Junker's Moon: Pirate Gold

by Peter Salisbury

  Chapter 2: Unwelcome Attention

  In checking for arrivals and departures every morning, Marshall looked with especial keenness for any unscheduled ones. Unscheduled ones were always trouble. Occasionally, after flight-testing a ship for several days, a captain would bring back his ship to complain about the way his engines had been tuned, or that perhaps an intermittent fault had returned. Marshall had received requests already for service operations from the slow in-bound ships, and the prospect of new business was almost always a good sign. The ones to be wary of, he had always been told, were fast moving ships inbound with no advance notification. On the departures side, there were two scheduled, one for the morning and one later in the day. Both were for service and test to certified space-worthiness.

  Of the three ships Marshall had already noted as heading his way, one kept erratically dropping out of the pipe. The only explanation was that its hyperspace engines were cutting in and out with an irregular fault. Marshall made a note of the type and model of the ship, so that its engine could be compared with the list of spares they held in stock. The other two ships were moving without the unpredictable excursions into and out of normal space, but were doubtless in dire need of being re-tuned, as they were making such little headway that even they would take up to a week to arrive.

  As Marshall continued to scrutinise the screen, he noticed a shadowy image at the extreme edge. Moving steadily into range of his sensors, it began as little more than a grey outline on a black background. Whatever it was, the tiny image gave no indication of an ID. It might have been mistaken for a large piece of rocky debris, if it hadn't been moving purposefully in a straight line. Planetary debris invariably followed a curving path determined by the stellar object under the influence of which it was held. Marshall hoped very much that it would veer away, or vanish for good.

  Without the expensive differential contrast feature on his scanner, Marshall probably wouldn't have seen it at all. The pipe showed up as a streamer of red against a black background, with stars as pale pin-pricks. Apparently floating along the pipe and far away in the nearest space lane were the ships he could easily identify. Bright green was used for merchant class ships, blue was for passenger liners, red indicated independent traders, and mining vessels glowed with a pale turquoise light. When the curious object blinked off the screen as he watched, his thoughts returned to his previous task.

  One major necessity of checking the schedules against visible shipping was that it was always possible that some old croaker would materialise out of the hyperspace pipe, right in the path of an outgoing ship. It had happened only once at Junker's Moon, although busier places had been even more unfortunate. The accident had involved a third class passenger liner which the week before had completed a full cosmetic refit. Marshall had not seen the incident himself because it was back in the days when his father, David, was station comptroller, and Marshall was still a young boy learning the trade at his mother's workbench.

  If the proximity detectors on the old ships failed, then rather than redirecting the ship's mass to a nearby vacant location, they exited hyperspace regardless of what was in the way. In the case in mind, a decrepit old mining vessel had materialised, re-forming itself right inside the passenger deck of the liner. Three quarters of the passenger deck had been deformed around the outline of the mining ship, leaving the two ships fused together on an atomic level. Marshall's father had suited up and set off in person to inspect the catastrophe. On entering the deformed passenger carrier, he had made his way to the deck where the mining ship had become included in the larger hull. It was immediately clear that no attempt at a reversal of the process could possibly differentiate between them.

  Although the liner was gleaming with fresh paint and the smell of new poly-leatherene seat covers, it was empty of passengers, and so no-one on board was actually injured. As then proprietor of the Junker's Moon depot, it fell to Marshall's father to enter initial negotiations with the two captains. The passenger liner's captain vented his fury in a rant which extended over a full half hour. Marshall, who knew his father to have a somewhat volatile personality, was surprised when told that he had listened to the rant with polite equanimity. When the captain had sat down, exhausted from his tirade, it was explained to him that he was fully insured and that he could claim against the third party for including his ship inside the larger one.

  The captain of the mining ship was distraught at the total loss of his vessel. His distress had been increased by the certain knowledge that the accident was his fault, and he was enormously relieved when informed that there had been no loss of life. He was less pleased, however, when told that he would have to sit tight over the two days it would most likely take to cut him out through six sets of compressed bulkheads and his own hull plating, but he was otherwise unharmed. Both vessels were insured but by different companies who agreed on only one thing; after seeing photographic evidence, both ships were immediately declared complete write-offs. Beyond that neither insurer would accept fault on the part of their client, and the court settlement had dragged on for years.

  The irretrievably combined vessels now resided on the far side of the moon which gave the station its name, as a testament to the unhappy results of poor maintenance. It joined a slowly growing assemblage of vessels deemed to be beyond any hope of repair. Given the lower gravity of the moon, compared to its parent planet, items of considerable mass could be placed there without a great deal of trouble. That meant that any saleable parts, like rocket motors and fuel had been removed, along with high value precious metal conduits and control equipment. The shells of the vessels were of less value and were only cut up, melted down and cast into billets for sale if times were really hard, and that hadn't happened for as long as Marshall could remember. As a result, the empty carcasses of ships lay on the surface of the moon, where they were occasionally prey to small asteroids, meteorites, and space dust.

  Marshall recalled his father's stern tones in telling that the accident between the liner and the miner had occasioned a visit from FBIS. Several agents had arrived in a collection ships, including an almost invisible, matt black Enforcer class vessel. When in orbit the Enforcer ship could only be seen by the stars it blocked out with its bulk. Under inspection by a centimetre wave scan, it was revealed to be all gun ports and protuberances. Within minutes of it exiting the pipe, a multitude of smaller ships had danced out of its cargo hold, all squawking instructions and giving orders to each other. The Junker's Moon coms system, which in Marshall's father's day was rather more rudimentary, blew several chips as a result of the barrage of voice coms and data traffic.

  This had caused a near incendiary situation when the captain of the FBIS vessel had assumed that the lack of coms response from the station was a result of criminal activity. When a warning shot produced no response, 'boots', as they say, had arrived on the ground and armed agents stormed the station buildings, to find nothing more extraordinary going on than a frantic attempt at repairs to the coms equipment.

  Once it had been established that the Junker's Moon station was not acting in defiance of federal orders, the captain of the FBIS vessel handed over sufficient spares for the damaged coms equipment to be not only repaired but upgraded. Not wishing to have his authority undermined by a perceived act of kindness, however, he demanded immediate access to all areas of the station and that the whole operation was to be shut down until further notice.

  This did not go down well with either residents or customers of Junker's Moon, as it meant that all repairs and service operations had to cease for as long as the FBIS captain decided to take with his investigations. For those who would rather be anywhere else than contained in a FBIS net, there was unfortunately no-where to go. This was a known FBIS technique: when attending a situation, imposition of a full 'lock down' usually meant that incidental crimes were detected. By that means, two smugglers and a trafficker previously completely unknown to the Junker's Moon depot were apprehended.

 
Amongst station personnel, FBIS was generally known for arriving too late to break up a fight, for the great size of its database of arcane laws, and for poking its nose where it was least welcome. Its list of obscure laws were enforced to a highly variable degree, most often at the whim of the captain, and frequently by confiscation of what he declared to be illicit goods which could easily be sold for profit later in another sector. During the extended investigation FBIS made of the accident, both of Junker's hotels were occupied by agents. When Marshall's father objected, saying that the FBIS agents had berths on their ship, he was told that there was a law permitting investigating officers free access to room and board in the location of an incident. It was also brought to his notice that obstructing any agent of FBIS either during his leisure time, or in carrying out his duty, were equivalent in constituting criminal interference of a punishable kind. Naturally, Marshall's father had withdrawn his petition.