The Great Beyond

by A. K. DuBoff

  “Name of...” she checked her pad, “Lieutenant Siriwardene. Travelling on to Yorkham.”

  That was a surprise. Yorkham was a space station, constructed out of a damaged colony ship by the survivors of an accident. The star that the station orbited was outward of Calloway, and the only planets in the system were too lethal to settle on. Since the accident had damaged their Chang drives, Yorkham wasn’t going anywhere.

  Any ship visiting that system would be flooded with people desperate to leave. That would have made recruitment easy, but what I couldn’t see was why someone would be heading back there.

  Especially a ground attack pilot.

  They were well known to regard themselves as the pinnacle of all pilots, skilled in null-G as well as atmospheric flying. Lieutenant Siriwardene would be a hotshot pilot jock, quiet as a klaxon, subtle as neon lighting, a man with places to go, things to do.

  So why was he heading back to Yorkham?

  None of my damned business. I had enough problems without worrying about someone else’s.

  Gunny ordered us to dispose of our ‘waste’, so we packed our kits back into the wheeled cases and dragged them out into the concourse.

  She finished off telling us what had happened while we’d been in jail.

  After the news about the credits broke to the Acid Penguins, the Commission’s official had retreated into the merchanter hired to take him back to Earth and wisely hadn’t come out again.

  Gunny had done what she could for her former troops, and they’d all departed to their individual star systems now. We were the last, and she was due to leave on the merchanter with the official in a couple of hours.

  She wasn’t looking forward to the company on the flight, so she wasn’t in a hurry to board. Instead, she offered us a meal at the little dockside hotel-restaurant she was booked into.

  “The room’s paid for another day. Yours, courtesy of the Terran Marines.” Gunny handed us the keycard.

  “Thanks, Gunny,” I said.

  “Appreciate what you’ve done,” Bjorn added.

  She looked out across the concourse, eyes focused on something far beyond the station’s curving walls.

  “I said I’d see you home,” she said shortly. “Those that I could, close as I could get.”

  She had said that. I could remember it: one of the first things she’d ever said to the Acid Penguins, and nothing we’d done since then had changed it.

  Later, we walked her down the docks, and only as the last call for her ship was being flashed up on the screens did she unbend enough to give us both a hug.

  She looked worriedly at us.

  “We’ll be okay, Gunny,” I said. “I’m making a plan.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.” She stabbed me with a finger. “You. Keep Thorsson from going berserk.” She stabbed Bjorn. “You. Keep Skelling from coming up with situations where you go berserk.”

  She shook her head, then the sergeant’s face slid back into place. “Hate to think of all my training going to waste.”

  With that, she picked up her duffel, squared her shoulders and walked up the merchanter’s gangway.

  —

  We went back to the restaurant to work.

  We were still in shock, but we fired up our pads and started looking at the traders’ portals to see what we could get for our combat kit. There was a problem: we were following in the footsteps of fifty other ex-1st Frontier soldiers who had been trying to sell their kit. The market was flooded.

  Bjorn was scowling. I could feel his temper rising again like a boiler nudging the red line.

  “I have an idea,” I said, trying to keep control, even though I wanted to blow off as well.

  “Yeah?”

  “We need to walk around to the market arc,” I said. “You can get us better deals face-to-face.”

  It was true, even if it didn’t qualify as much of an idea.

  “They’ll know we’re desperate,” he said. “Won’t get good deals on the kit. And nothing like enough to get even one of the bio-processors.”

  “Okay. If we can’t sell here—”

  “We can’t afford a passage back toward Earth,” he said. “And if we could—”

  “Hold on!” I had a brainwave. “The Karakun must be scheduled to make stops before Calloway.”

  I downloaded the itinerary from the transportation portal.

  There was one stop. The Karakun was a short-haul merchanter and couldn’t make the jump to Calloway without stopping to recalibrate on the way. However, the system chosen to stop in didn’t have a name; it had a number, GC 10295-83657. And alongside that tag, it had the Facilities Rating, which told you what you could expect to find there: a zero. Nothing. Not even a traffic or navigation beacon.

  Odd. There were some inhabited systems between Ensylas and Calloway. Each system was a chance for the merchanter to pick up some business. It didn’t make sense to do your recalibration in an empty system. Even if you didn’t want to spend time dropping into the gravity well to pitch for business, an inhabited system would have a nav beacon to keep charts updated.

  Unless the Karakun had a time-sensitive delivery for Calloway, and the route chosen was the minimum time course.

  I was no navigator—I couldn’t begin to guess the efficiency of the course—but common sense made me ask myself what possible delivery to Calloway would be shipped on a time-sensitive contract. They were unbelievably expensive. I doubted anyone on Calloway was making those kind of orders.

  And if they did... at that price, you went for a long-haul merchanter that could make it in one jump.

  My trouble-sense started to prickle.

  “Bjorn, why would a merchanter like the Karakun be heading out to Calloway?”

  “Huh?”

  He didn’t even raise his eyes from his pad.

  I lifted my head, but not to look at him; I’d registered that there was someone who had approached silently to stand next to our table.

  “I don’t think the Karakun is going to Calloway,” the stranger said in a whispery voice.

  She was untidily dressed and clutching a bag in front of her like it was a shield. For a second, I thought it was a beggar, but stations don’t allow them.

  She nervously ran one trembling hand through her short black hair. Her face was thin, dark-skinned. Her eyes... she had bruised-looking eyes that couldn’t stay still.

  “You’re Skelling and Thorsson, right?” she said.

  How would she know us?

  “Siriwardene?” I guessed.

  She nodded.

  I cleared my throat. Not the pilot jock that we were expecting.

  “Join us?” I said and gestured at the chair opposite.

  I could see momentary panic in her eyes and her nostrils flared.

  What the nova? Battle fatigue?

  But she sat, hugging her bag on her lap.

  Bjorn, who could be a real idiot sometimes, nonetheless caught on that something was wrong. When he spoke, he lowered his voice, and put away that dumb, megawatt smile.

  “Would you like something to eat?” he asked. “Drink?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I mean I don’t eat or drink food I don’t see prepared.”

  We stared at her.

  “You don’t know what they put in it.”

  “Okay...”

  Paranoia in addition to whatever else was going on with her.

  If we had to live with her in close proximity on the Karakun, none of us were going to enjoy this trip.

  I waved off a server who was lurking for an order.

  “The Karakun came in at the same time as the transport that brought me,” Siriwardene said abruptly. “I got a good look at her with the transport’s sensors.”

  She had relaxed the smallest amount.

  “Well?” I pushed gently.

  “The Karakun is a pirate.”

  I ignored the spasm in my gut and frowned. “Pretty serious allegation, Lieutenant.”

 
“I’m not a lieutenant anymore. And I can prove the Karakun...” She stopped and her lips thinned. “I could prove it, but we can’t get into the dock repair gantries.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. How convenient. I could prove it, but...

  “What use would it be getting into the gantries?” Bjorn asked.

  Siriwardene’s eyes flicked to him and away again.

  “The Karakun is in the last berth, next to the repair bays. You can see the whole of the ship from the gantries.”

  “So they have cannon mounted or something—” I started, but Bjorn interrupted me. His voice had gone all silky, like it did when he had a good hand at cards.

  “Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that we could get into the gantries. Have they painted a skull and crossbones on the hull?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Siriwardene said and got up.

  I would have let her go, but Bjorn reached out.

  “Wait,” he said, and she stopped. “We can get into the gantries through the maintenance tunnels.”

  “What? How?” I had a bad feeling about this. “You gave your access key back. I saw you.”

  “I did,” Bjorn agreed amiably. “But I didn’t give back the inspector’s backup override key.”

  For nova’s sake! Idiot!

  He was right on one thing. We could get into the gantries with a master key, but the keys were dual system—an actual, old-fashioned electro-mechanical lock activator twinned with an electronic interface which would report the activity.

  “They’ll have found out it’s gone,” I said. “If they don’t have someone already on the way to arrest us, they will have a tracking program to locate anywhere it gets used.”

  “Relax. It’s his backup key. I took it on our first day and he still hasn’t realized. He may never realize.”

  “It was still a stupid thing to do. Anyway, as I said, there’ll be alerts that come up on a monitor somewhere whenever those tunnels are accessed.”

  Siriwardene sat back down and cleared her throat.

  “Actually, I may be able to help with that.”

  —

  And she could. Which is why, an hour later, we were in the low-G dock gantries near the ship maintenance section.

  The section doors had opened, and according to Siriwardene, call-me-Shami, nothing had been reported to central monitoring.

  Ground attack pilots were different. I knew that. I just hadn’t really understood how different.

  Apparently, the difficulties of flying their craft inside and outside of atmosphere in combat situations required certain additional abilities, including the capability of connecting directly to the onboard computerized systems. Part of her skull was a freaking electronic interface.

  The reason she was twitchy was she needed that connection to computerized systems. She was addicted to it.

  “Low power,” she’d explained, as she rested her head on the door’s panel. “I need to be close, but this is fine.”

  Just using her ability to connect to the monitoring system had calmed her right down.

  On the other hand, climbing and crawling through narrow, low-G passages didn’t help, and Shami was showing signs of claustrophobia. Bjorn and I were fine; Gunny had insisted we train in ship-to-ship combat from null-G to hi-G, from restricted spaces to cavernous hangars.

  This far down toward the center of the station, we were well away from the effect of the artificial G of the main area, and the centrifugal force of rotation wasn’t having much effect, so all three of us were floating above an inspection window.

  Directly ‘below’ us, the Karakun was nose-in to the dock hub, secured in place with standard grapples, front and sides. It was like any other old, small merchanter—a long steel spine sitting on top of twin cargo bulges, crew space at the front and engines at the back.

  The low gravity played tricks with my mind. I felt as if I were looking up at the ship. It seemed huge and menacing. The glancing sunlight made every shadow deeper, turned every surface shape into something monstrous.

  I shook my head.

  Concentrate.

  “What am I looking for?” I asked.

  “The section behind the bridge,” Shami said. “The raised flat bit.”

  There was a big rectangular area which looked like it had been added recently. In the middle were what looked like sealed blast doors. Spread out around those were heavy-duty securing pits and recesses for grappling equipment, similar to the equipment used to secure the ship in dock.

  “That,” Shami said confidently, “is the latest in deep-space universal couplings. Replicates the docking facilities of space stations.”

  “It’s a way to make a sealed connection with another ship?”

  “Yes.”

  I frowned. Unusual, yes. Suspicious?

  “What do you think they trade, out there in deep space, out of sight of everyone else?” Shami said. “What’s worth the costs of getting a coupling like that installed on a two-bit merchanter?”

  “Maybe it’s smuggling rather than piracy?” Bjorn said.

  I grimaced. “No. Down in the depths of the Inner Worlds, maybe. Out here? Trading station to station? There’s no pan-system smuggling laws that individual systems are going to enforce. If they don’t want what you’ve got, they don’t buy it.”

  Everyone knew ships docked at stations with cargo that was illegal for that system. It was a gray area, but generally, if you kept it on board, the station didn’t care.

  Shami was right. Such a coupling only made sense for bulk transfers, and only pirates would need to transfer bulk cargo in deep space.

  There was a long silence, broken by Bjorn: “And they bid for a contract to take us to Calloway because...”

  He and Shami kicked it back and forth between them.

  “They get three slaves they can sell into rogue systems and three sets of back pay that they can convert next time they go inward.”

  “That ship wouldn’t dare enter a rogue system. No weapons.”

  “No, this is their legitimate merchanter. So that means there’s at least one other, an armed ship, out there in the dark, waiting.”

  “Can we cancel the contract to travel and re-bid using the same money?”

  “Maybe. Even if we can’t, and we have to pay passage ourselves, we have to.”

  They wound down.

  “Janice?”

  I was floating there, staring at the pirate.

  It all hit me in that moment: The greed of the Commission. The betrayal. The three lives wasted—Solveig, Enoch, Hal. The smirks of station traders as they swindled us out of everything. My family’s faces if I turned up after six years with no bio-processors. The despair as the colony faced its own collapse. More deaths from starvation. My uncle’s face—I told you she wouldn’t amount to anything. Probably spent it in bars. Six years of my life, my soul, risked and wasted.

  And finally anger—white-hot and steady as Sirius, flooding through me.

  Enough.

  I shook my head again. “We can’t stay here. We take that ship.”

  “Ah... I vote to not be a slave,” Bjorn said.

  “Well, that’s given,” I replied. “But you know what? I have a plan.”

  “Oh, shit,” Bjorn said.

  —

  My plan hatched in the relative comfort of the Orion’s Wheel station looked... different now that I watched the second pirate ship coast in by the faint red light of an empty system’s dying sun, surrounded by cold, hard vacuum.

  Back on Orion’s Wheel, we’d arrived at the Karakun acting belligerent in case Captain Satybal wanted to check our luggage for contraband. We didn’t have to worry. The crew of the Karakun didn’t bother to greet us. There was a screen next to the gangway, which demanded confirmation of our identities and then directed us to the ‘passenger accommodation’.

  That was three rooms. One with a set of bunks, one with chairs and a ReadyMeal dispenser, and one bathroom. As soon as we were inside the short cor
ridor that formed the entrance, the door had sealed behind us.

  Ship security and safety were the reasons given when we’d used the comm to query it.

  Hogshit.

  Even before we’d undocked, Shami had located, identified, and subverted the electronics of the monitors that the Karakun had installed to keep watch on us. And while we were outbound from Ensylas, I’d broken into and crawled through the maintenance tunnels. With instructions from Shami, I’d rigged a connection for her into the computer system network.

  It made her so happy, she had to discipline herself not to take over until we were ready.

  She wasn’t in control of the much larger, obviously heavily armed pirate ship that was incoming to connect up with the Karakun. Getting control of that was a job for Bjorn and me.

  The newcomer’s name was Tünjorgo. Both ships were registered to Zilkum, a small Frontier system at the other end of the Parvi Arc. There was almost nothing in the Ensylas databanks about Zilkum. Exactly the sort of setup that spoke of rogue systems and pirate bases.

  Karakun was the merchanter that visited systems and learned about rich prizes. Tünjorgo was the demon that waited in the dark places to seize them. Goods went to the Karakun to sell at the next legitimate system, while slaves went into the Tünjorgo to wait until they were sold in the next rogue system. Neat.

  What the Tünjorgo didn’t know was that Captain Satybal had not picked up three helpless potential slaves heading home with currency cards full of credits they couldn’t convert, but rather three angry, pissed-off veterans, one who was poised to take over the Karakun’s computerized systems, and the other two in fully operational combat armor, waiting to do something less subtle with the bigger ship.

  We waited in silence, except for the blood pounding in my ears and the rush of my breath. Knowing Bjorn could see my vital signs soaring in his helmet monitor didn’t help calm me down.

  Showtime.

  “Let’s go. When we get there, remember to point your weapon away from me,” I said as we launched ourselves into space.