by M. D. Cooper
The engineer waved a hand in dismissal. “Nah…I’m all set. I don’t really want people to like me. Safer that way.”
“Safer from what?” Tammy asked.
Kallie fixed her with an uncertain look. “Uh…from people. I thought that was apparent.”
I couldn’t help but snicker, and she turned to me. “You especially.”
“Don’t worry,” I raised my hands in mock-defense. “I’m fully repelled by you.”
A look of consternation crossed Kallie’s face. “I feel like this misfired."
“Speaking of misfires,” Tammy frowned at her board. “I’m showing red on the starboard burner. Secondary thermal sensor on the bell. Should I ignore it?”
Kallie rose from her seat. “No, I should take a look. A few bits of debris got through the shields when the Restaff blew. Everything checked out before, but maybe something shook loose during transition.”
“Want a hand?” I asked.
“No. Remember? I don’t like people.”
The engineer stalked off the bridge to Finn’s soft laughter.
“I think that bit her in the ass more than she liked.”
“Leave my ass out of it,” Kallie shouted over her shoulder.
I turned and gave Finn a warning look. “There is no safe response. Do the smart thing.”
He nodded, still grinning.
“Watch what? Your ass?” the breacher taunted, then frowned. “Huh.”
I couldn’t help but notice that his tone had changed from amused to serious in an instant.
“What is it?”
“There’s a shadow,” he said absently. “It’s being careful, but I spotted it.”
I pulled up scan, looking for what Finn had seen. “It’s damn hard to stealth this close to occlusion. Everything’s so bright, ships are always in front of something.”
“Uh huh.” Finn agreed. “That’s why I spotted them in two minutes.”
“There!” I put up the visual on the main screen. “Shit…it’s big, whatever it is.”
“Could just be an ore hauler coming in from the cloud,” Tammy suggested. “Those things are cold as fuck a lot.”
A laugh came from the bridge’s entrance. I glanced up to see Oln filling the doorway. “Tammy, you said ‘fuck a lot’.”
“Gawd…what did I do to end up here?”
“Focus, people,” I grunted. “That’s no ore hauler’s profile.”
Finn blew out a slow breath. “You thinking it’s DSA?”
I nodded. “Yeah, but that’s a big bertha, no little patrol boat.”
“Hard to say, without being able to tell distance,” Tammy chimed in.
I did my best not to clench my jaw.
“Course laid in, boss,” the pilot said a moment later. “Good to burn?”
“Yes, ease into it. I don’t want them to think we’re nervous.”
“Could we just try to drift?” Finn asked. “From their angle, the barycenter is behind us.”
I shook my head. “We were conserving heat orbs in the DL. Ship’s hot, we probably stand out like a—Oh shit.”
EM emissions lit up around the dark ship, followed by a burn lancing into the dark as its engines came to life.
Finn groaned. “Aaand we’re being hailed. It’s the DSA alright.”
I nodded. “Put it up.”
The main holo shifted to show a woman with commander’s bars on her lapel standing in the forefront of a busy bridge. Unlike Reeve, she didn’t hide her crew, knowing it served as a show of force.
“Aw crap,” I muttered, shaking my head.
The woman was Commander Sinclair. My own personal nemesis.
“Captain Bremen,” she said. “How nice to see you. We’re passing a vector. Come alongside and prepare for boarding.”
The connection terminated, and Finn muttered a rather inventive curse word. Tammy was silent.
Oln laughed. “Well, I’m gonna get a bite to eat. Food in DSA brigs is shit.”
After the brief conversation with Captain Bremen, I sat back in my chair, glad for a bit of sport in my day. I was considering swapping out the standard DSA shipsuit I wore to a double-layered one that was more impact resistant when Lieutenant Fledge reached out to me.
I was momentarily surprised by the statement. While it was unknown to my crew, Fledge was an officer in the DSA Intelligence Section. On the record—such as it was—he was stationed on my ship to watch over outsystem travel, looking for signs of Paragonian infiltration into Delphi. However, I suspected that he was also here to keep an eye on me.
Though my unconventional ways garnered me enough wins in the field to grant me the leeway to do as I saw fit, it also brought about enough jealousy in the ranks that some would be more than happy to see me trip and fall.
One thing I knew for certain, Fledge was no mere lieutenant. I had a suspicion that he outranked me. There was nothing overt in his behavior, just a hint every now and then that, push come to shove, he could do as he pleased.
There it was, those little hints. Not a request to accompany me, but not an order that contained a reference to authority. A simple statement, as though his authority was both implied and understood.
It grated on me like nothing else. He was a burr in my side, the one thing I couldn’t control that lingered in the back of my mind with the potential to mar the perfect operation of my ship.
I didn’t wait for a response before I closed the connection.
Fledge rarely joined boarding parties, preferring to watch feeds from the inspection teams. Whenever he did come along, things were invariably more…problematic.
Yes, I think I’ll swap out for the heavier shipsuit.
11
INSPECTION
Aboard the Kerrigan…
The DSA was smarter than a pirate like Reeve. Commander Sinclair especially. They knew better than to grapple onto a ship like the Kerrigan. Even with a hundred-meter umbilical.
Not that a ship like mine would pose much of a threat to a cruiser like the Victorious Strike. The ship was over fifteen hundred meters long, bristling with weapons and sheathed in both ice and carbon plating. Even the limpets I had in storage would do little damage.
“The DSA shuttle is at our airlock,” Finn announced. “Seal is good.”
I rose from my seat, not looking forward to the next hour or so. “OK, let them know I’m on my way down. Any sign of the commander?”
Finn shook his head. “No, they didn’t provide any information on who is in the shuttle. My only communication has been with the pilot.”
“She’s probably there,” I muttered. “I don’t know why, but she has it in for me.”
“Huh,” I grunted as I walked off the bridge. “I suppose I’m just not devious enough to deal with her.”
Kallie sent an affirmative response as my boots hit the deck plate at the forward end of the port-side passage. It was only a fifteen-meter walk to the airlock, and when I arrived, I was greeted by Commander Sinclair’s glowering visage staring at me through the window.
Yay.
I gave her a jaunty wave as I waited for the lock to finish its cycle, and when it opened, I was surprised to see another officer with her.
Well, that’s a first.
Two soldiers in light armor were behind them, and the pair moved into the passage ahead of the officers, both giving me a once-over before slipping past to check the port-side corridor.
“Clear,” one announced, and with that, Sinclair and the other officer stepped forward.
He was tall and slender, a clear spacer by birth. Close-cropped black hair framed an angular face with almost pouting lips. His was the look of a man who was used to getting his way.
Something in Sinclair’s body language told me she felt the same way—and didn’t like it.
“Captain Bremen,” she said upon reaching me. “So nice to see you again.”
I extended my hand. “Always a pleasure to have you grace us with your presence, Commander.”
Kallie began to respond, but I muted her as the commander spoke.
“This is Lieutenant Fledge. He’ll be joining us for the inspection today.”
Behind her, the airlock cycled, and I saw the team of DSA inspection specialists enter the airlock. Despite Sinclair’s and Fledge’s unnerving presences, those four would be the real threat. Should they find our hidey holes, we’d be in a world of trouble.
I knew the game the commander was playing—especially since this was our third round. She would tour the ship, questioning me about everything. She’d disrupt my bridge crew, pressing them for details about their personal lives, and judge them harshly. All the while, her inspectors would dig into every nook and cranny on the ship, leaving a trail of access panels and upended deck plates in their wake.
The crew would be unable to focus on distracting or herding the inspectors, which was the team’s goal.
But I trusted in Kallie. She’d gotten us through more than just the two prior inspections from Sinclair. The Kerrigan might look like a flying toaster, but my bird had a rep for getting cargo through intact and undiscovered.
Then again, I’d never moved something like DSA NSAI cores before.
For the first twenty minutes, things went as expected. I escorted the pair of officers to the bridge and granted them access to our flight logs, which they reviewed while questioning both Finn and Tammy about trivial issues that had nothing to do with moving cargo.
Then Sinclair laughed. “A writ of marque? Seriously?” She turned to me and looked me up and down. “I’d ask who you slept with to get it, but no one would consider that a favor worth granting a writ in return.” She shook her head in disgust. “I guess they’re just for sale now in Chal. How much did it cost?”
I shrugged. “I’m sorry, are you representing the government of Chal now? Is there a fee I need to pay for being granted such a writ?”
“Government,” Sinclair snorted out the word. “Chal is only civilized by the loosest usage of that term. To say they have a government is like saying that a murder of crows is a parliament.”
“Seems like an apt comparison to me,” I replied evenly. “Most governments excel at murder.”
“As do you,” Lieutenant Fledge commented. “Blew up another ship in the Chal System. Didn’t even give them a chance to abandon their vessel.”
“That is not required when exercising one’s writ in Chal,” I took extra care to keep my tone calm and measured. “And we registered the action. It was an act of defense, and we took no cargo or goods of any kind during the engagement, so there is nothing taxable to declare.”
“We’ll see about that,” the commander mused. “Tell me, how did you manage that initial explosion?”
“An IED,” I said. “Kallie whipped it up and stuffed it in a crate.”
Fledge turned to me and cocked an eyebrow. “Oh? And what did they think they were getting?”
I pursed my lips and sighed. “A few cases of high-grade beam lenses—which they actually did. We had to sacrifice some of them to make the ruse work.”
“So?” The commander joined the lieutenant in staring at me with a raised brow. I had to keep myself from chuckling at the image they presented. “Why would you bother with the IED, then?”
“Because I didn’t want to give it all to them. Plus, we were hoping to claim their ship as a prize, then it would have been well worth the tradeoff.”
“Instead, you blew it out of the black,” Fledge accused.
“No,” I shook my head. “And that’s also why we didn’t give them any warning to abandon ship. Our IED didn’t yield a blast big enough to destroy the Restaff. They either deliberately broke their antimatter bottle’s containment in an attempt to take us out with them, or it failed on its own.”
“Do you know how many times I’ve seen ships meet their end in antimatter explosions?” Sinclair asked, hands on hips that I was taking great care not to admire.
“Probably zero.” I tossed out the response with a nonchalant tilt of my head.
“Exactly.” She nodded for emphasis. “Zero times. So why do you think I don’t buy your tale?”
This time I couldn’t help but laugh. “Because you haven’t been to Chal?”
“Funny man,” she muttered. “We’ll copy all these logs and see if there are any steps that the DSA would like to take in response to your actions.”
“Copy away.”
A moment later, Sinclair cocked her head, a sneer that I suspected she thought was a grin spreading across her lips. “Well, well, Captain, looks like we have found some interesting cargo on your flying garbage heap. Let’s go have a look, shall we?”
I did my best to appear dejected. “Shit. Yeah, let’s go have a look.”
We found the inspection team in the forward engineering bay, deck plates piled against the bulkheads, and one of the backup plasma transfer lines disassembled.
“My, my,” Commander Sinclair shook her head in mock-dismay. “Captain Bremen, SC batts with these charge capacities are outside the capacity allowed for civilian weapons. You know they can’t be brought into Delphi.”
I gave a dramatic sigh—hopefully not too dramatic. “Yeah, well, we have to survive in Chal, and every two-bit criminal in that system has batts at least this good. We’d run out of charge five minutes into a firefight with Delphian-legal ones. We tuck them away in an inaccessible place when we leave Chal. Otherwise we’d have to buy new ones every time we go back.”
Sinclair shook her head. “I don’t see why you think that’s anything I’d care about. Maybe if you weren’t a smuggler, you wouldn’t need to be loaded for bear every time you go into Chal.”
“Again,” I made a show of trying not to clench my jaw. “You probably need to visit Chal before you pass judgment.”
“I don’t need to do anything, Bremen. Well…other than confiscate these and fine you for them.”
Kallie was leaning against a nearby bulkhead, and she gave a derisive snort. “What are you going to do with them after that?”
“Turn them in,” Sinclair responded, a note of confusion in her voice. “What are you implying?”
“Nothing,” the engineer said with a languid shrug. “Just…everyone knows that the DSA makes scratch on the other end by selling shit like this back to ships headed to Chal. Hell, these cores have three sets of DSA confiscation stamps o
n them. They’re carefully obscured, but if you look hard, you’ll spot them.”
Commander Sinclair turned to face Kallie, stretching up to her full height. “Are you suggesting that the DSA participates in illegal arms dealing?”
The engineer held up her hands and shook her head vigorously. “No! Of course not. I think it’s more likely that you have crooked officers in your impound warehouses, or that your security is so porous that any crook can walk off with shit you’ve confiscated. I always suspect stealing and crooked officers before some sort of systemic plot to enrich the DSA on both ends…granted, that’s kinda stealing and crooked too.”
The goal was to distract them and not have them look any further, not get us brought in on questioning for stealing from DSA impound.
While Kallie’s accusations appeared to be working on Sinclair, Lieutenant Fledge was a different matter. The man had dropped down into the opening the inspection team had made, and was peering into the plasma conduit.
“Well, well,” he said after a minute. “Batteries we can forgive. But what you’ve got in here is another issue entirely.”
“Mold?” I asked, glancing at Kallie. “I told you to scrub the backup lines.”
“What is it?” Commander Sinclair asked, her visage darkening further a she turned to Fledge. “More batteries?”
“No, nothing so mundane.” He climbed out of the opening and turned to the inspection team. “Pull out the next segment, but be very careful. We wouldn’t want to damage those military NSAI cores.”
“DSA military?” Sinclair asked, and Fledge nodded. She turned to me, a grin splitting her lips wide. “Well, well, Mister Bremen. It looks like I’ll finally get to have you visit my ship for a change.”
I glanced at Kallie and breathed out a defeated sigh. I was about to ask Sinclair how she wanted to handle bringing my ship in when Fledge spoke.
“Commander, we won’t be doing that. This is an opportunity I’d prefer not to waste. You can be certain that whoever has contracted the Kerrigan to move these cores has eyes watching us right now. Half the ships around us sell reports of every boarding that happens at the system’s edge. If we’re to catch the buyer red-handed, we can’t make it look like we found anything of note.”