Interstellar Mercenary

by Will Macmillan Jones

The Conqueror grew in the vidscreen, so I reduced the magnification to make it seem smaller. But it was still enormous, bristling with weapons and invulnerable. It dominated the planet, the Imperium fleet, and made me feel like the Speedbird was but a flea taking on a mighty dinosaur. Blue light flickered about the hull of the Dreadnought, wavering and pulsating. A major electrical charge was being prepared. The Speedbird was still accelerating.

  “Frank! Are you going to ram it?”

  “Contract bonus for being dead, is there?” I replied absently. “Don’t want it. Rather be a live coward, thank you.”

  “IFF> IFF> Unidentified scout ship, respond.” We had been noticed at last by someone on the Dreadnought’s bridge.

  “What do we say, Frank?” asked Rennie.

  “Nothing.”

  “IFF> IFF> Respond immediately. This is an operational combat zone and you will be fired on. Respond.”

  “What’s IFF mean?” asked Rennie.

  “It stands for Identification: Friend or Foe,” I replied, keeping my focus on the hull of the Dreadnought.

  “Incoming!” shouted Rennie.

  I spared a glance. The nearest StarDestroyer had turned to engage us but had badly misjudged the closing velocities and we were in no immediate danger. The Dreadnought was very close, and I raised the nose to alter our trajectory. Then every battery on the Dreadnought opened up in our direction. The Speedbird rocked as the screens absorbed the blasts that managed to find us.

  “Can’t you take some avoiding action?” asked Rennie. He had fallen to his knees on the floor, but still had one hand poised over the button I wanted him to use.

  “No. I’m about to do something right out of the flight envelope, and it might rip half the ship apart anyway. If we aren’t aligned dead straight when I start this…”

  “What?”

  “We’ll be dead straight away.”

  The firing stopped as we were now too close to the battlecruiser’s hull for the gunners to take a proper sighting. The strange blue electrical lights gave the Dreadnought a weird, otherworldly appearance as we sped over the top of the hull: and then I hit the nose thrusters and looped the Speedbird around the monstrous ship. “Now!” I shouted. Rennie hit the button and held it. All the space mines I had left came out of the rear defence pod in a continuous stream. As soon as the last mine left the ship and the hatch closed, I pre-engaged the hyperdrive and waited for our speed to reach VH…

  “Brilliant! Brilliant!” yelled Rennie, who was now sprawled across the floor.

  The ship rocked under an explosion that the screens couldn’t quite absorb. I heard a horrid crashing, tearing noise from the living area. Fortunately, that was when we reached transition speed and slipped out of the immediate combat area. I clambered over Rennie, who complained at the weight of my foot on his midriff and dived into the living quarters. Smoke poured out of the internal wall between the kitchen area and the engine bay, but a few seconds of foam from a fire extinguisher put that out. I peered down the circular stairs into the entry port: the impact of the last blast to hit us had bent the stairs out of shape and the internal airlock doors had distorted. But the seals had remained intact, as far as I could tell. I had taken on the biggest warship I had ever seen, and somehow I had got away with it.

  “Where do you want to go now?” I asked Rennie, while I inspected the coffee making facilities. Luckily the damage to the kitchen’s electrical circuits had missed the coffee maker.

  “I’m not going to be able to get down on Morainis, am I?”

  “Not a chance. Not alive anyway.”

  “Then could you drop me on Aramantia?”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s in the Merchant Princes’ sector. I can get a lift home from there.”

  “Fine.” I grabbed a set of charts from the flight deck and started plotting a course.

  *

  Aramantia loomed before us in the forward vidscreens. The course here had been simple, even by my standard of navigation. There are, let it be admitted, those pilots who understand every nuance of the abstruse calculations necessary to move from one star system to the next, mastering with ease the rotational data, the precessions and allowances that help deal with the fact that the universe is nothing like a fixed land mass and everything is constantly moving in relation to everything else. I’m not one of them, and frankly am constantly amazed that I ever arrive where I’m supposed to be. Sometimes I’ve arrived somewhere else entirely of course, and that can be fun. Sometimes not even the frequencies used for the comms systems stay the same, so that can get interesting. Or rather entirely boring, as frustrated pilots who failed to receive the approach chart updates for a system have to keep scanning multiple frequencies until they find something official.

  “Aramantia approach control from Speedbird,” I said hopefully into the comms system. How pleased I was when someone replied.

  “Aramantia approach receiving.”

  “Aramantia, Speedbird is incoming, two persons on board, looking for maintenance and stop over.”

  “Speedbird, do you have the approach vectors? Do you require immediate assistance?”

  “Yes, to the vectors. No, not declaring an emergency.”

  “Then set your navcomm to descend at RK 218 -420. That’s a maintenance facility.”

  “Why are we not declaring an emergency?” asked Rennie. “The hatch is jammed, and we can’t get out of this tin can without help!”

  “If I declare a flight emergency, they will put us down somewhere too close to the authorities for my liking.”

  “Oh. Right. That suits me too, then.”

  I programmed the co-ordinates into the flight computer and navcomm, and the Speedbird slid smoothly into the approved approach pattern. The rest of the approach and the landing itself were both uneventful, which is always a relief. The maintenance facility had been delighted to accept us for some work, and I tried not to think too hard about the costs involved. My bank account had funds, but they might be somewhat limited after I’d refunded Rennie for not landing him on Morainis, and I was hoping not to have too large a bill. Of course, the first problem started when we tried to get out. Rennie was both pushing and pulling on the inner door of the airlock, which naturally got him nowhere.

  “Move over,” I told him. Rennie shifted, and I started pulling on the inner hatch. Eventually, by bracing both feet on the frame, I managed to get it to move enough for us to squeeze through the gap. The outer hatch, of course, was stuck fast, as we expected. At length a grinning mechanic, waving an atomic welding gun rather too freely for my liking, managed to free us.

  “Now I know what a sardine feels like after it’s been canned,” grumbled Rennie.

  “Well, this bloke had the magic twisty key-like thing that let us out. So get lost, eh?”

  Rennie shook my hand. “Been interesting flying with you, Frank. See you around. I’ll expect my refund shortly, or I’ll come looking.”

  “I’ll be long gone,” I told him.

  “Found you before. I’ll find you again. Don’t forget, now.”

  I watched him wander off across the flight apron and disappear into the cluster of buildings

  “What hit you, then?” asked the mechanic, examining the many scorch marks to the hull around the entry hatch, several of which had been made before his welding torch had started work.

  “Imperium ship.”

  The mechanic swore, describing the Imperium in the most inventive and unflattering terms. I was going to take notes of some of his phrases but didn’t want to interrupt the flow of inspiration. “Can you fix it for me?”

  “Yeah. We won’t have any spares for your model. Don’t expect anyone has, apart from the boys who play with vintage ships for fun, but airlock hatches are pretty generic. We’ll sort you out. It’ll be serviceable, but might not be too pretty. Don’t plan on entering the Concours competition tomorrow.”

  I had spent so long away from any remotely non violent or non military planet that
I had forgotten that some places actually held rallies for vintage spacecraft, with the prettiest and most original ships winning prizes. It seemed a strange concept. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” confirmed the mechanic. He took my arm and led me away from the Speedbird towards one of the maintenance facility buildings. “If you look over there, you’ll see some of the entries.”

  He was right! In one roped-off corner of the spaceport, five extremely elderly spaceships had grouped together. I was interested at once to see that one was a Speedbird, but somewhat earlier than mine. And rather better looking. In fact, it gleamed. Every part of the hull had been polished until it shone. I looked back at my example of the class: nothing shone. Combat scars segued into pitting and dents from collisions with space debris. The landing gear was mismatched, although serviceable, and the signs of hard usage were all too clear. I wiped a brief tear from my eye. A tear of, it should be admitted, pure envy. I looked away.

  “Museum pieces, some of them.” The mechanic led me away through a door into the base. “Over there you can sign in with Customs before coming back to sort out the paperwork for the repair. Good luck; they are as useless and bitchy as every other Customs post in the galaxy.”

  Sadly, but not unexpectedly, he was right. There were three Customs officers at the post, and they were enjoying themselves berating some poor pilot for having too many shoelaces, or some such nonsense. Eventually they wound down and let him escape in the direction of the bar. Then they started on me.

  “Where have you come from?” demanded an officer with captain’s pips on his shirt’s epaulettes.

  The tricky ones first. “Er, The Emporium,” I lied.

  “That still going? I heard it had been looted and taken down by pirates. You a pirate, then?”

  ”Not me. I had to do a tricky bit of flying to get away from them. And it wasn’t pirates, but the Followers of Zog. They wanted me to hear The Word.”

  The customs staff shuddered. “We had some of them land here once. That was a nightmare. So, what’s the purpose of your visit? Besides avoiding hearing The Word?”

  “Picked up some damage while getting away and need some skilled repair work.”

  “Well you won’t get that here. Best you’ll manage is a botched job that costs an eye watering amount.”

  “Hey,” growled the mechanic beside me. “I take exception to that.”

  “Talk to the hand, sunbeam. I’m not interested.”

  “My boss will hear about this.”

  The customs men gave me back my papers and waved me away. “Go and waste your money then.”

  The mechanic slouched off grumbling. I followed him, as he was clearly heading in the direction of the bar. In fact he waited until we were inside the bar and starting on the first drinks before he said anything intelligible. Then it was wildly profane. Eventually he descended into printable speech. “That lot. They never realise that it’s the work we do that pays their wages.”

  This was a complaint I had heard many times, in many spaceports on many planets, from many mechanics. “Customs are the same, right across the galaxy,” I sympathised. “Always too self important.”

  “Well, they are about to meet their match.”

  “Your boss?” I was curious.

  “Nope. Tomorrow there’s an event that will be full of important – or wealthy, sometimes it’s hard to see the difference, isn’t it? – people from this part of the galaxy.”

  “Economic Forum?”

  The mechanic finished his drink and banged the glass on the counter until the bartender turned up to refill it. “Not officially. It’s the VSSR. The Vintage Spacecraft and Shuttle Rally. Once a year, the stupendously rich idiots who can afford to privately maintain and operate stupidly old and outdated spacecraft congregate here to show off how well they’ve polished their antiquated rubbish.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  The mechanic shrugged. “Just because they can, I suppose. I mean, they even spend small fortunes restoring them to original factory settings and specifications – forgetting that the original manufacturers’ specs were so bad that sensible people spent small fortunes upgrading them into something actually usable. Did you see that Speedbird on the ramp as we came in?”

  I nodded. I had seen the gleaming scout ship and felt a moment of pure envy at its condition.

  “It’s got the original weapons systems.”

  My envy increased.

  “Would you believe it’s worth more than a brand new StarDestroyer? And not many people would fly a Speedbird now. Present company excepted, of course.”

  I began to toy with the germ of an idea: steal the pristine Speedbird, fly it half way across the galaxy and sell it, then vanish with the cash.

  “And it’s got the original flight computer that was so rubbish it killed nearly anyone who tried to use the automated landing system, and occasionally disconnected the Internal Life Support functions as they were programmed on the same part of the hard drive as the hyperdrive settings, and conflicted in use.”

  “I didn’t know that!” My career as the stealer of vintage spacecraft ended, very quickly.

  “Well, they certainly didn’t advertise it. Wouldn’t look good in the brochure, would it? ‘Our new hyperdrive delivers everything but a live pilot to the destination in a super-fast time.’ Not a strong selling point, is it?”

  I’d had superior officers, Admiral Crichton for one, for whom it would not have represented an insurmountable problem, or for that matter, even provided a downside. But any last ambition I had to steal the pristine looking Speedbird evaporated.

  “Then there’s the Hyperion battlecruiser. That’s owned by someone from inside the Imperium, not sure who.”

  “I didn’t know the Imperium let anyone privately own a warship, even a classic one?”

  “They don’t. So the rumour is that it’s probably secretly owned by the Emperor himself, or alternatively by the man whose job it is to enforce the prohibition.”

  As the latter would be the fearsome Colonel Starker, I decided to give the Hyperion a wide berth.

  “Most of the ships are civilian freighters or sports jobs, of course. Just toys for rich men when they were built, and toys for even richer men now that they are antiques.”

  “What do they do at this rally, then?”

  “Let us plebs stand at the viewing windows and watch as the ships take off and land, usually. It’s a way of showing off, really. I never bother with it. But this time they all intend to lift off in a group, and take a quick trip round the system before landing on Zantia, one of the outer planets for a picnic.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Because they have put up posters all over the place advertising it. They know that no one here has enough money to go along for the jolly day out, and that sort of adds to the fun for them.”

  I finished my drink. The mechanic quickly downed his as well, and waved at the bartender to top up both glasses. On my tab, of course. Just as the new drinks arrived, so did a stranger.

  “I say, I say, I say!” he started, without, as far as I could tell, actually saying anything. On he went, however. “Are you the chap who just turned up in that beautifully distressed Speedbird?”

  That was the first time anyone, ever, anywhere had referred to my spaceship as beautiful. Even on occasions when I had saved someone’s life with it, their reaction was more along the lines of: ‘this old thing? Can’t you afford something a bit better? A bit more comfortable? A bit safer?’” I just nodded at the lunatic and wondered idly when the men carrying the straightjacket would catch up with him.

  “Well, look here, old boy.”

  “Look where?”

  “What? What? Never mind. Thing is, we’ve sort of got this rally on at the moment, and we’re always looking for new members for the Club. Care to join us tomorrow on the jolly?”

  “The jolly?”

  “The jolly day out, chap. We’d love to have you along! I’m lovin
g the look of your old ‘bird. Rather authentic, don’t you know. Did it cost you much to get her into that condition?”

  “Lot of maintenance, yes,” I replied. But I think that the irony passed him by.

  “Thought so! Here, this is the schedule of the event. There’s normally a small fee for entry, but the committee have waived that because they are so keen to see you on board! Been a while since we’ve had the luck to meet a prospective new member!”

  “Well, I’ve just got so get a spot of damage sorted out first,” I objected.

  “What’s up?”

  “Bit of damage to the hull round the airlock.”

  “That’s no problem. Jarrold here is a splendid fixer. He fixed the nose assembly on my Mayflower’s shuttle last year, good as new she is now. Jarrold, make sure that this chap’s boat is done for the run, will you? Bill the extra time to me, there’s a good man. Nice to meet you, err?” He offered his hand.

  “Frank.” I took his hand and shook it. Briefly. The clasp was warm, dry, and very firm.

  “Frank. You can call me Will. Have another drink, while Jarrold here goes and twiddles with his oxy-acetylene thingies. Off you go Jarrold, there’s a good chap!”

  “And I bill you, Mister Portals?” asked the mechanic.

  “Just run along, man, and get that Speedbird operational before tomorrow afternoon. Now Frank, let’s have a drink, and you can tell me about your ‘bird. Wherever did you find her? I’ll wager that there isn’t another operational Speedbird in this Quadrant now since The Free Union scrapped the last of their fleet last year. Replaced them with Vipers, don’t you know?”

  “I had heard that, yes,” I agreed. So this was Will Portals, reputed by legend to be the fourth or fifth wealthiest man in the Imperium. He stood maybe six foot two inches tall, slim and -now I looked- dressed casually in clothes that were worth as much as some small houses I had seen. He was one of those men who had an aura of sheer power. Even if you did not know who he was, you would have been inclined to do as he asked without arguing. His Mayflower class space yacht was so big that it needed a crew of nine to operate it. By rumour, it was absolutely the last word in luxury. Every conceivable optional extra had been fitted, sometimes more than once. No time trials had been published, but it was supposed to be able to outrun any known civilian ship and most military class vessels as well. Will Portals raised one finger without looking round, and the harassed bartender (there is rarely any other sort in a flyer’s bar) arrived at once with a nauseating servility. Portals noticed my reaction to the speed with which he was served.