The Fractured Void

by Tim Pratt

  “It’s not a dreadnought or something,” Tib said. “Not that those are really built for stealth anyway. The distortions indicate something cruiser-sized.”

  “Don’t give them any indication that we’ve seen them,” Felix said. What was this unfamiliar feeling, like his blood was fizzing? Oh, yes: excitement. The thrill of the hunt. He’d missed it. Stalking Tib in the basement was a poor substitute for the real thing.

  “My communications array just lit up.” Tib put the incoming message up on half the screen, the other half still tracking the slow ascent of the shuttle as it inexorably approached the big red question mark Tib had generated to indicate the location of the stealthed ship.

  A dirty-faced woman hunched over a console in a small dark room appeared, her eyes wide and wild. “They took Mr Thales!”

  “This is Captain Duval of the Temerarious.” Felix leaned forward. “Who took who?”

  She ran a hand through her messy hair. “These soldiers, five or six of them, they wore armor and had these guns, they broke into his house and dragged him out! They took him and a bunch of his stuff – we asked what was happening, who they were, and they told us to shut up or they’d shoot us! I tried to call before but they did something, they jammed the signal or something.”

  “I guess now we know who’s on the shuttle,” Tib said. “I’ve pinged the vessel, but there’s no transponder, and they don’t reply. No indication where it’s from or where it’s going.”

  “Should I blow up the shuttle?” Calred said.

  “There’s probably a kidnapped civilian on board, so no,” Felix said. “Can we move to intercept the shuttle, disable it, scoop it up?”

  “Sure. Assuming we’re faster than the invisible ship, which we might be. Also assuming the invisible ship isn’t better armed than we are, which is more doubtful.”

  “Start moving that way. Weapons hot. Hail the shuttle again, Tib. Tell them if they don’t respond we’ll be forced to disable them.” Felix returned his attention to the woman on the screen. As far as he knew there was nobody worth abducting in this system, at least not for conventional reasons like ransom. Felix had been furnished with a list of notable citizens when he came here, mayors and heads of local business concerns, and none of them seemed like targets for a heavily armed strike team with stealth tech and jamming equipment. Thales hadn’t been on it anyway. “Why did they come for this Thales? Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “He moved here not quite a year ago. He mostly keeps to himself, and when he doesn’t, you wish he had.” She paused. “I mean, everyone here hates him – he’s terrible, really – but I don’t know why anyone would bother to kidnap him.”

  “Huh. Thanks for notifying us. We’ll take care of things from here.” He ended the call and watched the shuttle get bigger in the viewscreen as their courses converged.

  “The shuttle just answered us,” Tib said.

  “What did they say?”

  “‘Stand down, or die.’”

  “Oh,” Felix said. “I don’t much like either of those options. Cal, you know that ship we can’t see?”

  “I am familiar with it.”

  “The shuttle is still pretty far away from said invisible ship, right?”

  “It’s outside the maximum blast radius, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “That is what I’m asking. There you go, showing initiative again.” Goodbye boredom, Felix thought. “Let’s turn that invisible ship into a cloud of radioactive dust, shall we?”

  Chapter 2

  The missiles Calred launched did not, in fact, turn the invisible ship into radioactive dust. Felix hadn’t really expected them to. He had, however, hoped the mysterious ship would be forced to drop out of stealth in order to deploy countermeasures, and that’s what happened: the empty space on the screen was suddenly full of spaceship, its countermeasures dazzling the incoming missiles with guidance-disrupting lasers, sending them spinning off on harmless courses to burn up in the atmosphere of the planet below.

  “Looks like the Federation,” Calred said. “A cruiser, built for speed, not violence.”

  The Federation of Sol, Felix thought with reflexive irritation. Sure, he was human himself, but he was from the Coalition, and he knew being human didn’t make him particularly special – something his ambitious, expansionist cousins-by-ancestry didn’t seem to grasp. The Coalition had decent relations with the Federation, insofar as their interests ever overlapped, so what were they doing sneaking around and kidnapping people out here? This Thales must be pretty important to risk an act of war over. Unless… “Are we sure it’s from the Federation?”

  “Not necessarily,” Calred said. “We’ve even got a few Federation ships in our raider fleet, and they sell their old military cruisers sometimes.”

  “There’s no transponder indicating that they’re an accredited diplomatic or trading vessel,” Tib said. “They’re running dark. It could be anybody. Anybody with the resources to field a snatch team and operate cutting-edge stealth tech, anyway.”

  “Target lock the shuttle, and tell the big ship to stand down,” Felix said. “If we can see them, I assume we can yell at them.”

  “Are we going to actually shoot down the shuttle?” Tib asked. “That would prevent them from abducting one of our colonists, the same way cutting off my head would stop me from sneezing.”

  “I’m still thinking about it,” Felix said. “How long do I have to think about it, Cal?”

  “In about five minutes, the shuttle will be close enough to the ship that firing on one will mean firing on the other.”

  Felix considered. “If the shooting starts, would we win?”

  Cal shrugged. “They might die of heatstroke before we die of thirst.”

  Felix had served with Calred long enough to know that was a Hacan phrase that either meant it was a no-win situation or, more generously, that the fight could go either way. He almost asked for clarification, but both interpretations were bad, so he didn’t bother.

  “There’s an incoming transmission from the ship of mystery,” Tib said.

  Half the screen filled with a visibly irritated human woman’s head and shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, but she was wearing the sort of armor favored by the better class of mercenaries – and she wasn’t even part of the ground force that did the snatch, so who knew how they were outfitted? What Felix could glimpse of the enemy bridge (they had an enemy now – how exciting) was bare of insignia, flags, or other identifiers. She glared, but didn’t say anything.

  “Hello,” Felix said. “Return the person you abducted, and we won’t kill you.”

  “We’re capturing an escaped prisoner,” the woman said. “He’s not a citizen of the Coalition. He’s a fugitive from justice.”

  “Assuming that’s true, we have diplomatic relations with the Federation, and there are channels for this sort of thing. You’re not allowed to drop in and kidnap people without turning in the appropriate paperwork first.”

  “We never said we were from the Federation.”

  Felix smiled. “I apologize for the assumption. Maybe you’re from Jol-Nar? Or are you from a faction we don’t have diplomatic relations with? In that case, I’m pretty sure this is definitely an act of war, instead of just probably. Do you want to reconsider this…” he waved his hand in the air. “… whole thing?”

  She gritted her teeth. “We are independent bounty hunters.”

  “Interesting. What crimes did Thales commit, and in what jurisdiction?”

  She winced. She was clearly unhappy that Felix knew that name. Felix was just sad he couldn’t play cards with someone who wore her emotions so clearly on her face. He quite liked taking money from strangers. “Phillip Thales is guilty of theft, murder, and destruction of property.”

  “Where did he do this thieving, murder, and vandalism?”

/>   “That’s classified.”

  Calred laughed out loud. “By whom? Let me guess. Also classified?”

  Felix cupped his chin in his hand and looked at her. “Thales must have stolen something pretty big if you mentioned the theft part before the murder part. Cobbler’s Knob is an unusual choice for spending ill-gotten gains, but to each their own, I suppose. I’m sure we can clear all this up. If you’re bounty hunters, just send the credentials proving you’re authorized to operate in Coalition space.”

  She worked her mouth like she’d taken a bite of something sour and couldn’t decide whether to swallow it or spit it out. “Perhaps we could come to some other arrangement.”

  “Are you offering me a bribe?” Felix said.

  She shrugged. “Where I’m from, we have a saying: every Coalition ship is a pirate ship. The man we took is not one of your citizens, and none of your citizens were harmed in the course of taking him. We’d be happy to send you a substantial quantity of Federation credits if you’d agree to let us leave in peace, and refrain from filing any sort of official report. Everyone goes away happy.”

  “How substantial?” She named a sum. Felix went hmm. “What’s the exchange rate right now, Tib?”

  “One-point-five Federation credits to one Coalition credit.”

  So, not that substantial, but still. “Sure. Tib, send them the account info.”

  The woman blinked at him. “Really?”

  Felix shrugged. “Why not? I like money.” He almost said, “I’m Coalition. What do you expect? I’d sell my mother’s teeth if I could get a credit for them, right?” but decided that might tip his hand.

  After a few moments, Tib said, “Transmission complete. From an untraceable account – very slick.”

  “Thank you for your generous contribution to the Bereaved and Orphaned Benevolent Fund,” Felix said. “The Coalition will be eternally grateful. Now, release your prisoner, or we will fire on your ship.”

  “We had a deal!” she shouted.

  Now Felix shrugged. “I gather my people are famously untrustworthy. Shall I count to, let’s see, five? One, two–”

  He didn’t get to finish, because the other ship fired on them, and the Temerarious had to deploy their own countermeasures. Felix was surprised. The Temerarious had the shuttle target locked, and surely the enemy ship knew they were well matched tactically, but they still chose to fight? Bounty hunters were all about balancing risk against reward: these weren’t bounty hunters. (Well, obviously. The amount they’d paid Felix was more than any bounty he’d ever heard of.)

  “Do we return fire?” Cal said. The shuttle was so close to the ship now, it would inevitably be destroyed if the Temerarious fired back.

  Damn it. Maybe Thales was a citizen – Felix wasn’t about to take the word of the people shooting at him on that – but even if he wasn’t, someone was willing to go to a lot of trouble and expense to abduct him, and that meant he was valuable. The Coalition really liked taking valuable things, and didn’t like having them taken away. “No, pull back. Can we keep up with that ship when they run?”

  “Unless their stealth technology is better than anything I’ve ever heard of before, yes,” Cal said.

  “Good. Then let them go, follow at a safe distance, extrapolate their likely course, and see if any of the raider fleets are in a position to intercept.” There was no regular military way out here, but they weren’t far from a shipping route, and there were often a few of the Coalition’s irregular troops lurking in the dark between the stars, keeping an eye out for easy targets.

  The Temerarious withdrew as the shuttle disappeared into the belly of the enemy cruiser, which rose out of orbit and accelerated away.

  “They must know we’re going to call for help,” Felix said. “What’s their plan?”

  “I think their plan was ‘don’t get caught,’” Tib said. “It’s a reasonable plan, way out here, where we’re the only possible threat in the system. It’s just their bad luck we happened to be passing this way. Otherwise, they would have been long gone by the time we heard about the abduction. Their new plan is probably ‘run fast and hope for the best.’”

  Felix nodded. That wasn’t a good plan, but he didn’t judge the humans too harshly: after all, they didn’t have any other plans available. “See what we can find out about this Thales, would you, Cal?”

  “I’m already compiling a dossier. It’s going to be short, though, I can tell.”

  “Good news,” Tib said. “I’ve got Commander Meehves and a small fleet that should be able to intercept our new friends in half a day or so.”

  “Good old Meehves,” Felix said.

  •••

  “Oh, we can catch them.” Meehves slouched in a chair in her quarters, a drink in her hand, her grayish skin and blank eyes revealing her Letnev ancestry. Those eyes made her damnably hard to gamble against, as Felix had learned during officer training. Meehves taught tactics occasionally, with a special emphasis on surprise and misdirection, and had cheerfully explained that taking money from her students constituted teaching them a valuable lesson in her areas of expertise. “Do you want to lead the boarding party?”

  “It would make a nice change from flying around in circles, if you don’t mind.”

  Meehves waved her free hand lazily. “We’ve just been lurking out here waiting for a fat, lonely cargo ship to drift by. Thanks for bringing us something to do. I’m a bit baffled by the whole thing, though. Who is this Thales, anyway? Why would the Federation, or someone hiring a bunch of mercenaries, go to so much trouble to kidnap him?”

  “We don’t know much.” Felix flicked his fingertip and scrolled through the information Calred had scrounged up in the past several hours. “We don’t have any record of him on Alope until about ten standard months ago, when he showed up in Cobbler’s Knob–”

  “Whose knob?” Meehves said.

  “I had the same question. It’s just what the locals call their little patch of grazing land, a river, some fields, and a few housing modules. Maybe it was founded by someone named Cobbler, or there’s a mountain nearby that looks like a shoe or something. Anyway, this Thales immigrated, perfectly legally. Claimed he was from the Federation of Sol and, I regret to say, the security officials didn’t poke too hard at his identity, or they would have realized all his documentation was fake.”

  “Doing deep background checks on colonists to remote worlds isn’t a good use of resources,” she said. “It’s not like Alope is a prime target for terrorism. Most of the people who immigrate to places like this have shady backgrounds and no other options.”

  “Fair enough,” Felix said. “He showed up in Cobbler’s Knob looking for a place to live, and for some reason the good country people didn’t just steal his money and throw his body down a well. Instead they fixed up an abandoned cottage for him, one with a big root cellar, which he was particularly pleased about – he said he could use the space for his work, without saying what that work was. He shut himself away and only came out to buy supplies, and to complain about the food, the weather, the hygiene of his fellow colonists, and every other subject imaginable. No one had any idea what he was doing there, and he didn’t volunteer information. The locals thought he might be an artist or a writer, a reclusive genius devoting himself to his work, or else that he was hiding out from the law. There was some disagreement on that score, but everyone does agree that he’s rude, unpleasant, and a total bastard.”

  Meehves sipped her drink, a perfectly clear liquid that Felix suspected was highly flammable. “People don’t usually send stealth ships full of mercenaries to kidnap artists, and whoever came for him wasn’t the law.”

  “The locals took the opportunity to snoop around his house after he was taken, and there’s no sign of any artwork anyway. They’re not exactly trained investigators down there, but they say it looks like the kidnappers took everything b
ut the furniture with them. No documents, no personal effects, nothing.”

  Meehves swirled her drink. “Maybe he was a fugitive, but if so, why not reach out to us through normal channels? Why risk a fight with the Coalition?”

  “I was thinking about that. Maybe he’s a special kind of fugitive – the kind with a head full of state secrets the Federation, or whoever, is afraid he’ll give away. Or maybe he stole something they were really keen to recover?”

  “Why not just kill him, then?” Meehves said. “They had the firepower. Honestly, they could have paid someone in Cobbler’s Knob two sheep to kill him, the way it sounds.”

  “They need him alive, then, for whatever reason,” Felix said. “Maybe it’s not something he has, but something he knows.”

  Meehves nodded. “So he’s not a brilliant artist, but he could be some other kind of brilliant – some useful variety. You hear about people kidnapping Hylar scientists sometimes, trying to get a jump on weapons research.”

  “Or he could be a spy with intel that’s not recorded anywhere, or he was witness to something and they need his testimony, or, or, or. Suddenly I can come up with all sorts of scenarios.”

  Meehves shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough. Unless they kill him when we try to board their ship, in the spirit of, ‘if we can’t have him, no one can’. Unless they all choose death before dishonor, though, one of them will tell us what’s going on, anyway. We just have to ask them the right way.”

  “Mercenaries don’t tend to sacrifice their lives for honor.”

  “They do not,” Meehves agreed. “So let’s hope they’re mercenaries, and not some flavor of true believer. We should intercept their vessel soon.” She pushed herself out of the chair. “I’m going to make sure the guns are loaded and the boarding pods are prepped. Or, rather, tell other people to make sure of those things – the burden of command, you know.” She leaned down and looked into her screen, and through it, into Felix’s mind. “The money you scammed out of them for the Benevolent Fund. How much did you skim?”