you can get a distress call out, those guns are gonna tear us apart.” I suppose that I should have been quicker to think of that myself. I scanned all of the displays and warnings around me to see if my communications were still operational. Nothing told me of their demise, so I broadcast to all channels and pleaded like a death row convict on his final stroll.

"To any available persons, we are stranded just outside the space lane and are being pursued by someone who is terribly unfriendly. Please, someone come save our butts!"

To be honest, the chances that someone was going to help us were slim to none. I cut the drives and stabalized the rotation, turning us to watch our attacker close the distance slowly but surely. It would, by my best calculations, take them a minute or two to get close to us. "Boss" Snake called from below, "I guess the least we can do is shoot them up as best we can when they get in range. Got any missiles left?" I sighed. "Yeah. Two, I think. I suppose I may be able to knock out a turret or something with them, but-"

The lock warning came on. "Oh, geez." I moaned, burrying my face in my hands. "What, boss? What is it?"
"Snake, they've added LRM pods to that thing. They've got us locked. We're as good as-"
"Uhh . . . boss, I'll bet you a million dollars that they don't."
I snorted in amusement. "Oh, really? Alright, Snake, I'll take your little bet, since I'll be too dead to pay it, either way. But, why do you think that?"
"Well, first, boss, why would they waste an expensive long range missile on a crippled ship that can't run?"
"Alright, Snake, I'll give you that one. And second?"
"Look behind us." I spun the ship around to see what Snake was talking about, and was rather shocked at what I saw.

There, not too far away, and moving at full afterburner, was a P-593 Razor modified combat shuttle. My jaw slacked as the comm flickered to life.

"Don't worry, Snake, baby! I'm comin'!" It was Carla. Snake's little girlfriend. Snake let out a whoop as she flashed past us, barrel rolling for effect. Snake popped through the turret hatch and stuck his head into the cockpit section. "Now you know why I write love letters. That woman is something else!" I grimmaced. "If she's so great, why'd she have a missile lock on us instead of that Zenith?" Snake's reply was smug; "Because her scanner is a lot more expensive than ours and can engage up to six targets at once."

Carla's Razor unloaded a barrage of lasers on the ECC, cutting down one of its turrets with the second full burst, and hammering its shields mercilessly. The other turrets opened fire and lit up the space around her, but she put some distance between the mammoth and herself, and then slug back around on a slow approach. I recognized what she was doing immediately: She was about to unload one of her expensive torpedoes on the ECC. The turrets converged on her, and her shields flashed into existance, absorbing every bit of the punishment without missing a beat. Snake gave a low whistle.

"It's away!", he announced. The torpedo streaked into the weakened hull around the skinned turret, punched through the ship's skin, and blew a Razor-sized hole deep into the Zenith's guts. I watched in amazement as Carla's firepower split our would-be murderer in twain. The other side of the Zenith blew out as the fuel lines ignited, and the ignition flowed down the lines all the way next to the tanks, and, conversely, the other way to the engines. The resulting explosion lifted the top rear of the ship completely off, and the rest of the ships innards were sucked out through explosive decompression. When the whole thing was said and done, there was an empty hull of a Zenith ECC and a bunch of wreckage, crew, and illegal cargo spreading across the vacuum. "Well, old buddy, I guess you owe me a million dollars. I'll have my accountant talk with you about setting up payments." I snarled and swatted at him, missing, and hoping that I wasn't going to have to put up with his bragging the entire trip to wherever Carla was going to lead us. With our navigation systems as damaged as they were, and our scanners down, she was going to be our seeing-eye dog until we landed somewhere. And, sadly, I knew that this whole rescue was going to cost us.

In the bar on Siphius Station . . .

I sat down in the booth with a plop and a sigh, unwrapping my burger while Snake brought the drinks. The repairs were going to cost us dearly. Our shields were in bad shape, our scanner needed a new emitter, our shipboard computer had lots of fried components, our engines needed some replacement parts, and our armor was in shreds. Unfortunately, Siphius isn’t exactly the station to go to for cheap repairs. It sat right on the main space lane, so the prices here for everything from ship parts to entertainment to food and lodging was high quality, but expensive. Even the burger I was about to eat cost about fifty percent more than the same burger just a few systems over. Snake set my beer down, and I handed him his burger from the tray.

“So, where’s your precious girlfriend?” I asked, sarcasm dripping from my voice. “I dunno, boss. She said she’d meet us here at oh-four hundred, standard, and it’s about fifteen after, so I figure she’ll be here any minute.” I took a bite of my burger, which, at the very least, tasted good for the amount of money I paid for it. I was about to take a sip of my overpriced beer when Snake set down his sandwich and stood up. I turned in my seat to see Carla, purple hair and all, walking our way, with Snake still motioning her over. She pulled up a chair and sat down.

“You guys are lucky that I was around to save your behinds.” She said, picking up my beer and taking a long pull. I snatched it out of her hand, spilling some on the table, and set it down just out of her reach. “Yeah, we’re lucky alright,” I replied, “but I know you’re not just gonna chalk it up to charity, now are you?”

She grinned, and took a swig of Snake’s beer instead. “You’re smarter than you look, flyboy. If it weren’t for the fact that your rat trap of a ship was hauling my Snake around, I wouldn’t have responded at all.” She ruffled Snake’s hair playfully as she said it, and he didn’t seem nearly as territorial over his beer as I was over mine.

“Well” I began again, “I just got the estimate on how much it’s going to cost us to get my perfectly good ship fixed, and I’m not sure if we’re gonna have any left over for your little bounty.” I paused as she took a bite of Snake’s burger. “Especially if someone keeps eating our food and drinking our beer.” Carla rolled her eyes and fished a bill from her pocket. “Here, now quit whining about your stupid beer.” Snake grabbed up the bill and headed for the counter, leaving his food for Carla.

“Like I said, though, we’re broke. So exactly what kind of payment are you expecting?” She set down the sandwich and wiped a bit of mayonnaise from the corner of her mouth. “Alright, I’ll make you a deal, crybaby. I’ll forget the money aspect of it if you’ll agree to loan me Snake for a few days.” I cringed. “And what am I supposed to do in the mean time? I can’t earn money without my turret gunner. What do you want with that ugly grease rag of a man anyway?” She leaned back in the booth a bit and eyed Snake at the counter, picking up his new burger and another mug of beer. “Well, flyboy, it’s a big universe, and I’ve been to quite a bit of it, but I’ve never met anyone as cuddly as your ‘grease rag’ of a turret gunner. That good enough for you?” I faked a gag reflex. “Ugh! Say no more.”

She laughed at my discomfort, but settled back in for a more serious note. “By the way, Mr. Poor Man, I don’t suppose it would interest you to know that there was a bounty on both Stills and the group I wasted?” I nearly choked on the beer I was trying to swallow. “You wasted?!? What about the escorts that Snake and I took out?” She laughed. “Don’t worry, flyboy. I’ll split that one with you. The Stills bounty is yours and Snake’s.”

Snake returned to the booth with his food. “So who put out the hits? You got a contact?” She shook her head. “Nope. It’s all posted in the Mrykrah Police station here on-base. I think it’s on F deck. As long as your gun footage of Stills is still good, I can provide proof of the other guys. Go find out how much we’re getting. I’ve got more important things to worry about right now.” And she turned and winked at Snake. I moaned again, and he gave me his trademark smug grin as I stalked away after our bounty, glad that this story had finally come to a happy, yet sickening ending.

Barrett's Privateers (Part 1)

My bedroom door opened, sans knock, and my father stepped in. I glanced up from my periodical computer, made eye contact, and went back to my article. "Hey, old man. What's up?"

"I need to talk to you, son.", as he walked to my bed, where I was seated. I knew that tone in his voice. Something had gone wrong. "I just got the report. Your combat performance stats are fantastic. You scored seventh. You passed everything . . . except Manual Control 302 . . ." he trailed off, both sympathy and disappointment detectable in his expression.

"And Manual Control is one of the mandatory cores. I flunked out.", I finished.
"Yes, son. You've been turned away."
I slammed down my periodical computer on the matress. "Dang it, dad, I tried! I really tried!"
"I know you did, son.", his patience overlooking the outburst of his sixteen year old son.
"No you don't! You don't know how hard I tried! I can't take this! Not again! Not right now!" I flopped over onto my pillow, threatening a tantrum of frustrated tears. "I'm sick of waiting around!"
"Look, son, I've talked with the commandant. He's impressed with your abilities. You just need to improve in one area. He's willing to re-enroll you for next year."
"Next year? NEXT YEAR?! Do you know how far away that is?!"
"Frankly, boy, it's a year. It's an opportunity to-"
"I can't wait a whole year! I need to be out there flying NOW! I can't wait a whole year just to start over from the beginning! We're just wasting my time!"

"I know it's disappointing son. But there's always next year. You can return to the civil academy until then; maybe get a tutor in the meantime . . ."
"It's hopeless, dad. HOPELESS! I'm horrible at math, and I'll never figure out that stupid manual jump equation! I should just give up now, get a job flying for a common carrier, and spare myself the trouble."

"Now, that's not the attitude to have, boy, and you know it. " I was starting to wear through his patience. My old man, for what it's worth, did his best to be a good father to me. But I suppose I didn't appreciate all that the man had on his plate. "Life is full of setbacks. You've seen me come in second far too many times. But what have I always taught you, son? Get up, shake it off, and keep going."

"Yeah, yeah, you're a real hero, dad. A real hero. Second term in office as Council Chairman of Mars; everyone knows how hard you struggled. Well, I'm glad you have such fortitude, but maybe I'm young and fragile, huh? Maybe I don't have your well-worn grit. Ever think of that?" My teenage rage now coming up to a healthy, self-loathing boil. "I'm sorry I can't be as strong as you, dad. I'm sorry! But I've poured myself into this and it's just too much for me! Sorry to disappoint you and ruin your good name!"

I knew I was acting out of line, but I was a teenager, dang it, and I wanted him to know just how upset I was. I think he realized I was intent on being unreasonably upset. Instead of rising to my taunts and self-pitty, he simply regained his patient composure with a sigh.

"Alright, have it your way, boy. We'll talk again after you've had some time to calm down. There are still opportunities here."

I wasn't having any of his sympathy. I threw my pillow at him in rage, which he deftly caught and tossed back, turning on his heel and leaving my room, closing the door behind him.

I'm a rich man's only child. There you have it. I'm the leftovers from a failed first marriage and the byproduct of political fame. My father, as I just mentioned, is the Council Chairman of Mars (second term, no less!) and a very famous and distinguished man. At sixteen, I'd lived in luxury my entire life. My childhood dream had always been to join the Confederated Military as a pilot of some kind. Maybe a fighter pilot, or even fly for the United Cartography along the Outter Rim. What you've just witnessed is the day I learned I'd flunked out of the Junior Aviator program for the second time.

It took me a couple days to even attempt to look up from my pit of despair. But, instead of trying the Military Academy again next year as my father had suggested, I came up with my own plan. An irresponsible, half-baked, childish plan. One that would ruin my future. One that would make an indellible mark on my life, my family, and my father's career. One that succeeded.

SHERBROOKE SPACEPORT, SHERBROOKE, MARS

I stepped from the tram onto the bustling sidewalk. It felt so surreal. I'd been to this spaceport more times than I could remember, but never with intentions like the ones I had today. I slung my duffle bag across my back and stepped inside. The security personel inside waved me through the scanner and into the main concourse. I knew every terminal of this place like the back of my hand, so I walked towards the bar, doing my best attempt at non-chalance. The legal drinking age on Mars is 19, but I figured I could slip inside easily enough, as long as I didn't try to order anything I wasn't supposed to.
I'd never actually even been into the bar. My dad had always said it was a place where the salty sort would self-medicate before and after their flights, and that a family such as ours had best not be seen there. My father's public image would have been ruined if he'd been seen rubbing elbows with the middle and lower classes. The elite and the rich had private parlours in which to indulge, after all.
I selected a booth as close to the corner as I could, hoping to stay out of sight, and did my best impression of what I'd seen in all of the vids; I calmly surveyed the scene through squinted eyes, not daring to turn my head for fear of ruining the camera angle. I felt so adventurous! It was as if I were some seedy gun runner, watching for the under cover agents to spring at any moment.
In reality, all I "surveyed" was a room full of what appeared to be normal people. Some were dressed in business suits, some were dressed in normal, everyday clothes. Most were either reading an article while sipping on something, or some were chatting in twos and threes. Nothing looked exciting or adventurous. Nothing looked dangerous. It just looked like a bar full of people killing time before their flights.
I sighed, inwardly. This was a stupid plan, and my father was going to kill me when he found out where I'd been. I left my link at the house so that I couldn't be tracked here, but the security cameras had all had a good look at my face. Someone was probably on the link with him right now, telling him that his wayward son was at this seedy dive. I put my face in my hands, feeling deeply humiliated, and started preparing the lie that I would tell my father.
"You gonna order something, or just take up a booth?"
I looked up to see what I assumed was either the bartender or a waiter.
"I'll be honest. I'm not hungry. What I need is to get out of here."
"The door's over there, kid. You look too young to be in here anyway."
"No, you don't understand. I need work."
"Well I'm not hiring. Cops'll throw me under the tram for hiring a minor."
"Not here. I need work on a ship or something. I need to get off-world."
"Off-world? What's a kid like you need off-world for? You in trouble or somethin'?"
I opened my mouth to tell the man my situation, but suddenly remembered what my situation was. I was a runaway. I might as well have been running off to join the circus. There was nothing that I could say to this man that wouldn't cause any responsible adult to call security, so I closed my mouth and looked away, completely unsure of what to do now.
The man took a good long look at me; his face betraying a look of pity, or maybe it was understanding.
"What?" I inquired, unnerved by his gaze.
"You see that guy over there?", gesturing towards a small group of men sitting at a table along the opposite wall.
"Yeah. Why?"
"That guy announced about an hour ago that he was looking for crew to sign up. He'll probably turn a pup like you away, but who knows. You can either talk to him, or go take up a booth in someone else's bar."

I looked long and hard at the group of men, not even knowing which one the bartender was referring to, and something welled up inside of me. This is what I had come here for. To find some way off of this red rock. I fished an orange Confederate bill from my pocket and handed it to the barkeep. "Thanks for the tip."
I stood and slowly began to make my way to the table where the men sat. My nerve began to wane, and I felt the sickening, embarrassed urge to turn and walk out the door instead. I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, and kept moving.
"I'm looking for work." I said to the group, doing my best not to sound as scared as I was. They all looked like regular guys. They didn't look like pirates or roughians. They weren't dressed like folks in the vids. They all looked like guys that might have factory jobs somewhere. I think that's what made me so nervous. This didn't resemble the vids. This wasn't what I was expecting. The mundane clothing and appearance made these men too real. They didn't resemble my fantasy of space-faring folk. They looked like normal men who did normal work, and that scared me.
As I eyed the men, all three of them, they eyed me, and I realized that my age was very apparent to them. None of them looked to be younger than thirty. The man sitting on the right had an air about him; like a quiet authority, though over what I wasn't sure. He was the one who responded to me.
"What kind of work are you looking for, kid?"
"The kind that gets me off-world and flying."
"Not interested. Go back to school and finish your law degree, or whatever it is your family does. You're not cut out for space work."
The men went back to their conversation without another word to me. I stood, fuming at the insult, until I found the courage to speak again.
"I placed seventh out of two hundred in the combat program at the Military Academy. I can probably fly better than you, sir." The man cut his gaze towards me, and I swear I saw the faintest smile cross his lips.
"The military academy, is it? Well, I can tell you that, even if I did hire you, you wouldn't be seeing much combat. Or piloting the ship. So, tell me, what other skills do you have to offer?"
I swelled up just a bit. "I minored in engineering. I'm good with a wrench."
"I have an engineer. His name is Ranald.", and he pointed across the table to a man with a bald head, bushy red beard, and rosy cheeks. "What else do you do?"
"I . . . I can find something to do. I just need work."
"Fine, kid. I'm Eric Barrett, captain of the Antelope and I do need one more hand. I was hoping for someone with experience, but I'm in a pinch for time, so your academy training will have to do. We leave in an hour."
I felt like someone zapped me with a cattle prod. I had just been hired! I was running away from home with a bunch of salty space men! Even though this looked nothing like the vids, in my mind it just became exactly like the vids. Except for one detail . . .
"Shouldn't we discuss my pay?"
"You'll get a greenhorn's share until you've been on for a while."
"A what?"
"What's your name kid? I'll add your account to the docket."
I hesitated. I didn't want this Barrett guy knowing who I was, or who my father was. My wonderful situation could easily devolve into me being a hostage or something.
"No names."
"If I don't know your name, how am I supposed to know what account to pay?"
"I . . . I dunno. I guess you'll have to pay me in cash. Either way, I can't give out my name."
"Do you know how hard it is to get cash? It's not like they hand it out these days."
"I'll make it worth your while, Mr. Barrett. You won't regret it."
He sighed. "Fine. I'll pay you in cash. But know that you may have to wait for your pay when I can't get cash."
"That's fine, sir."
Barrett stuck out his hand to shake, and I accepted. Barrett explained where I'd find the Antelope when it came time to board, and I left the bar with my head practically swimming. I had just been hired onto the Antelope as a "greenhorn", whatever that meant, and in one little hour I was going to be my own man. Free. Free from the pressures of being a rich man's son. Free from academy rules and regulations. Free from my father and step-mother. Just free. Simply that. I wandered the concourse for the next hour, wondering what I had just gotten myself into and fantasizing about my new life aboard the Antelope.
AN HOUR LATER
The lift to C deck halted smoothly and the safety gate receeded into the railing. I stood at the back of the lift and waited as the crowd before me poured forth like sand. Again I looked at the people around me. Mostly middle and lower class flight crews. C deck was primarily for common carriers, physical mail, and low cost transportation. Turning right, I nervously navigated towards terminal 7, still contemplating the decision I had made and the consequences that would follow. As I rounded the final corner, there is was. Terminal 7, like a portal to another world!
I approached the loading dock and peered through the window, excited for my first glimpse of the Antelope. And there she was. And she was a sickening sight.
I couldn't quite pick out what she was, but she was small, dirty, and ugly. She looked like a glorified cargo container with a utility shed attached. If she had ever been painted, the paint was long gone, and I couldn't tell if the red on her hull was rust or the reflection of Mars' landscape through the clear dome of the loading zone. She rested on extended landing gear; the type with wheels. That meant no vertical takeoff. I could see behind her that Barrett was overseeing the loading of several pallets of whatever it was that we would be hauling. Part of the ship's rear actually folded downwards into a loading ramp/dock plate, and the space port's loading crew were guiding the pallets up and into the cargo bay. The bay itself looked pretty small, as far as I could tell. Probably only enough space for one standard load volume.
Three engines were set about Antelope's center of gravity, one protruding from the curved top of the ship's body, and one nestled under each of the ship's stubby, ugly wings and recessed into the frame of the fuselage.
In the front, the "utility shed" must have been the cabin. Suspended awkwardly from the main body, it poked out like the head of a turtle from its shell, neck extended. And, almost as an afterthought, an ill-fitting ball turret bulged from underneath the floor of the cabin, like an Adam's apple, just clearing the ground by a few feet.
Needless to say, my heart sank. This, without a doubt, was the ugliest, most ill-conceived monstrosity I had ever laid eyes upon. Swallowing my pride, and probably a half-ounce of bile, I worked my way down the scaffolding to the tarmac. Noticing my arrival, Barrett jaunted down the ramp to, I assumed, welcome me aboard.
"Well, if it isn't my new greenhorn. I'm glad to see you came. I didn't think you'd go through with it." and he extended to shake my hand again. There was something about his joviality that seemed both in and out of character for the ship he captained. I shifted my duffle from my right to my left shoulder and accepted his hand, coming up with nothing more clever than "I'm here." in response to his greeting. "Good!" he exuberated, with a cheeriness that betrayed a sadistic glee, as if he was giddily welcoming me into my worst nightmare for his own amusement. My heart sank a little further.
"We're just cramming the last of it in now," he explained, "and then we'll be off. Got everything you need?", as he led me towards the ramp into the ship.
"I think so. I have enough clothing and supplies to last several days. I picked up some rations on the way here. How long will we be in space?"
We ascended the ramp into the cargo bay. The crates and pallets were being strapped down to the floor. Strewn about on either side were tools and equipment; some of it I recognized and some I didn't.

"Months."
"Oh crap! Should I run and pick up more? I didn't know we'd be out that long."
"Oh, we'll be at our first stop in a week or so. You won't starve by then. You can re-stock there."
"Our first stop? Where are we headed?"
"Diis." Barrett opened the airlock hatch connecting the cargo bay and the cabin.
"Diis Superstation? Like, last federal outpost Diis?"
"That'll be our last stop, yes. We've got several deliveries along the way. Probably ninety days before we hit Diis. Might pick up a few extra runs along the way."
The cabin was somewhat larger that it appeared to be from the outside, possibly because of how it was laid out. The space was relatively well arranged. The hatch was situated between two cabinets of electronics and computers. To the right, running along the wall, was one long, dirty couch, with storage cabinets underneath and overhead. To the left was the emergency hatch, leading directly outside without an airlock. On either side of the hatch were single seats, with more storage underneath and overhead.
About a step and a half into the cabin, there was an open circular hole in the floor. I peered down into what must have been the interior of the turret. Various panels and hatches littered the floor and ceiling, each concealing some vital compartment or access. At the front of the cabin, the space narrowed considerably, and one single pilot's seat was surrounded on three sides by controls, displays, readouts, you name it.

"What happens when we hit Diis? Where do we go then?"
"Who knows. Shipments come in and out of Diis all day, every day. We'll find more runs when we get there, and we'll keep hauling."
"Back this way?"
"Maybe. Probably not. Why, are you homesick already?"
"No! No. I just figured knowing the agenda may be a good idea."
Barrett pointed towards the couch on the right. "Stow your things in one of the lockers here. Laundry and personal effects. Rations can go here.", and he opened one of the recesses in the floor to reveal a refrigerator.
"Where's the bathroom?" I asked, noticing the distinct lack of running water, toilet, and shower.
"There's a lav in the airlock." He stepped inside and pulled open a panel at knee-level which folded out into a crude but functional toilet. "Sanitize here." and he revealed a bin of Sani-Sand waterless hand cleaner. I was starting to get the idea. "No shower?", I ventured. Barrett reached into another hidden cubby and produced a packet of Dry Scrub. "You're starting to catch on, kid."
"So where are the bunks?"
"That couch and those two seats. There are four of us now, so we'll sleep in shifts by twos. Can you operate a gun turret?"
"I guess so. Why?"
"I don't let greenhorns pilot, but if you can keep your thumbs off the triggers, I assume I can trust you to keep watch in the turret on your shift."
"Yeah, sure. I can do that."
Barrett reached over the pilot's seat and activated a display. I couldn't see what he was checking on, but he seemed satisfied. "Good. Looks like we're ready to takeoff. Get your gear secured, kid. We'll be taking off in a few minutes." He keyed the ship's intercom, "Ranald, Dolan, get things sealed up. Let's get ready."
I checked under the couch for an empty locker and stuffed my duffle bag inside. Barrett was already sitting in the pilot's seat, flipping switches and pressing buttons. I peered over his shoulder to see if I could recognize any of the warm-ups and checks that he was performing. I caught most of them, but some were alien to me. My academy training had been in small, one-man fighters. I had never had to think about air recirculation filters, compartment pressurization, or even cargo mass offset calibrations. I was about to set in with a round of questions when I heard the airlock behind me close.
"Gentlemen," began Barrett, without looking away from his routine, "let's all say hello to our new greenhorn. He has deprived us of the pleasure of his real name, so we'll be assigning him a nickname in the near future." I recognized the man with red beard and bald head as Ranald, the engineer. He was the first to shake my hand. "Welcome aboard, son. I'm Ranald."
The second man was a tad taller with dark hair and a bronze complexion. Both men looked to be in either their late thirties or maybe even in their forties. The dark-haired man took my hand next, but kept his thumb firmly curled into his palm and used all four fingers to grab my hand. "Dolan." He must have noticed my quizzical glare at this bizzare handshake.
"He's a Ciprian." Ranald explained as he took one of the seats by the hatch and strapped himself in.
"A Ciprian?", my confused response. Dolan expounded, taking the other seat.
"It's is my religion. That's is how Ciprians greet new friends."
My curiosity was piqued, and even as I fumbled with one of the safety harnesses on the couch, I couldn't help but inquire further. "Religion? I thought most folks were beyond that these days." Dolan smiled politely while Ranald spit out one good, hard genuine laugh, even as the engines of the ship rumbled to life.
"What, you don't believe in God, kid?"
"Of course not. Everyone knows there's no such thing as a god."
We began to taxi out of the loading dome and onto the runway outside. Ranald's playful grin stretched from ear to ear; his eyes twinkling with amusement.
"You ever been in a tight spot, kid?"
"Tight spot? Like what? Like about to die?"
"Yeah. You ever had your back against the wall?"
"I dunno. Is that supposed to turn me religious?"
"You'll discover, son, there's no atheists in space!"
As if to punctuate his statement, the engines roared to full power and I was jerked to my left by the acceleration.

Barrett's Privateers (Part 2)

DAY 5
"So, then, you engage the offset over here, right?" I asked, pointing to the little box on the screen. The screen needed replaced, and so the text label for the offset option was an incomprehensible blur. "Yes" Dolan answered. "That's is right. And to disengage the offset upon re-entry, you touch it again. The thrust adjusts gradually, over the course of fifteen seconds." To demonstrate, he disengaged the cargo mass offset. I felt the slight change in inertia for the next fifteen seconds, and then a warning popped up on the navigation screen. "See? Now the thrusters are not compensating for the mass of the cargo, and the thrust is uneven. The autopilot has detected that we're drifting off course."
There was another chime and the maintenance screen displayed an error code, which was promptly followed by another, and then three more. Dolan cued the intercom. "Ranald, the relay on 4720 has gone out again." "Crap." came his reply from the turret hatch. Up he scrambled, and into the airlock he stomped. "Come on, kid. I'm gonna show you how to deal with this stupid piece of crap."
"I'm not on duty." I argued, hoping to ask Dolan more questions about the calibrations. "Dangit, get your runaway butt in here!" On the couch, Barrett's snore faltered slightly. I scurried into the airlock, chin practically tucked into my clavicle, and Ranald slammed the hatch shut and punched the life support for the cargo bay. There was a roaring whoosh on the other side of the airlock, and soft chime before the bay hatch slid open.
Ranald, shoulders bowed up in frustration, crossed the cargo bay in what seemed like three steps, knelt down by the number two engine housing, and yanked open an access panel. Eyes glaring, he looked back at me and stabbed a finger towards something inside. "You see this?" he shouted over the roar of the exposed machinery. I peered inside to see the relay he was identifying. I nodded. It was hard to miss; it was the one dangling freely from the electrical cables it was meant to connect.
"See how it's disconnected over here? The coupler is worn out. Here's what you do." He grabbed the relay in one bare hand and the cable in the other. "Hook it back up . . ." and he fitted the cable back into the worn out coupler. He then picked up a hammer from somewhere deeper in the housing. " . . . tighten it up . . . " and he bashed the coupler with the hammer to pinch the wires in place. " . . . and tie it up." He reached down into the housing again and pulled up a bit of rag, which he used to tie the relay to an adjacent hose. "If the pinch in the coupler is good, this will last about a week. If not, we, and by 'we' I mean 'you', will be back in here in an hour." I nodded my understanding.
"Shouldn't we have disengaged the power first for lock-out-tag-out?", I asked, remembering my academy training. Ranald glared at me. "The power source is the engine, son! These relays feed directly from the power plant. You can't turn that off while we're flying. We don't have the luxury of a top-notch safety program, boy. Just don't grab any exposed metal, and don't stick your hand in the moving parts, and you'll be alright!" With that, he slammed the housing closed again, pulled a rag from his pocket, and wiped a bit of grease from his hand.
"Why don't we have another coupler?"
"Because it's built into the relay, and those relays cost an arm and a leg."
Dolan's voice squawked hollowly over the intercom. "Alright, it's is green again. Thanks, Ranald."
Ranald headed towards the hatch, motioning for me to follow. "Aight, kid. Go get some sleep. Your shift starts in seven hours." Stepping inside with him, I closed the hatch and started the atmospheric recycle of the cargo bay.
DAY 16
I came scrambling up the turret ladder again and plunged into the airlock, just reaching that wretched hidden toilet in time. I was sick of throwing up. I was sick of the diarrhea. Very simply, I was sick.
Ranald, from his reclining relaxation on the couch, burst into laughter again.
"Once more into the breach!"
I emerged from my wretching a few moments later and gave him my moodiest "go to hell" glare. This only resulted in more laughter. For his part, I'm sure there was a deep humor in seeing a spoiled, rich, tough-acting runaway having such a difficult time adjusting to the cuisine of the common folk.
And, sadly, that was exactly the case. I had never eaten anything that wasn't gourmet and expensive. As a consequence, when I had to eat the greasy, chemical laden staples of the working-class diet, my body was completely unable to cope. Ranald, for his part, didn't strike me as a mean person at all, but his decision to take me under his learn-by-ridicule wing was hard on my pride. Even then I understood, deep down, that he meant the best for me, but the not-so-deep part of my mind jumped to the conclusion that I would eventually have to confront him about his constant jibes.
Dolan passed me a few more tablets from his medicine bag and smiled sympathetically. "It's will be alright, kid. Your body'll get used to it in time."
"I sure hope so." Barrett chimed in from the pilot's seat. "At this rate we're gonna have to purge the waste tank before we make Zeta-2 Scorpii."
I chewed the pills and once again descended the ladder into the turret. Aside from the sickness, and the occassional conversations between the other three, space life had turned out to be mind-numbingly boring. Since we'd left Sherbrooke sixteen days ago, we had trundled along in a loose line of traffic from jump point to jump point. Instead of pirates and excitement, our adventure had been filled with cargo scans and traffic jams. Jump points, especially, had proven to be a real snore. One would think that forcing every spare quark of yourself and your spaceship through a one-dimensional string and emerging instantaneously lightyears away would be a thrilling rush. Instead, the God-awful sensation of jump was precluded by hours of sitting in line, waiting your turn, and followed by more cargo scans and tolls.
And, speaking of the God-awful sensation of jump, we were next in line.
"Okay, Squirt, you buckled in?" Barrett's voice crackled over the intercom.
Oh yeah, the nickname that they had given me in lieu of my real name? Yeah, it was "Squirt"; at least, when they weren't calling me "kid", "junior", or "rookie". I finished buckling the safety straps and swivelled the turret a bit to make sure they were holding me securely. "Yeah, I'm good."
"Dolan, Ranald?"
"We're good, boss.", came Dolan's reply from above the turret hatch.
"Alright. Looks like the jump monitor is about- okay, there it is. Here we go. Jumping."
And with that, the universe began to stretch and melt away, even as another universe stretched and melted into its place. In reality, it was me that was being stretched, and even though the illusion gave the visual effect of the world outside doing the changing, my body told me the true story in vivid, graphic detail. My stomach lurched again, but I didn't bother going back up to puke; there was nothing left in my stomach to come out, and I was content to dry-heave without Ranald's laughter egging it on. As soon as the few seconds of wretching were done, I got back to my job.
And the boredom of the past few days shattered like a pane of glass.
Lasers filled the space to our port side. Several hundred meters out, I could see what appeared to be a large cargo vessel engaged in a shootout with two Federal gunboats. I couldn't contain my surprise and excitement.
"Holy cow! Look!"
Barrett shot back without a second's hesitation. "Keep your finger off the trigger, kid!"
"What's going on?"
"Looks like that Kunoon failed his cargo scan."
"What? Like drugs?"
"Drugs, slaves, weapons, who knows."
I watched intently as it played out like something from the holos. The patrol gunboats had pulled up on either flank of the Kunoon and were pounding it mercilessly as the Kunoon attempted to accelerate away. The fireworks display lasted less than a minute and ended rather anti-climactically. The gunboats seemed to simply cease fire, and closed in for the boarding process.
"What happened? Why did they stop shooting?"
"You that eager to watch someone die, squirt?"
"No, no" I declared, somewhat lying. "But why did they stop?"
"You didn't see her engines blow out? She's disabled. Probably never fly again."
"They shot the engines out? I guess I missed it."
Barrett accessed my gun camera and played back the footage. "See there? That debris is from the second engine. And there's debris from the first."
I was shocked. I had never seen actual real space combat. I seen the vids, and I had done the simulations at the academy, but they all showed big explosions for this kind of thing. The real thing seemed, somehow, less interesting. Barrett must have read my mind in the silence.
"This ain't the holos. Big explosions do happen sometimes, but only when conditions are just right. Death out here is usually understated and instant."
"Are those folks dead?"
"Dunno, kid. Maybe. Probably. All it takes is an uncontained hull breach. Your atmosphere is all gone in an instant; if you aren't sucked out of the breach or pulled apart by the decompression, you'll simply die a few seconds later from exposure to the vacuum. Either way, from the time the trigger is pulled to the time you're a corpse is often less than a few seconds."
I sat in sober silence. The thought suddenly became very real to me that my choice to run away could very well kill me. If life in the far-stretching lanes of space was so precarious, what was to keep me from being "pulled apart by the decompression"? Again, Barrett must have read my mind.
"Don't think about it, squirt. You worry about it, you'll either die or go crazy from the stress. Nobody gets to choose when, where, or how they'll take that last flight. You're not going anywhere till it's time to get your ticket punched."
I continued to watch solemnly as the scene shrank behind us in the vacuum, deeply drinking in the stark reality of the situation. Above, I heard Ranald's pained grunt as he stretched back out on the couch to finish his sleep, and Dolan's quiet humming of a Ciprian hymn. Even through the boredom of long shifts in this turret, I took some comfort in the peace and quiet which, sometimes thankfully and sometimes uncomfortably, gave me time to think on things I'd learned. For the first time since takeoff, this whole affair seemed like a bad idea, and I found myself wishing that I was back in Sherbrooke.
DAY 65
"Okay, here's your cut from what we've run so far." Barrett fanned out the bills for me to see, and then counted them into my hand. I was glad. The money I had brought with me had run out two weeks ago, and I'd been living on handouts from everyone else. Of course, I didn't each a whole lot, anyway. The food out this way still sat heavy on my stomach. I stuffed the bills into my pocket. It wasn't a lot, but it was something, and that, I had learned, was far better than nothing. "Now, let's get back to the depot and finish stocking up. They should be done offloading by now."
Barrett and I turned from the cashier booth and headed back down the sidewalk towards the depot where the Antelope was parked. The sky was darker than most planetside nights I had seen, and the public lighting along the street was sparse, but the innocent kid in me had never been given a reason, outisde of the holos and vids, to distrust dark streets on far-off worlds.
That is, until the man stepped out in front of us.
"Give me the cash, boy." the shadowed figure demanded, putting his hand into his jacket. Barrett and I stopped in our tracks. I completely froze. "Now, kid! The cash I just saw you tuck into your pocket. Throw it on the ground!" I looked over at Barrett, whose expression was stone cold. "Do it, squirt. Give him the money." My eyes darted back and forth between Barrett and the man before us. "Go on. It's just money."
I pulled my precious bills from my pocket and tossed them on the ground. The man's attention turned to Barrett. "Alright, now you. Throw your money on the ground!" Barrett calmly raised his hands, palms open. "Alright, alright" he soothed. "My wallet is in my breast pocket, right here." he pointed with his right hand to his left breast. "I'm going to reach inside my jacket and get it out, okay?"
"Just do it!" the man replied.
Barrett gripped the jacket with his left hand and held it slightly open, then reached in with his right. Just as his hand passed over the breast pocket of his shirt, his arm lunched into his armpit, his left hand flung the jacked wide open, and his right arm stretched out towards the man with an odd "click click". The motion took a scant fraction of a second, and startled me. That's when I noticed the object in his hand.
Barrett had just pulled a gun on our mugger. But it wasn't like any gun I had seen before. It was white. Or, well, maybe silver. It was massive, and styled strangely. Our mugger also startled slightly before reaching his hand back into his jacket and fumbling madly. Before the man could produce whatever his jacket held, Barrett squeezed the trigger, and the shot struck the man in the stomach. Barrett's second shot took the man in the ribs, and he collapsed to the ground in a heap, oozing blood.
The ringing in my ears prevented me from hearing, but I could plainly see the man, now clutching his wounds, gasping for breath and writhing in pain. Barrett pointed with the gun down at my money. "Get your cash, squirt. We gotta go." He knelt down by our mugger, and opened the man's jacket. "You gotta help me!" the man wheezed as Barrett pulled the man's gun and holster from their hiding spot. The mugger reached up and grabbed Barrett's arm with both bloody hands. "Please! I'm sorry! Please! Oh God, please!" Barrett's only response was to take his hand away from the man and pistol whip him across the cranium. "Shut up."
I watched, even as my shaking hands gathered up one bill at a time, while Barrett searched the dying man's jacket and pants for his credit chip and cash. The cash he stuffed in his pocket. He pulled his link from his pocket and swiped the credit chip across, accessing the account and transferring the mugger's few credits into his own account. With that, he dropped the chip on the ground, stood, and stomped it with the heel of his boot, crushing it. "Okay, kid, let's go."
I stood, cash in hand, watching our mugger wheezing and moaning. "Please, please!" he beseached again. Barrett handed me the man's gun and holster.
"Aren't we gonna call the police?" I nearly begged, feeling sorry for the man.
"No."
"Why not?"
Barrett took me by the arm and wrested me onwards, even as the man reached out after us, now crying.
"He would have killed us, kid. I'm not going to jail for him. He can pay his debt to society a lot quicker lying right where he is."
"Are we gonna be arrested?"
"Not if you shut the heck up and keep moving!" he barked. I cringed under the rebuke. After a few seconds of silent striding, he softened his tone. "Once we get back to the ship, we'll get off-world. We'll be fine, then."
I had to struggle to keep up Barrett's pace back to the depot.
A FEW HOURS LATER, ABOARD THE ANTELOPE
Barrett rapped his knuckles against the metal bulkhead behind me, drawing my attention away from my musing. "You okay, kid?"
"Yeah. Why?" I lied, not even bothering to look up from the dead mugger's handgun, which I had been cleaning Barrett's gun cleaning kit.
"Haven't seen you in an hour. And, in the two months I've known you, you've never once hidden yourself away in the cargo bay. What's bothering you kid?" He looked down at the gun in my hands. "The dead guy?"
I looked down at the gun in embarrassed silence, deeply ashamed that I was having such an emotional reaction to the day's episode.
"It's alright, kid. Everybody handles it differently."
"Handles what?"
"Death."
I nodded, still looking down. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"I dunno. Why everything? Why is this so different? I've seen it on the news more times than I can remember. I've known people who've died. Why is this different?"
Barrett sat down next to me, leaning against the same crate, and pulled his gun from its holster.
"It's personal, that's why. You saw me shoot the man, and you saw him dying. Even though we didn't watch his last breath, you were there in his final moments." He paused, looking over at me. I was staring at his gun. "It's called a revolver. It's a .45 caliber." He handed it to me, and I felt the hefty weight of it. It seemed to have its own personality; its own personal feel in your hand.
"You pull back on the hammer here to cock it. You have to do that for each round. It's not automatic. Go ahead." I pulled back the hammer with both thumbs. "Now, to uncock it without firing, hold the hammer back while you squeeze the trigger, and let it down gently." I did like he said, returning the hammer to its resting place without firing the weapon.
"I guess this is something I'll just have to get used to, yeah?", I ventured, handing the revolver back to Barrett.
"What? Death? Yeah. It's a part of space. It's a part of life. You stay in this line of work, eventually you find yourself in harm's way. Most of the time you can find your way out. Sometimes . . ." he trailed off, cocking the revolver, and then letting the hammer down gently.
"When was the first time you had to kill someone?"
"I wasn't much older than you. I had just bought the Antelope and thought I was hot stuff. Hired a crew, worked 'em like dogs, tried to cheat 'em on their pay. We put in at Suffa after a string of deliveries, and they mutinied while we were docked. Tried to corner me and push me out of the airlock."
"What did you do?"
"Locked myself in the turret, used my security code to disable all other control consoles, and purged the atmosphere from the cabin. I waited till I knew they were dead, then I repressurized and came out."
"Get in trouble?"
"Nope. Mutiny's a capital offense."
"So what happened then?"
"Well, nothing. I hired a new crew, and I learned my lesson about treating people fairly."
"Did it bother you?"
"Of course. It brings on some sort of existential crisis, unless you're some sort of born hard killer."
Barrett re-holstered his gun and began to stand. "After time, you'll come to grips with the reality of life, death, and the universe. Some people become nihilists, some people find God, some harden themselves and learn to enjoy the killing. Look at Ranald and Dolan. Dolan thinks there's a forgiving god somewhere, and he feels peaceful. Ranald also thinks there's some sort of god, and he'd push you out of the airlock just because he didn't like you."
At this, I cringed. "Would he really?"
Barrett's wide-eyed expression scared me. "Yeah. He would." My mind suddenly flashed back to all of the times I'd smarted off to him, and a lump of fear filled my throat.
"Don't sweat it, kid. He likes you." Barrett reached down, took my hand, and helped me to my feet. "C'mon. Our shift starts in half an hour. Let's go get ready."
I put the dead man's gun back in its holster, and tucked the holster into my waistband. I still didn't understand the issues that were pressing on my mind, but I understood that I didn't have to have it all figured out yet, so I shelved the issue for later rumification and followed Barret back to the airlock.
DAY 97
"Another one, barkeep!" and I gulped down the last of the mug. This would make four, and with a pocket full of confederate currency, legal drinking ages didn't seem to matter as much. Barret and Ranald sat at the bar with me, and Dolan would be in shortly. Before the next beer arrived, I slurped and gulped away at the excess toppings of my sandwich. This, I had firmly decided, was the life!
Diis superstation marked the end of our three month run, and with my stomach having well adjusted to the rigors of poor man's food, I had learned to savor the unhealthy flavors that came with it. Cheap beer, greasy bar food, and loose women were the pleasures of the day, and now that I had recieved my cut of the profits, I was feeling much better about my new career.
"Maybe you need to slow down, squirt. You don't want a hangover.", Ranald advised over his couple ounces of aged liquor. "Are you kidding me?" I retorted. "I'm a machine, good sir! I can handle my beer!" and I finished with an embarrassing and cliche'd hiccup. "That's just from the volume, not the alcohol!" He rolled his eyes. "I'm sure."
Meanwhile, I had been eyeballing the brunette a few seats over. A mere boy of sixteen would have no business talking to her, but I, now seventeen and full of liquid courage, felt that it was my duty to approach this woman who was clearly old enough to understand a man with needs.
"Excuse me, ma'am. Do you know what time it is?"
"No." her curt answer, attempting to brush me off.
"Well, in that case, allow me to inform you." I pulled back my sleeve to reveal my brand new watch. Or, I suppose I should say, my brand new watch implant. I had seen the adverts and programs as we approached the Outter Rim, and these things seemed to be quite fashionable, so I had decided to spend some of my hard-earned credits as a kind of reward for my newfound life of bravery and ambition.
The brunette, however, wasn't impressed.
"Nice."; her sarcasm evident as she returned the news report she was watching. Ah, but I wasn't so easily shaken off.
"So, what's in the news?"
She finally turned her eyes towards me, ready to spew venom (or vodka), but instead her eyes surveyed my handsome face . . . and grew as wide as dinner plates. At long last, she answered.
"Y-you are!"
Ah, there was the in-road I had hoped for. "So, then, how about I buy you another-"
"No! Look! Isn't that you?"
I looked at the screen, and my heart stopped cold as it splashed into my intestines and my stomach lurched into my throat. There, on the screen, was my face, my father's face, and my step-mother's face with the words "SEARCH FOR CHAIRMAN AND FAMILY CONTINUES". I felt lightheaded.
She turned up the volume and replayed the article, and I sat in silent horror as it told the story of my kidnapping, which was nearly simultaneous with the abduction of my father and step-mother. I fished a bill out of my pocket and slid it towards her. "Look, let's just say you didn't see me here, okay?"
She looked down at the purple bill, up at me, over to the screen with my face still displayed, and back at me. "N-no. I don't need your money! Whatever it is that's going on, I don't want any part of it!" And with that, she flew away, fear driving the swaying hips from her now hurried gait.
"You really know how to sweet-talk 'em, kid." Barret chided with a sarcastic pat on my shoulder. "Better luck next time." Oh crap. I thought to myself. If these guys see the news, I'm screwed. I deftly switched off the screen next to me and tried to swallow my panic with another bite of sandwich. My beer arrived as I chewed, and I washed the bite down with half of the pint.
"Dang, kid. It's not that bad! She's just some random bimbo. Don't let it get to you like that."
Ranald, that lovable brute, was always trying to keep my head on straight. Neither he nor Barret knew about my family's abduction, so I played along with the idea that the woman had caused my change in demeanor. "Sure thing, baldy. I'll be sure and take note of all the other fish in the sea." He reached across Barret and rustled my hair. "You'll be fine, kid."
I decided to change the subject, hoping that I could find a way to get away from these newscasts. "What's our plan now, boss? Barret wiped his mouth and attempted to dig a bit of meat from his teeth while talking.
"Well, we'll head along the border of the Outter Rim, I guess, until we find another run. The net here is pretty devoid of anything significant. We'll probably take a small load to-"
"Hey, Barret!" It was Dolan. "Did you hear the news? It's is all over the network! Terrorists have taken hostages on Mars! Pirate activity is going crazy in the inner systems. They've reinstated letters of marque!"
Ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap! I screamed inside my head. They're gonna see my face on the news! What can I do?
"Letters of marque? What's that?" I asked, hoping to keep the topic away from the newscasts, and also because I had no idea what a letter of marque was. Barret ignored me.
"Yeah, but what kind of incentive?"
"One thousand credits per confirmed terrorist kill or capture!"
"Not bad, not bad. Dunno if it's worth the risk, though. Everyone and their brother will be there inside of a month to mop things up."
"That's is the thing, boss! It's is the Titan Tigers! The letters of marque extend across all Confederate space!"
Ranald nearly did a spit take. "The Titan Tigers? Are you kidding me?"
"No, brother, they kidnapped some official on Mars; no one knows there they're hiding him. The Inner Worlds are going crazy, but they don't know if maybe he's been transported to the Outter Rim."
I needed to find out just how bad of a situation I was in. A sector-wide search was bound to carry some kind of bounty or reward. If Barret found out that turning me in would net him some easy cash, supposing he could avoid being arrested just for having me on his ship, then I could be in serious trouble. The best way to find out, I decided, was to play it straight.
"Is there a reward for finding the guy?"
"Whoa whoa whoa, squirt! Nobody said anything about us becoming privateers. A thousand credits per kill isn't really all that much when you consider that you have to risk being killed. If we were in some sort of corvette, maybe, but the Antelope ain't built for that kind of action."
Dolan grinned from ear to ear. "I haven't told you the best part, boss. You get to keep what you catch!"
Ranald leaned in closer. "Cargo or vessel?"
"Both!"
Barret broke in again. "There's no guarantee we're going to find Titan Tigers all the way out here, though."
"Doesn't matter. There are lots of groups along the Outter Rim that would support them, so they've left the target clause wide open to include all pirates, smugglers, illegal craft, you name it!" My jaw hung slack. My family had somehow just caused the largest governing body in human existence to flop over on its ear and declare open season.
"Think, Barret; the bounty hunters out here are going to be hiring now that capture is legal. We can join an outfit and pick over what they don't keep."
Barret rubbed the stubble on his chin. "So, you mean to tell me that, all the way out here at Diis, I can get permission to capture any vessel that commits a crime, without being charged with piracy, and I get to keep the cargo and the vessel, and all of this is because some empty-headed politician on Mars went missing?"
I bristled at "empty-headed". That's my father you're talking about, dude.
Dolan nodded his head excitedly. "This is the real thing, Barret. Open season! We can go from one vessel to several in no time if we play our cards right." Barret leaned back against the bar in stunned silence.
"Okay.", at length. "Let's do it. This is a once in a life-time opportunity; let's make some money!"
Dolan and Ranald cheered enthusiastically, and Ranald gulped down his liquor with a flourish. Barret clapped Ranald on the shoulder. "Alright, let's go make it happen, shall we?", and he turned around to the bar and swiped his credit chip across the surface before leaving the rest of his meal and heading for the liason's office. Ranald followed hot on his heels, the excitement of the moment quickening his step. I took one last swig of beer before starting after them. Dolan called after me quietly.
"Don't worry, boy. We'll find your father."
I felt my shoulders draw up and my neck recede, as if someone had dropped a cube of ice down my collar, and my arms shriveled with goosebumps. I slowly and dreadfully turned my head to face Dolan, who leaned against the bar with an evil smile. He stepped forward and took me firmly by the arm, his face uncomfortably close to mine, and spoke just above a whisper.
"Don't worry, I'm not going to share your secret with Barret and Ranald. I would not visit that evil upon you." and in this his expression showed sincerity, maybe even sympathy. His grip, however, was as strong as steel. "But" he continued, "you are going to help me in return for my silence."
"Wh-wh-whadda ya want?" I stammered, feeling utterly helpless and weak in the knees.
"It's is nothing bad, my friend. You and I must convince Barret to take us towards Titan. That's is my home, and now I must attend to things there."
"Why not just tell that to Barret?"
Dolan unzipped his shirt to the navel. There, tattooed on his ribs, was some sort of glyph. He allowed me to see it, then quickly zipped his shirt again.
"My business concerns the Titan Tigers, but Barret must not know that I was once associated with them."
My eyes bulged out of my head. "You- you're a . . ."
"No! No. I distanced myself from the group. The Titan Tigers began sixty years ago as a splinter of the Ciprian Brothers of Peace. Missionaries. In my youth, I was involved with missionary work. It's is how I became involved in space travel." His grip loosened, just a little, and I began to relax just a bit, though still very much aware of the situation that I was in.
"When politics became more important than faith, I left; long before the violence began. I am no terrorist. But I must go to Titan now, to help disarm this situation. Barret and Ranald know that I was once a missionary, but they would no longer trust me if they knew that I had been involved with the Titan Tigers. Indeed, it's is not widely known that the Titan Tigers were once Ciprian missionaries, before they were nationalists. This is why you must help me convince Barret to go there." He let go of my arm; a sign of trust.
I breathed heavily, head swimming from the life-altering events of the past five minutes.
"How could I convince Barret to do that? I don't have any reason to go there."
"I will instruct you on what to say, and when to say it. Together, we can persuade him to do it."
I looked away, pretending to survey my surroundings, mostly trying to give my brain a few seconds to process all that was going on. The alcohol in my system was preventing most of this from making sense. I pinched my eyes shut and focused my concentration.
"If I help you, is there any way we can find my father?"
"I cannot promise that, but I can promise that, if it is indeed possible, I will give you my help."
I nodded, slowly. "Okay . . . okay. I'll help you. I don't have much choice, anyway."
Dolan smiled warmly and genuinely. "No, you do not." He extended his hand towards me, and I took it without much thought. It was only afterwards that I noticed that he had given me a normal handshake, not the Ciprian "new friend" handshake. He motioned towards the door. "Let's go catch up to them. Our jobs are about to change significantly."
He was right. When we got to the liason's office, Ranald stood waiting by the door. "You two get lost?"
"Stopped for a chat." Dolan answered truthfully. The office door opened and Barret stepped out; a physical sheet of paper in his hand. "Take a look." We each perused it in turn. Nearly the entire page full of paragraphs of legal jargon, with Antelope underlined, followed by Barret's signature.
"This is it, fellas. We're officially in business! Let's go make some upgrades and see what kind of trouble we can cause!" Ranald let out another whoop, Dolan smiled, and I did my best to force any sort of happy face that I could muster. The truth was that I felt as though I was in over my head. In three months, I had gone from being a spoiled brat living in the lap of luxury to being a nameless fugitive who couldn't even fully trust his closest friends.
My life had changed, and though I didn't know it, that piece of paper I had just touched marked a turning point in my career that would eventually overshaddow the drama of my family and the Titan Tigers.
From that moment forward, I would forever be a privateer.

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