Andromeda's Pirate

by Debra Jess

  The puppet dissolved the door after Kelra activated the annunciator. Blank blue eyes greeted her.

  "Mayla, I'm Kelra. You served me dinner earlier. If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a few questions. May I come in?"

  The woman backed away from the door but didn't move otherwise. She wouldn't unless Kelra asked her to.

  "Why don't you sit down on your bed, and I'll take this chair over here?"

  The puppet quarters were more of what she expected of crew quarters, albeit with slightly more room as Kelra saw one bed instead of the usual dual rack. There was also a tray with an empty plate and glass sitting on the edge of a small table.

  "Mayla, can you tell me if you have been here a long time?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you tell me if you have lived here since you left Stratos?"

  No answer. The question was either too complex or Mayla didn't remember.

  "Do you like it here?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you like the food?"

  She hesitated. "Yes."

  "It's okay if you don't like it."

  "I like it. I want more of it."

  "I'll make sure that happens."

  "Thank you."

  "When you first came here, did you already know anyone?"

  No answer came.

  "Do you know everyone on board this ship?"

  "No."

  "Is there anyone you don't like? Anyone who hurts you?"

  "No."

  Hart was telling the truth. Not that she doubted him, and puppets didn't have the capability to lie, but it helped to have confirmation.

  "Is there anyone you like better than all the others?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you tell me who?"

  "The boy who brings me food."

  She pointed to a holo-image sitting on top of the small locker that would contain clothes and grooming products.

  The image showed Ezick smiling into the camera with a tray of food. He must have asked Mayla to take the picture and keep it with her.

  Mayla meant something to him, a relative, or a lover, or maybe just a friend. Manitac initiated and oversaw the puppet program, contracted by the Unity Homeport. The puppets were supposed to be prisoners judged to be unlikely to respond to rehabilitation, so instead of letting them rot in a prison, Unity agreed to let Manitac wipe their memories and put them to work. There were rumors that some puppets might not have been criminals, though, but protestors and the like. If mistakes were made, well, Manitac had a way of burying those problems.

  You knew that, so don't bother acting shocked.

  Kelra buried her feelings on the topic so she wouldn't stress Mayla. After Manitac wiped a prisoner's memory, the new puppet was immediately transported to an assignment as far away from any family, friends, or locations that might trigger a memory. Trying to remember a blocked memory had dire consequences for the puppet, making them so ill that they couldn't work. A few died from the pain of trying to remember.

  So why didn't Mayla react to Ezick's presence, and why would Ezick want her to keep a picture of him?

  "Do you need anything else, Mayla?"

  The girl tilted her head to the side, straining to understand, so Kelra tried again. "Other than more food, do you need new clothes, or more pillows, or extra soap?"

  "No."

  Kelra nodded as she stood to leave. "Thank you for answering my questions."

  "Will you come back?"

  Mayla sounded lonely, which Kelra could relate to, but her instinct was still to say no. The sad look on Mayla's face stopped the word on her lips. "Yes, I will."

  Mayla said nothing else as Kelra dissolved the door. Would she really, though?? Did all the puppets feel the same way? Not having a memory didn't mean Manitac had amputated their feelings. By the Stars, she never should have come down here. She couldn't afford to care. She'd always cared a little, enough to keep the puppets on the Silt safe, but she never said more than please or thank you to them, which was more of a way to demonstrate how she expected her own officers to act than it had to do with the puppets themselves.

  The hallway leading to the compressor window remained empty. Where to next? This all started because she needed to know who she could trust in Hart's crew and who she would watch so they couldn't interfere with her plans.

  Manitac preferred the threat of the lash to keep personnel in line, but sometimes a touch of sweetness could work better.

  "Queen of Hearts, where is Dunne?"

  "Dunne is located down the hallway to the left."

  Of course, Hart didn't keep any records of his real crew, so the Queen of Hearts couldn't locate them on board the ship. Should the Queen of Hearts ever be boarded, the invaders wouldn't be able to use Queen of Hearts’ security system to track any pirates hidden on board, waiting to strike back.

  All of this gave her more insight into Hart as both pirate and leader. He took extra precautions to keep his crew safe. His aversion to needless slaughter had caught her attention early on—when she'd first took command of the Silt with orders to break the back of the pirate trade. She'd reviewed not only her predecessor's notes, but also interrogated every pirate she caught personally. She built profiles, documented movement, looked for patterns, and triple-checked suspected weaknesses.

  More often than not, pirates would turn on each other when they had to make a choice: save themselves, save their booty, or save their fellow pirates. It was a weakness she exploited with precision, breaking every pirate she caught herself, not just to locate what they'd stolen, but to learn about their encounters with other pirate ships.

  The more she learned about Hart, the more suspicious she got. She'd arranged for Manitac to give her three older corvettes—decommissioned and headed for the scrapper—which she converted to look like civilian pleasure craft carrying upper-class Unity Homeport passengers.

  Each craft launched from newer colonies, which the wealthy often toured to find new investments, like the passengers on board the Majesty of the Stars. All three bait traps worked as planned, each one drawing in a pirate ship, which the Silt subdued with enviable efficiency.

  But not the Queen of Hearts.

  The annoyance of missing the biggest prize of all had almost doused the tiny spark of admiration, which flared after she sprung the third trap.

  Hart was as smart as he was good-looking. Dismissing Hart's choice to ignore the bait was easy: either he knew or guessed that the mock-up pleasure cruisers were traps, or attacking such easy targets was beneath someone who preferred a challenge.

  Each time he escaped, she became more determined to catch him, until the day she did at Cordova Station—and then let him go.

  She needed to dig, but first, there was some debris that needed clearing . The compressor window spit her into the landing bay. The space was near deserted except for a few puppets who were refueling the runabout and the interceptors, with a pirate looking after them. Ezick Dunne lay on his back beneath the ship runabout, a bucket of soapy water next to his head.

  The pirate watching over the bay didn't speak to her, but he acknowledged her nod as he watched her approach Ezick.

  Squatting down, Kelra peeked underneath.

  "How about a break?"

  Ezick's head jerked up and slammed into the underside of the ship. Swearing up a storm, the kid dropped the scrub brush. She'd just doubled his anger. There was nothing she could do about it now.

  Ezick shoved himself from under the ship, his movements tight. Standing to face her, he pinned her with a look of such resentment it was clear he would have possibly killed her on the spot had he been armed. "What are you doing here? You got what you wanted."

  "How do you know what I want?"

  "You're Manitac." He stepped closer, trying to intimidate her. "You want profit. That's all Manitac cares about."

  "I'm no longer Manitac, and you're a pirate. All pirates care about is booty. That's the point of becoming a pirate, isn't it?"

  "No, it isn't." Dunn step
ped closer, right into her face. "We steal from Manitac to show them they aren't as all-powerful as they think they are. We're breaking Manitac's laws so we can shove it in their faces."

  "Unity laws."

  Agitation rolled off Ezick, slapping her with each breath as he continued to lose control.

  "Manitac's laws." No matter how close Ezick got, Kelra still refused to back away. "Manitac is the Unity Government. Manitac owns Unity. You're so blind to your corporate overlords, you can't even see it."

  For a moment, Kelra thought he would hit her, and she braced herself, raising her arms to block his attack. Prior to Ruintalos, she could take a punch and give as good as she got, but she wasn't in peak form anymore. .

  At the last second, Ezick chose to emphasize his point by kicking over the bucket of dirty water. Kelra didn't flinch as the water splashed around her boots. The boy stared at her, daring her to make something of it.

  "Who is Mayla to you? Why doesn't she react to your presence?"

  Stunned, Ezick floundered for a response before answering. "She's my sister. How…?"

  "If she's your sister, why doesn't she get caught in a memory loop around you?"

  Ezick said nothing, pure rebelliousness on his part, until he realized she wasn't going to back down. With a grunt of disgust, he jammed a finger against his jawline. A plasma mesh hiding his true features sloughed off his face, revealing blond hair, blue eyes, a larger nose, and sharper cheekbones.

  Using a commercial mask wasn't unusual, since most people wanted to change their features in some way, even if was just to enhance their normal features with extra color on their cheeks or the length of the eyelashes. Military-grade masks, though, allowed the wearer to change the shape of their face along with the color, length, and style of their hair. While Manitac made a killing selling the low-end product, prying the high-end device away from Manitac legally was near impossible. Yet there were always leaks in Manitac's security that could be exploited by a determined profiteer…or pirate.

  The fact she hadn't noticed the mask reinforced the high-end quality Ezick used.

  "Was she a protester on Stratos?"

  "She supported the Shadows if that's what you mean." He squinted, suspicious of how she got the information. "Why would you care?"

  She didn't want to, but she also didn't want Ezick's hatred of her to get in her way.

  Either way, she had her answers.

  "She would like more food. However much you're taking to her, increase it by fifty percent. Ask Hart if he has enough supplies to do the same for all the puppets."

  "You spoke to her? How dare…"

  She swatted away the finger he poked at her chest, reversing the intimidation tactic he tried on her, and stepped closer, using her height to bully him into submission. "I dare because I have my own mission to fulfill. I ditched Manitac because they got in my way. I'll do the same to you if you try to stop me. I'd rather not, because Stratos was a travesty that never should have happened. If I had been in command, you can be damn sure no one on that planet would have died, but I wasn't in command. I took care of my crew no less than Hart takes care of his, and I too protected the puppets. Now, you and I can do this the easy way or the hard way. Remember, Hart needs me to find the Majesty of the Stars. You and your temper tantrums are replaceable."

  She turned on her heel with perfect Manitac precision and left Ezick spitting his agitation at nothing.

  Chapter Seven

  Hyeph Silt, current captain of the UHS cruiser Silt, squinted his hazel eyes against the blinding whiteness of mountain snow as fingers of frozen air slipped under the hood of his parka to tease his short-clipped sweat-soaked mud-red hair.

  "Sir, we’ve debriefed the guards and have a preliminary report for you."

  "Let me guess." Silt closed his eyes against the light for a brief moment to calm his desire to snap a response to his second-in-command. “Kelra Shade escaped custody."

  "Aye, sir. That about sums it up. We’re still trying to identify the rescue ship."

  "You do that."

  The debris of wrecked sleds dotted the landscape of the mountain. The clumsy guards who let her escape stood near the crude bivouac she had created in this desolate location, all of them jumpy either because the icy wind managed to find weaknesses in their winter gear or because they knew their careers had crashed along with the sleds. It would serve them right if they were left here to rot with the prisoners. Knowing Manitac, the guards would escape true justice with a mind wipe instead of being abandoned on this abysmal planet.

  Silt couldn't say he cared one way or the other. Once he completed his investigation, what happened to the miscreants was of no concern to him.

  All that mattered was killing Kelra Shade. He poked the ear jack and pulled up her personal logs. He searched once again for anything that hinted at her plans on Ruintalos, despite already having read them in order from the day she took command of the Silt. How it burned that she had walked the decks of the ship named after his father after his celebrated victory over the pirate ship Iron Heart. The UHS Silt should have been his from its maiden voyage, but instead was handed over to an orphaned refugee handpicked by the ship’s namesake, his own father, to great fanfare.

  Manitac should have stuck to naming ships after the dead, but Hyeph saw to his father’s demise soon enough. Darvik Hart never thanked him properly for the coded message giving him the coordinates for Horgath Silt’s new assignment. Nevertheless, the pirate finished the job that Hyeph couldn’t afford to do himself: killing Horgath Silt.

  Not even his own father’s death, however, could salve the burning hatred he had for Kelra Shade. At that point, she still had command of the Silt until she decided to turn traitor. Her conviction changed nothing. He hated Shade for every slight he’d suffered by always coming in second place during their academy days and had spent the past twenty years chasing her.

  "What should we do with the guards, sir?"

  Silt pulled his attention away from the debris. His second-in-command, an unremarkable man who resembled a brown-furred lupos with its snout smashed against a window, had that look—the questioning one, wavering between whether his captain would actually obey Unity's laws, follow Manitac's dictates, or create his own version of justice.

  Out here at the ass end of the Andromeda Galaxy, no one would notice the odd missing personnel or three. Covering up a massacre was easier than skip-sledding across the barren landscape chasing a runaway prisoner. Most other senior officers serving Manitac knew corporate policy had no tolerance for screw-ups, especially when it involved profits. Prison planets were unprofitable, and Silt never understood why Unity or Manitac wasted resources on them.

  "Have they given us a description of the intervening ship?"

  "Yes, sir. We also have the security recordings though. It's just a matter of time."

  "Fine. You started this investigation, so you finish it. I want a full report before the dinner bell." He jerked his gloves higher, covering his wrists.

  "Shall I also send a copy to the board of directors? They might ask for a broader investigation."

  Because Manitac was a corporation with a private navy, answering to Unity's flimsy command structure was unnecessary. The board of directors handled all navy decisions.

  "No, they won't. Shade’s whole career was nothing but a lie, and once you give them your report, the board will know it too. She never served Manitac’s purpose—she served her own. The board of directors clearly are already embarrassed by her treason. They’ll want to cover up the fact that she escaped before it hits the next news cycle. They kept her trial quiet, and she didn’t fight her sentence. Now we know why—she’d had her escape plan worked out long before she stepped foot on this world.”

  “Do you really think she tossed her career away for a chance to find her family’s ship? It’s been twenty years.”

  Silt knew what burning vengeance meant to himself, the endless tease of trying to complete unfinished business that dangled
just out of reach. If Shade had half the rage he’d held back over the years to keep himself positioned to take command when she finally showed her true colors, then yes, he could see her spending twenty years chasing a dream that would never happen. The difference between Shade and himself was that his dream would come true. “The odds of her finding the Majesty of the Stars are astronomical, but not impossible. Don’t we all chase dreams of one sort or another?”

  His second hesitated and then nodded. No doubt the man also dreamed of commanding the Silt someday.

  Maybe Hyeph should have felt sorry for the man, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t even be bothered to learn the man’s name because it didn’t matter. Killing Shade mattered. It was all that mattered. The rest of his crew was just fodder for making it happen.

  "Your orders, sir. About the guards, I mean."

  Silt looked around at the mess Shade had created. He shouldn't have to clean up after her, but Manitac waited for his report on the situation.

  "Execute them."

  His second-in-command tilted his head to the side. "Are you sure, sir? There still will be questions if we kill the entire squad…"

  "You don't need to concern yourself about questions. The answers are my problem." By the Stars, he'd have replaced this particular officer if he hadn't already replaced two engineers and three comm officers. Manitac would take notice if yet another one of his crew members needed reassignment, and killing them on board the ship was out of the question—unless it became absolutely necessary.

  The officer nodded, but still too slow for Silt's taste. "What will you tell the directors?"

  Silt shrugged. "It's obvious. The other prisoners followed the guards up the mountain and gained control of one of the sleds. They overpowered the pulse cannon operator and turned the cannon on the rest of the guards."

  "May I suggest we at least drag the bodies farther down the mountain?" the second asked. "It would be more plausible if we made it look as if this…situation…occurred elsewhere. It will also allow the bodies to decompose faster or get eaten by the local predators, leaving less evidence. Just in case…"