Vick's Vultures (Union Earth Privateers Book 1)

by Scott Warren

  “Shrewd observation,” countered Director Sampson, “The incident not so much, more about what they’re hauling and what showed up after they hit the dusty before another couple cutters could warm up. Tell you what, it’s easier just to show you. Why don’t you pop open your terminal and take a look-see at your FTL cryptos?”

  Alice glanced at her terminal, then back at the director, casually leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He nodded toward the computer on her desk. Alice narrowed her eyes. How did Sampson know what was waiting on her crypto account? She circled around the desk, never taking her eyes off him.

  The biometrics recognized her as she sat down, bringing up her personal interface. With practiced ease she navigated the several levels of security required to access the faster-than-light communications while Sampson waited. A flashing alert greeted her. She opened the message, scanned the contents, and gasped.

  High Priority Hyperlight Dec 1st

  Rec: Sec. Alicewong HT4776782

  Send: Cpt. Vicmarin; PVTCondor TRU-STN

  Advisement – ferryboat 10 heavy Malagath – FP Tavram aboard pls. advise

  Best time - Kallico’rey Malagath base 5 days, hot salvage follows – tech Malagath pls. advise

  Advisement – rspns PLM-STN.

  Nd

  Alice looked at the director in shock.

  “The Malagath First Prince? Aboard the Condor? Good God I can’t imagine the diplomatic nightmare Marin is going to conjure up!” she said. She buried her face in her hands, groaning. Sampson came and sat on the edge of her desk.

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that, Alice.”

  She looked up. “How could it be more complicated than Prince Tavram billeting on that privateer? You know the number of more important names in the known galaxy is down to the single digits, right?”

  Sampson leaned forward. “Well, we have some friends owe us favors out that way that clarified the situation a bit. No, can’t tell you how or why, but the skinny is that the ship they rescued the prince from is still on their tail. Now Victoria is tearing a streak across the sky trying to get him home ‘fore the Dirregaunt cruiser on her tail, which she doesn’t know about by the way, catches up.”

  “Director we have to warn them, give them a chance to make it to Kallico’rey,” said Alice, for the moment concerned more for her daughter than with the depth of Sampson’s intelligence data. She began preparing a response to send to the Pilum Forel listening post. A thick hand settled on her right wrist.

  “Not so fast there, Miss Wong. Relax and take a deep breath.”

  “Relax? We have to get the First Prince off that ship, Director. It’s a matter of state urgency.”

  There was that smile again, the one that narrowed his eyes. “Not entirely, Alice. Ordinarily, yes, rescues are matters for State and Colony. But in this case Victoria was mistaken in sending this crypto to you.”

  “Explain.”

  “Word in the stars is the Prince is set on negotiating a peace treaty between the Malagath Empire and the Dirregaunt Praetory. Something somewhere leaked and made someone unhappy.”

  “Peace between the Malagath and the Praetory? Think of all the lives that would be saved. Trade would go up, ideas would spread, and the Big Three might not vaporize everything in sight. God, it’s hard to imagine being a part of that universe.”

  “Don’t bother trying to imagine it. It’s not a universe the UE wants to be in.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s simple, Alice. The UE runs on stolen tech. You can parade the Navy and the Union Earth Colonies around in front of congress and parliament and the Chinese president, but at the end of the day it’s xenotechnology that keeps us in the black. It’s xenotech that keeps us from getting scraped off the Orion Spur like a bad rash, and it’s the Big Three tearing at each other’s throats that provide us opportunities to salvage that xenotechnology.”

  “But most of our salvage doesn’t even come from the Big Three, most of it is other xenos.”

  “War creates chaos, creates opportunities for opportunists, and creates desperate people that do desperate things. That chaos goes away and suddenly the galaxy becomes a lot more stable. The Big Three are then actually able to police their territories, proxy wars using the lesser empires become more infrequent, and human advancement dries up, and our progress slows to a crawl unless we start taking measures into our own hands.”

  Lesser empires. Lesser than whom? Humanity? Surely not, even Sampson couldn’t be that arrogant. That was how the Big Three described, well, anyone who wasn’t Big Three. Alice had just about enough.

  “You want me to give the First Prince to the Dirregaunt cruiser. I won’t do it.”

  Sampson frowned. “Alice, Alice, Alice. This isn’t me asking. This is way over both of our heads.”

  “Then whoever is ordering it can draft the message, and sign it.”

  The director stood up again, walking to the window and looking up at the sky. The sun had yet to rise, and a few stars were still visible in the pre-dawn light.

  “She’s out there, you know. The fury of 10,000-year-old hunters is racing to devour her ship.”

  “Marin knows what she’s doing.”

  “That’s not who I was talking about.”

  Alice twisted away from the terminal.

  Sampson clasped his hands behind his back and flashed a wolfish smile over his shoulder. “You don’t think it was an accident that Huian was sent to the Condor instead of that cushy billet on the Heinlein do you? That she jumped to the front of the line in front of all those more qualified pilots with prior space time because she was the daughter of the SS&C? That takes a fair amount more clout than you have, Alice. It’s a dangerous galaxy.”

  Alice Wong felt a chill creep through her blood. “What are you implying, Director?” she asked, standing.

  Director Sampson took a deep breath, turned, and strode to the office door. “Send the damn crypto,” he said, and closed the door behind him. Alice retrieved her tablet from the other side of the desk, and scanned it before sitting down once more at her terminal. She could not afford to hesitate.

  “God forgive me,” she whispered as she signed the First Prince’s death warrant.

  Would Captain Marin do the right thing?

  Chapter 7: Pilum

  Victoria sat alone in her stateroom, attempting to concentrate on her latest project by the light of a small lamp; A 23rd century UE destroyer, encased in a glass bottle. She should be sleeping. It had been almost two days since she had slept. Sleeping drugs never seemed to help her insomnia, and she couldn’t drink until she passed out, not with the Malagath aboard. Hadn’t stopped her completely though.

  The tiny thruster she was setting fell over within the bottle, and she cursed, pushing away from the desk. The glass case containing the partially constructed model rolled over, fouling her work of the past half hour. She looked longingly at the bed, four hours still remained before the Condor arrived at Pilum Forel to request permission to transit the galactic territory of the Paralt. Four hours that she didn’t want to spend lying in her rack staring at the blinking light of the command repeater. She tugged a fleece over her uniform and thumbed open the door to her stateroom. The whirring oscillation of the horizon drive greeted her, fueled by the exotic matter they managed to get aboard. Her ship still had its hurts. She had hoped to take a day or two at Taru to refit and repair, but now it looked like the Condor would be limping all the way to the Malagath frontier.

  No drugs could make her sleep, but maybe seeing some of the engineering repairs would help. Yuri Denisov could make an atomic war sound dry. She passed the crew’s lounge, wherein she spied two marines and a weapons tech teaching one of the Malagath to play Texas Hold ‘Em. Probably cheating, too. She had expected the Malagath to isolate themselves within their quarters where the atmosphere had been modified to accommodate them, but was more than a little surprised to find that they were integrating themselves with the crew. The privateer
s of the Condor were no strangers to xeno life aboard her vessel, but the Malagath had a reputation for xenophobia and callous violence that made her assume they would enforce self-segregation. Maybe it was due to their interstellar form of feudal government. Individuals might not be as bad as officers, just trying to get by like the rest of them.

  It took her only a few minutes to traverse the length of the Condor and enter the aft engineering bay crippled since the attenuator overloaded. Inside, her engineers labored to repair the damage with what material was on hand. Yuri Denisov was a deck down, working on the Gravitic Stealth Device. She descended to the lower level and found her chief wearing the far off expression of a man focused on reading his retinal implants. Not one for patience, Captain Victoria waved a hand in front of his face.

  He started, focusing on her face.

  “Vick, what brings you back to our neck of the woods? Horizon drive giving you migraines again?” Yuri asked. He looked somewhat worse for wear, Doc’s handiwork showed where he had been burned following the attenuator’s overload. A fairly serious burn, from the look of his bandages. His wide pupils gave away the presence of painkillers, and there was a slight slur to his voice. Victoria suspected this might be his last journey aboard the Condor, but he wouldn’t leave while the ship was still hurt. He was one of the original Vultures, with her since she’d taken command.

  “Just wanted to see how the repairs were coming along.”

  “Not as well as if we had another couple days at Taru, but damned if I want to bunk in a house with a Grayling. The Malagath make up for it, truth be told. Once they dumb down to our level, they soak up engineering know-how like a sponge. I never would have seen them helping us.”

  “They like knowing how things tick, us included. Don’t think they wouldn’t strip us apart as fast as any of your equipment if they had the chance. How’s the GSD coming along?”

  “Let me just asked my newest engineering team,” said Yuri. He thumbed the engineering circuit on his console, “Cohen, bring the new gal up for a minute.”

  Victoria waited while Aesop Cohen ascended from the lowest level, helping one of the Malagath rescues up behind him. Her arm was in a sling. It looked like Doc Whipple had modified the medical gear to accommodate her. She approached behind Cohen, who saluted.

  “Captain.”

  Victoria ignored him, eyeing the blue-skinned Malagath up and down. She met the eyes of the xeno, so possessing familiar intelligence and yet so alien. The spark of sentience was almost universal, at least for any xeno’s possessing eyes, anyway. Victoria had often wondered if the rescues could detect the same thing, or if they saw her as little more than an animal.

  “Yuri, I don’t know if I like her futzing with the Gravitic Stealth Device. That’s classified.”

  Her chief engineer laughed, “As if we had any secrets the Malagath hadn’t forgotten before we climbed out of our caves. Aurea has already brought me a laundry list of improvements we can make to it.”

  The Malagath engineer stepped forward, “It’s not all that dissimilar to the theory behind the emergency engine employed by the Dreadstar which brought us to your astral territory, Captain Marin,” she volunteered, “Both devices adjust local space-time to create mass. Your device? Negative mass. Our device? Positive, enough mass to initiate a space tear, what your crew calls a horizon jump. Functionally very similar.”

  “Cohen?” asked Victoria.

  “She’s not wrong, Captain, from the way she’s described it to me. I’ll grant the Malagath version puts out about as much mass as a small star, but they only really maintain it for a fraction of a second.”

  “And we would never leave a calculation that important to a computer,” added Aurea, still somewhat scandalized that a species would put such investiture in a technology the Malagath so readily dismissed millennia past as good only for opening doors and displaying documents. Victoria chuffed. If they only knew, she thought.

  Victoria left before Yuri could launch into a technical tirade about the GSD, maneuvering her way past two marines on a pair of exercise bikes. Square feet were at a premium, so you shoved workout equipment wherever it could be strapped down. If it wouldn’t jeopardize her command, she would invite one to exercise in her rack. UE protocol was explicit when it came to commanding officers bunking with their crew. Just fore of the engine room were the ship’s command and control center, unmanned for the duration of the Horizon jump, and the sensor shack. The sensor shack usually maintained only a single operator when transiting between stars, but she could clearly make out the voice of Dan Avery, her senior sensor supervisor.

  She slipped into the shack, careful not to disturb Avery or his two operators.

  “You’re sure there’s nothing in the banks about it?” she heard him ask. Avery leaned against the operator’s chair as he scanned the screen through his glasses, a cup of coffee steamed in his long-fingered hand. His hair was mussed, and his normally smooth face roughened with stubble. All in all, not a bad look for him, she thought.

  Avery caught her reflection in the screen, and started, almost spilling his coffee over the sensor stack. “Vick, I was just trying to decide if this was worth waking you over.”

  She stepped further into the shack, greeted by the smell of hot circuitry and the rush of ventilation overhead. “Well I’m already awake, so you’re not risking an ass-kicking. Now talk.”

  He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck with a slender hand. With the other he reached over the shoulder of his operator and brought up an unfamiliar screen on the sensor stack.

  “It’s probably nothing, but Joyce picked up a … well, I’m not sure what to call it. Horizon space backwash maybe?”

  On the screen was a jumble of red lines, relatively flat, except for a single bump, barely above its neighbors, which Avery panned over and enlarged.

  “Theoretically this should let us detect shifts in mass leaving horizon space. Like tossing a rock into a pond and picking up the ripples. Here’s the rock,” he said pointing to the peak. He moved his slender finger down the wave, “and here’s the ripple. Barely above background levels, all things considered. But to make any kind of splash you’ve got to be either fast, heavy, or both. We’re talking on the order of thousands of tons. But we’ve never had any kind of indication of other ships leaving horizon space before, we’re the test bed for this platform.”

  Victoria clenched her fists and looked away from the screen. “What’s the bearing?”

  “Pilum Forel. What do you think it could be? Bulk merchant freighter?”

  “Nothing good. Damn, there’s only a dozen xenos fielding that kind of tonnage. No way it’s coincidence.”

  “Maybe it’s a Malagath ship and we can hand over the First Prince and his crew?”

  Victoria shook her head, “Not a chance, the range on those ships makes stopping at Pilum Forel pointless, they can just jump right past the system.

  So much for sleep.

  She dialed her XO’s stateroom into the growler, buzzing him awake.

  “XO,” he muttered. Unlike Victoria, horizon space put him right in the rack. It affected everyone slightly differently.

  “Carillo, nap’s over. Pilum may be hot when we get there, get the ship ready.”

  Her executive officer gave a groggy aye-aye before she cut the connection.

  Avery might be right, could be nothing. Or it could be a bulk freighter. It wouldn’t be unusual, Pilum Forel was a heavily trafficked system. Or there could be a Dirregaunt battleship waiting for them, to finish what they started. The only way to find out was to keep going. Besides, there was no way to turn back. Horizon space jumps were a one-way trip. Hopefully ferrying the First Prince wouldn’t turn out to be the same way.

  Best Wishes gazed at the binary stars through the primary view screen aboard the Springdawn’s bridge. Pilum, the lesser, and Forel, the greater, as the locals called them. The lesser empires used this system as a travel hub. Pilum was possessed of rare properties which made it sh
ine brightly in horizon space, casting a wide net across the cosmos to ensnare captains who aimed for her. Forel had such stability that it eased the burden of the calculations required and extended a vessel’s safe range. A short transit between the two might cut days off of a journey and conserve the precious catalysts required to slip into the space behind space. The binary system changed hands many times, as a beacon of economic and strategic importance. Currently the lesser empire of the Paralt claimed ownership, and charged a handsome fee to organizations wishing to make use of the binary system’s advantages. How did any of these freighters turn a profit when everywhere they turned they encountered trade tariffs and docking fees?

  A Dirregaunt battleship paid fees to no one, least of all the lesser empires, and the garrison at Pilum Forel scrambled to acquiesce to the dictates of the Springdawn’s commander. If the primordial terrors that were the Grah’lhin had steered him correctly, this Human Victoria would enter at Pilum within an hour, and request transit to Forel, which they would use to continue on towards the Malagath front. Or so he was to believe.

  Best Wishes held small trust for the Grah’lhin. It stood, pensive, on the raised observation ring, often not moving or reacting to stimuli. It claimed that others of its kind were on their way, though how it communicated with them was a mystery. His crew offered a wide berth to the creature wherever it went.

  Best Wishes was still scrutinizing the creature when Earthen Musk burst through the gate to the bridge, stumbling up to his first officer. Modest Bearing looked up, catching Best Wishes’ eye. A worried look adorned his face, his teeth bared just so. The sensory tips in Best Wishes’ mane started to itch, those vestigial organs evolved to sense the wind of predators. This was not the time for trouble, not with their prey less than an hour away.

  Modest Bearing approached, the runner in tow, but once again refusing to meet Best Wishes’ eyes.

  “Commander, I think you will want to see this for yourself, but one of our own is dead, killed outside the shuttle bay.”