Stealing Spaceships: For Fun and Profit

by Logan Jacobs

  “Helpful, as always,” I muttered.

  I ducked back down under the controls to find the starter wires. There should be a bundle of them on a ship this size, and if Favian Grith had anything to do with the setup, they probably wouldn’t look like starter wires normally did.

  I found a bundle of blue wires hidden behind a maze of rainbow ones. They looked to lead toward the main command console, but a warning chimed in my head.

  “Are you certain?” The chip sounded like she was laughing.

  “Well, not now.” I rolled my eyes behind my shielding glasses.

  I pressed past the blue wire bundle. When I was elbow-deep in wires, I saw that the clump of blue lines headed in the direction of the external manifest. What I needed was the internal.

  It took a few another minute of digging, but since the blue wires went to the external, that meant the bundle of gray wires had to be for the ship’s internal manifest. I fidgeted with the cords until I fished out the part I needed. As soon as I stripped the middle three wires, I sparked them against the other bare wires.

  The floor vibrated under me as the ship’s engines hummed to life.

  Only one more thing stood between me and Grith. The ship was ready to go, but I still had to turn off the docking brake. Then I’d be flying high toward a peppery bloody mary with my name on it. With the ship still running, I left the bridge and ran back out the way I came. New ships like this always had the docking brakes on the outside, and they could only be disengaged once the engines were running. It was supposed to be an extra security measure against people like me. I grinned at the thought.

  There wasn’t anybody like me.

  I found the docking brake easily enough on the ship’s hull, but when I reached up to flip it off, I saw the real test. Just beside the docking brake controls was a timer, with red numbers that beeped every time the second changed. Only, the timer was counting up, not down, so there was no way to know how much time I had left.

  I shook my head even as I felt myself grin again. Grith was no doubt watching me find his real test with great delight, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t excited by the challenge.

  I turned the docking brake off and studied the timer. There were a few wires connecting the timer to the brake panel, but they didn’t make any sense. Unless this wasn’t a bomb at all. It had to just be the timer, and the real bomb was hidden somewhere in the actual ship, since only an idiot would put the bomb with the timer itself. And Favian Grith was a great many things, but he sure as shit wasn’t an idiot.

  I ran back toward the cargo bay doors. The timer had been at six minutes and twenty-three seconds, so that meant someone had started it almost the moment I first boarded. I didn’t know how much time I had left, but the mustached crime lord had been very specific about what time brunch was served. And that meant there was very little room for error.

  My feet crossed from the rough metal of the dock to the smooth sheet of the lowered cargo bay doors. As soon as I stepped foot on the ship, I knew something was wrong, and it wasn’t the bomb ticking soundlessly somewhere on the crime lord’s ship.

  “Hands where we can see them.”

  The flat voice belonged to a police droid, and that meant there had to be at least a solid twenty cops behind me. Only units that size got to use droids.

  I raised both hands with my fingers spread.

  “What you think?” I hissed to my chip.

  “Interference.” The chip clicked as she scanned the surrounding area. “Turn around.”

  With my hands still raised, I turned toward the assembled police force. The droid was the closest but still a dozen paces away, and I saw seven cops in a semi-circle behind him. The rest were either hidden or trying to sneak up from the other side of the ship.

  “Hidden,” the chip confirmed. “We count twenty-four in total. Heavy equipment on the way.”

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was part of the crime lord’s test. Still, I doubted even Favian Grith would have called the cops on his own ship.

  “He put a bomb on his own ship,” Honey Bee pointed out, and I could have sworn that she sounded a bit smug.

  I shrugged. “True, Honey Bee. But he’s gotta know I’ll disarm that.”

  “On your knees,” the police droid interrupted my conversation. “Keep your hands up.”

  I did not have time for this. There were brunch treats and bloody marys to be had, a bomb to disarm, and a ship to take into orbit to dock on an infamous crime lord’s space station. And not all in that order.

  “What seems to be the problem?” I asked. I didn’t kneel down, but I kept my hands where they were.

  “Camera surveillance spotted you entering Etoria with a jacket on,” a human officer said.

  He was on his knees a safe distance behind the droid, but his standard-issue projectile gun was drawn. Every officers’ were, actually. I imagined the same held true for all the cops I couldn’t see.

  “Now look, I know I’m not from around here, but you can’t tell me there’s a law against wearing jackets here. What is that, some kind of outdated city ordinance? You folks don’t have any real crimes to police in a city this big?”

  “The jacket belonged to a Granix pilot whose ship was stolen last evening,” the police officer continued.

  “Well yes, I’d say we are in a grand fix here, but--”

  “We know you stole it,” another cop interrupted. This one seemed a bit twitchy, and his finger looked to be on the trigger already.

  I looked left and right. “I don’t see any racing jacket, do you?”

  “Your image was captured by surveillance,” the first police officer said. “We need you to get on your knees and come with us to answer some questions.”

  “Heavy equipment arrival, ninety seconds,” Honey Bee chimed.

  “Now look here, old pal.” I made a face. “Do you really think I’d be taking this girl up for a spin if I had some racing ship I could be zipping around the planet in instead?”

  “On your knees,” the droid said again.

  “I said, I don’t have any kind of racing ship, or a racing jacket, for that matter,” I argued.

  The great thing about Deltulu cops being hard-asses was that they almost always played by the rules. So unless I fired first, we would be stuck here as we argued back and forth about jackets and ships and how too much surveillance meant the planet might as well have been a police state.

  “Just do what the droid says, son,” another cop said.

  I couldn’t see the officer who spoke, but I did know one thing. I sure as hell wasn’t his or anybody else’s son.

  “Wait,” my chip hissed in my ear.

  My palms itched to shoot at something, but I knew Honey Bee was right. I needed a distraction if I was going to get out of there in one piece. And since Grith didn’t seem the type to offer second chances, I knew I had better not blow this.

  Or blow up his ship.

  Right on time, the heavy equipment rolled into view. It was a tank with a long cylinder projecting off it, but its mouth was too round for missile capabilities. And for someone trying to get off-world in a hurry before a bomb pulverized me into complete mush, it was so much worse.

  It was a gravity tank.

  The tank shot out its gravity beam. As long as it was on, the ship would be crippled in its grip. It was bad, but I took advantage of the loud buzz that came along with the beam as it powered all the way on. When the cops all winced at the loud sound, I pulled one of my guns and fired a round off into the middle of the police droid’s chest.

  It sparked and hissed, and I had just enough time to dive to the side of the cargo bay before the cops started shooting. I hit the switch to close the cargo doors and shot a few rounds around the corner to keep the police officers from approaching. I aimed purposefully high, but it did the trick of keeping them from storming after me.

  As soon as the doors were closed, the cops stopped shooting. The loud buzz of the gravity beam continued, so I ra
ced back up the stairs to the bridge. It might not have reached full power yet.

  “A miscalculation,” my chip told me solemnly.

  I swatted at her before I remembered I was only swatting at myself. But when I reached the bridge, I saw that she was right. The gravity beam was fully on, so even though the ship was still powered up, ready to go, the controls themselves were completely frozen. Even the throttle didn’t budge when I jiggled her. The ship would be locked into position until the cops decided to turn it off. She was planet-bound, and so was I.

  I exhaled. I liked shiny new ships as much as the next guy, but there was something to be said for older crafts. If this had been a ship from even two decades ago, nobody would have been able to take control of the systems from the outside, not even a gravity beam. That shit relied on technology and ship systems working on an equal level.

  I smiled. What the cops didn’t know was that Grith’s craft might have been new, but I was already in her system. I just had to hack in a little deeper and see what I could do. It would take the police a few minutes to break through the cargo doors, and by that time, I’d be finished overriding their override.

  Of course, that was all assuming Grith’s test bomb didn’t go off by then.

  “Alright, Honey,” I told my chip. “Let’s do our thing.”

  Chapter 4

  The external manifest was the key. If I could break into it deep enough, I could reclassify the ship and override the gravity beam. Honey Bee could help me out, of course, but only if I broke into the blasted computer system first.

  “We are ready whenever you are,” the chip sighed.

  “I’m working on it,” I growled.

  I ducked back down under the controls of the bridge. The manual panel was still open with the wires all on display, so now I just had to pick the right ones.

  And just hope none of the wires I picked were hooked up to the bomb hidden somewhere on the ship.

  Luckily for me, I had already found the wires to the external manifest. I sifted through the bundles and cords all twisted together, but I was careful not to mess up my hotwiring job. The last thing I needed was to power down the ship by accidentally knocking something loose. It wouldn’t matter what I overroad, or didn’t, if I was dead in the air.

  I found the bundle of blue wires again and jerked them toward me.

  “We need to connect them to the display,” the chip pinged.

  “You think I don’t know that?” I grunted. “This isn’t my first rodeo, you know.”

  “It is the first with a bomb.”

  Always helpful, that one.

  I criss-crossed wires and yanked one cord around another. The ship was big but not so big I would get lost in her wiring. Just big enough to make it a challenge. When I found the wires leading to the display, I spliced and diced them to connect to the cords of the external manifest.

  The control panel dinged above me.

  I jumped up into the pilot’s seat and assessed the situation. The external manifest was displayed three-dimensionally where it floated above the controls themselves. It was all a sequence of zeros and ones that coded the ship according to the classification her engineers had given her. Unlike the Alfaromero-31 that could only ever be classed as an on-world racing ship, there were any number of classifications this craft might have had.

  “Transport ship, grade 4,” Honey Bee stated as we both studied the code floating in front of us.

  “Well yes, I can see that,” I sighed. “Just because I don’t have pupils and all that doesn’t mean I can’t read a blasted code when it’s staring me in the face.”

  “Pupils are only responsible for admitting light,” the chip observed. “Retinas then transmit--”

  “Don’t act like you don’t know what I meant,” I interrupted her.

  She fell silent, but I still felt her whirring with laughter inside my brain.

  A grade 4 transport made sense. The ship was just big enough to move a small crowd over a short distance before they killed each other. Any bigger and it might have been classified as a grade 2 or 3 ship for human or cargo passage. Grade 4 just meant it was a glorified shuttle. Shiny and fancy, but still a shuttle.

  That also explained how quickly the police had been able to lock onto its sensors to keep it grounded. The external manifest controlled the classification shields around a vessel, so other ships saw you as more than just a blip on their radar. Instead, they could see exactly what kind of ship you were and more importantly, if you were any kind of threat to them.

  The crew of most ships didn’t particularly care about their classification, but if you were a smuggler or a thief, you had better know exactly what your classification was. Or even better, know how to change it. Because if you didn’t have the right one and you popped up on the Dominion’s radar, you could bet your sweet ass those fuckers would notice.

  “What should we reprogram her as, do you think?” I wondered out loud.

  “Something that overrides the authorization of a gravity beam,” my chip answered.

  “I figured that.” My eyes were going to get stuck behind their shielding glasses if I rolled them anymore.

  I didn’t know the coding for a Dominion ship, which would have been the most obvious choice for an override. The Deltulu police force didn’t have any authority when it came to holding Dominion vessels on-ground. No planet’s police force did.

  “The police seem to be making headway with the cargo bay doors,” the chip observed in my ear. “Perhaps you should hurry.”

  I couldn’t hear what the cops were doing over the sound of the ship’s engines and the loud hum of the gravity beam encasing us. If I had to guess, I’d say they were drilling into the locks. They couldn’t exactly bust down the doors in any way that would destroy the ship itself. Not if they’d scanned it and seen that it belonged to someone whose picture certainly didn’t match my face.

  God, I loved by-the-book cops. So concerned with following procedure to the letter

  There was only one way I could think to recode this grade 4 transport into something I could take out of the gravity beam and off-world. I scanned the zeros and ones in front of me again. I’d have to rewrite the code without erasing it completely, or the cops might figure out what I was doing before I finished.

  “First seven numbers, accurate,” the chip pinged as she read my mind.

  “Then let’s start with the eighth,” I told her.

  I started coding. The external manifest just needed a bit of love to rework its classification from a grade 4 transport to an emergency medical craft. As soon as I did, it wouldn’t matter that the cops had a gravity beam holding my ass to the ground.

  Medical crafts, like Dominion ships, trumped any kind of law enforcement overrides. The gravity tank would recognize the change in external manifest, and its beam would immediately power down. The cops probably hadn’t even thought of the possibility. After all, it wasn’t your everyday fucker who still knew how to code with all the automated shit we have these days.

  I glanced out the corner of my glasses at the front-facing ship cameras. Cops were moving into position there too, and I wondered if they might say to hell with protocol and just start firing.

  Well. Nothing like a little extra motivation.

  The zeros and ones arranged themselves in the projection in front of me like I was composing a symphony. It was damn beautiful, and part of me hoped the cops were part of Grith’s test because somebody really ought to appreciate the fine work I was doing here.

  I only had a few more lines of code to go when I saw it.

  “Now, just what in the hell is that?” I exhaled.

  At the end of the long stream of zeros and ones, there was another number: a 2. Not only did it have no business being in the code in the first place, but I had a sneaking feeling it was a lot more sinister than just a mathematical impossibility.

  “You wanna take that one, Honey Bee?” I asked.

  “You know you do not have to ask me
out loud,” she pinged. “I read your question as you think it.”

  “Yeah, well, sue me,” I muttered. “If you knew what I was gonna ask, how come you haven’t come up with an answer yet?”

  “Still processing,” she said cheerfully.

  While she worked to make sense of the impossible presence of a two at the end of a binary code sequence, I kept rewriting the ship’s classification. It only took me a minute to finish reworking the external manifest, and when I was done, it was like she had never been anything but an emergency medical vessel.

  “The bomb is in the code,” Honey Bee announced calmly. “The outer shields are wired to explode if the code is not rewritten.”

  I was about to just delete the two from the code and disable the explosives, but my chip clicked in my ear. I took my hand back from the keyboard.

  “Miscalculation,” she said.

  “Rewrite first?” I asked.

  “It is advised.”

  I glared at the ending sequence of numbers. If I couldn’t just erase it, I’d have to work around it. I started inputting numbers after the two, and when the ship didn’t immediately burst into flames, I figured I was doing alright.

  I worked until I had enough of a safeguard padded on either side of the misplaced number. Then, with a final touch to my shielding glasses for luck, I erased the two.

  The ship roared. I thought it was the bomb ramping up for destruction, but I realized that I had killed two birds with one stone. As soon as I disabled the bomb, the ship had been able to finish reclassifying itself as a medical vessel.

  I buckled myself in as the ship shook off the weight of the gravity beam holding it down, and then I flipped the thrusters on just long enough to give a warning light to the cops below. When they’d had a few seconds to retreat, I flipped them back on and kept them on. The ship jolted to hover just above the ground.

  “It’s a beautiful morning for a takeoff, don’t you think?” I glanced through the window at the stars overhead. The lights of the shipyard were so bright the stars seemed faint by comparison.

  I noted the coordinates of the Alexandria blinking on the control screen. Seven o’clock wasn’t looking good. Then again, I liked shitty odds. I had just defused a bomb using nothing but code, so I was feeling pretty lucky this morning.