My Other Car is a Spaceship

by Mark Terence Chapman

  Losing Gort was a real jolt to his pilot’s sense of immortality.

  How much longer can we keep this up? He glanced over at Marsengar. We’ve lost a third of our firepower already. If either of us goes, there’s no way the other can hold them all off, and then we’re done for.

  “Hold up!” Kalen ordered. “They’ve stopped firing. Catch your breath, but stay alert. There’s no telling what they’re up to.”

  “Ahoy the ship!” A gruff voice he didn’t recognize came through on the open radio channel.

  “What do you want?” Kalen queried.

  “Parley.”

  “Okay, talk. What do you want?”

  “You can’t hold out forever. Sooner or later you’ll have to sleep, eat, shit. We can wait. You’re not going anywhere and you’ve no reinforcements coming. It’s just a matter of time. You’ve got two choices. Surrender now and live, or keep fighting and die.”

  “If we surrender, do I have your word that you’ll let us all live?”

  “You have my word.”

  “Very well, then.” Captain Kalen Jeffries took a deep breath. “We surrender.”

  “You made the right choice. Look behind you.”

  Kalen glanced over his shoulder and gasped. Just beyond the doorway behind him floated two pirates with guns drawn. They’d evidently cut their way through the unguarded cargo doors and slipped down the main passageway unnoticed, their approach masked by the firefight.

  The wrong answer would have meant instant death for Adventurer’s crew.

  Kalen gave the order through his suit’s radio. “Lay down your weapons, Hal, Marsengar, Gort. I’ve surrendered.”

  There was a brief pause. “Are you certain you want to do that, Captain? We can hold them off indefinitely from here.”

  Kalen looked back at the pirates who had a bead on him and the others. “Quite certain, Hal. Leave your weapons and join us here.”

  He heard the other man’s sigh.

  “Take them,” the gruff voice ordered.

  Rough hands grabbed Kalen, Nude, and Fesel and shoved them down the passageway toward the cargo holds. Hal and Marsengar arrived a minute later.

  Kalen’s eyebrows went up when he saw the two arrive without Gort. Hal shook his head with another wince.

  That’s two more gone. Two more crew I’ve led to their deaths.

  Kalen shook off the thought. Stop that! You have a duty to the rest of the crew. Pull yourself together, Captain!

  A skinny man with blond hair and a scruffy beard visible through his suit’s helmet floated aboard Adventurer. He looked the prisoners up and down.

  “Him,” he said in his gruff voice. He pointed to the Blensian. One of the guards raised his weapon and shot Fesel through the helmet. Due to the virtually nonexistent gravity, he tumbled backwards from the force of the blast, thumping quietly against the far wall.

  Kalen glared at the pirate as if his eyes were death rays.

  “Blensians make poor slaves. Too weak.”

  “But—” Kalen protested. “You gave your word!”

  The blond man grinned. “Maybe next time you should find out whether the person you’re negotiating with is authorized to make deals. My word meant nothing.”

  “But—”

  “Pirate. Remember?”

  The guards shackled the five prisoners together and “marched” them hand-over-hand at gunpoint through the cargo doors and up a temporary access tube. It was approximately 2.5 meters in diameter and extended alongside the ship, out of the ravine, and back to the salvage ship anchored to the surface of the asteroid. On the way out, the group had to pass collections of dead pirates around the two access hatches. Other pirates towed the corpses behind them one by one, through the tube to the ship.

  Once inside the salvage vessel, artificially generated gravity kicked in. The corpses were laid out on the deck in rows. As Hal passed the last row of bodies, one of the two Melphim pirates carrying a human corpse accidentally dropped his end of the load, causing the body to slip out of the grip of the other and fall onto the corpse below. The body rolled directly in front of Hal, staring up at him with blind, accusing eyes.

  Hal stumbled over the man’s hip and nearly fell.

  Whoa there, Hal. Don’t step on the poor man. Then he corrected himself. Make that ‘Don’t step on the dead man’s chest’. He chuckled at his poor joke, despite the dire circumstances, drawing a confused look from Kalen, who was chained just ahead of him. “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,” Hal said.

  Kalen looked no less confused after the ‘explanation.’

  Hal shrugged. Well, I could surely use that bottle of rum right about now. It might make the next few hours, days, weeks, months, a little less unpleasant.

  One of the guards secured both ends of the chain linking the prisoners together to a ring on the wall. Four guards pointed unswerving weapons at the Unies. No one spoke during the twenty-minute trip to the pirate fortress, still outside the shield walls, but heading back that way. The ship docked and once again the prisoners were marched down a short passageway. This time the guards herded them into the back of an electric truck and whisked them off down a wide corridor. After several minutes, it pulled up in front of a heavy, wide metal door. Sensors in the walls and floor detected their presence, weighed the truck and its contents, sampled the energy signatures of the guards’ handguns, and sniffed for the presence of chemical weapons—even before the guard contacted someone inside. A light flashed by the door to signal admittance, and the blast door slid back.

  The prisoners were ushered inside, still at gunpoint, around a split perimeter catwalk overlooking an open “pit” area full of people sitting at command consoles. The catwalk was to prevent a large force from charging straight at the executive offices at the rear of the large chamber—the control center of the fortress. Visitors had to enter no more than three abreast, and the wide sweeping curves of the catwalk, on both the left and right, gave defenders a terrific field of fire from the gun ports hidden in the walls. Spiral staircases joined the upper and lower levels.

  Once at the executive suites, one of the guards knocked on a clear door made of four-inch-thick armored aluminum oxynitride—transparent aluminum—reinforced with a nearly invisible mesh of boron nanotubes for additional protection against armor-piercing projectiles.

  The door slid back to admit the prisoners to the outer vestibule adjacent to the offices of Tarl Penrod, Jern Ishtawahl, and their executive assistants. A guard secured both ends of the prisoner chain to a ring bolted to the wall.

  Once this was done, two people entered the room from one of the offices. Hal examined them closely on the theory that anything he learned here might be useful later in an escape attempt.

  The one on the left was human, approximately 1.9 meters in height and muscular. He looked to weigh at least a hundred kilos. His short black hair and neatly trimmed beard accentuated his piercing blue eyes. A ragged scar running down his right cheek disappeared into the beard.

  His associate, an Alberian, was well over two meters tall and in excess of 150 kilos. His bulging fiery yellow eyes set in a green pebbled face were fearsome enough, until one looked at the double rows of razor-sharp teeth. One chomp could saw through a man’s arm in seconds. His own arms were short and appeared to lack the strength of his human companion’s, but his teeth and talons more than made up for that shortfall.

  The human frowned back at the ragged, bandaged group chained before him: two humans, a Foren, and a Chan’Yi. “This is it? I lose more than a dozen pirates and all I get in return is four beat-up prisoners?” He shook his head. “Well, those nukes will make up the difference, and then some.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Kalen replied. “We used all our nukes to force our way through the inner shield wall.”

  The human pirate made a wry face. “Really. And left none to attack our fortress with? I think not. And who might you be?”

  “I am Senior Captain Kalen Jeffries, and this is my crew—” He wi
nced. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

  The other man pursed his lips. “Well, Captain Jeffries, I must congratulate you on managing to survive everything to get this far. That’s more than the rest of your fleet can say. You four are the first nonpirates to see the inside of our new fortress. Welcome to Smuggler’s Cove.”

  “I can’t say I feel especially welcome. And you are?”

  “Ah. My apologies. How rude. I am Tarl Penrod, and this is my second-in-command, Jern Ishtawahl. And these are?” He gestured to the other prisoners.

  Kalen nodded toward Hal. “This is Hal Nellis, my pilot. Behind him is Marsengar, my tactical officer, and in the back, Chalmis’Noud’Ourien, ship’s doctor.”

  Hal was surprised at his Captain’s openness. So much for name, rank, and serial number. Perhaps he’s hoping if we’re highly regarded we’ll be treated better than if Penrod thinks we’re mere galley help.

  Penrod nodded in thought. “Well, well. It looks like our net caught some high-quality fish after all. That should make up somewhat for the lack of quantity. I suppose it would be a waste of time to ask whether any of you would care to join us voluntarily. We seem to be short a few pirates at the moment, thanks to you. After we rebuild the ships we’ve lost we’ll need crews for them. Any takers?” His only response was silence. He nodded with a wry smile. “I thought not.”

  “Speaking of ships lost,” Kalen ventured, “I take it from the fact that we’re all standing here in your fortress that our attack was unsuccessful.”

  “Unsuccessful? Only if you consider the complete destruction of your fleet and the deaths of everyone in it ‘unsuccessful’.”

  Kalen winced and looked at Hal.

  Hal swallowed the acid taste in his mouth. Until that moment, a small secret part of his mind had held onto the hope that some of the fleet had survived to fight another day, that they would come back in force and nail the pirate bastards to the wall, blowing the fortress to atoms in the process. But now that hope was gone.

  All our friends, so many former crewmates, even some past lovers. Gone. Any hope of rescue, gone with them. It’s all gone. It’s all over.

  He should have been angry, furious; but exhausted as he was, short of sleep and food, all he felt was drained—drained of energy, drained of hope, drained of the will to fight back. Penrod could have been lying, but Hal knew in his heart that the other man wasn’t. At that moment Harold “Mongoose” Nellis, former colonel in the United States Air Force, was a beaten man.

  “Guards,” Penrod ordered, “take the prisoners to a holding cell while we decide what to do with them.”

  He smiled, and it was a cold, calculating smile, devoid of humor. “In the meantime, I hope you gentlemen won’t mind if we poke around the wrecks of your other ships to see if we can salvage any of their nukes.”

  Nukes? As they were led away, Kalen saw the same horror in Hal’s eyes that he knew was reflected in his own.

  There couldn’t be any salvageable warheads in the other ships—could there? The uncertainty of the answer chilled his soul.

  What if they do find some? We’d be responsible for anyone who died as a result. No, I’d be responsible.

  Hal seemed to read Kalen’s mind. He shook his head. “There was nothing you could do. Even if we were absolutely, positively certain there were working nukes on the other ships, there was no way we could have gotten to them all, destroyed the controls and the warheads, and dispersed the plutonium in such a way that it couldn’t be retrieved and used to make new warheads. Not in the little time we had before the pirates arrived. And not as banged up as we all were. No matter how this turns out, you did everything that was humanly possible to do.”

  Kalen’s eyes lost some of their haunted look.

  “Hell, if you want to be picky about it,” Hal continued, “it was the fleet commissioner who authorized the use of nukes, not you. If anyone’s to blame—besides the pirates—it would be the commissioner.”

  Now it was Kalen’s turn to disagree. “No. As the squadron’s senior officer, the responsibility was mine. But you’re right—there was nothing else I could have done. Let’s just hope the blast did what we couldn’t and there’s nothing for the pirates to retrieve.”

  Hours later, in Penrod’s office, Ishtawahl reviewed the results of the salvage operation to date.

  “We have scoured the wreckage looking for radioactive material. As best we can tell, seven of the nine ships still had nuclear missiles aboard when the one nuke detonated. At the very least, we should be able to recover enough fissionable material from those ships for several sizable bombs of our own. With any luck, some of the warheads will be intact enough that we can repair them and use them as-is. If not, we will probably learn enough from the components to build our own. I have already begun the search for scientists and engineers with the proper skills that we can hire or…persuade…to help us with that task. Best case, we could have one or more working warheads at our disposal within weeks. Worst case, it could be years. But getting the fissionable materials is the hard part. Governments are extremely hesitant about releasing any of it, lest it fall into the ‘wrong’ hands.” He snorted. “All we need to do is build a bomb to go around it. That is the relatively easy part. It is merely a matter of time and engineering skills.”

  Penrod sat back in his comfy chair and flashed a smile, a very, very satisfied smile. “Things just keep getting better and better, don’t they? Pretty soon, we’ll be able to get any planetary government to accede to our demands, lest we blow up one of their cities, or their passenger ships, or their frontier colonies. They can’t defend everything from us.”

  “I agree. This opens many doors for us.”

  “Keep on it, Jern. We’ll need more than just one or two working warheads. We’ll need at least one as a demonstration, and probably a second one, for anyone who doesn’t believe the news of the first one. It’s likely we’ll need a few more over time to teach some people a lesson about being stubborn. We wouldn’t want to run out of nukes, now, would we?”

  “No, sir. We know that two of the ships fired their nukes. Assuming that each of others still carried two nukes, that could give us up to twelve working weapons.”

  Penrod nodded in thought. “Twelve sounds just about perfect. We could do some serious damage with twelve nukes. Hell, we could topple a planetary government with less than half that many.” He smiled. “So what are you waiting for? Let’s make it happen.” He reached up and stroked his black beard, already deep in thought.

  “Yes sir.”

  Whatever you say, sir! I shall bow and crawl and do your every bidding, sir! For now, anyway. But not forever. No, not forever. Your day of reckoning is not far off, sir. And when it does, you will not see it coming.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Spelvin Mynax burst into his superior’s office. “Sir, the fleet has just returned with news of the battle!”

  “Well, man, out with it! How did we fare?” Commissioner of the Fleet Boutan’Mourn’Froul literally sat on the edge of his seat, holding his breath.

  Mynax grimaced before delivering the verdict. “It was an unmitigated disaster, sir. Only four ships are returning. Two of them were so badly damaged that they won’t arrive for another two days. Only one of the four is in fighting condition: Melnore Rising. Her Captain, Jestheel Felpett, is coming in to brief us now. But the gist is that although we did heavy damage to the pirate fleet, we didn’t get the fortress.”

  The commissioner slumped in his seat. “No,” he whispered. “Four? Only four ships survived out of 128?”

  He shook his head in the Chan’Yi manner of signifying disbelief. “You are correct. This is a disaster.” Then a thought occurred to him and he brightened. “How sure is this Felpett that we did not get the fortress?”

  “We can ask when she gets here, but my understanding is that ships’ sensors detected the twin detonations at the outer shield wall, and then several more behind the wall. That indicated the ships successfully breached the
outer wall and were at least attempting to breach the inner wall. Later there was a single detonation that was much more muffled by the shield walls than the others. We believe that indicates they successfully breached both shield walls and had a shot at the asteroid.”

  “That is excellent news! How do we know they were not successful in destroying the fortress?”

  “Sir, we don’t, but from what we learned of the fortress before the assault, we can be pretty sure one nuke would be insufficient. The fact that fourteen other ships from the two squadrons that assaulted the fortress had nukes to fire, and yet only one ship got off a single shot—that should give us some idea of how badly things went for us in there. Not only that, before the four ships retreated and jumped they caught fragments of unshielded transmissions between pirate ships. They were celebrating the fact that the fortress wasn’t there at all. It was all a decoy, a trap for the fleet.”

  Boutan’Mourn’Froul’s face went a paler shade of blue. When he spoke, it was in a dull, dead whisper. “Prophet preserve us. All those ships—more than ten thousand people dead.” He shook his head in shock, the enormity of the catastrophe finally sinking in. “And by my order.”

  “Sir, there was no way you could know. We went by the best intel we had.”

  “Yes, I know that. Still, I could have waited, to be more certain of our facts!”

  Mynax shook his head. “No sir, you couldn’t. We were under a time constraint. We had to act before they consolidated their power around that fortress. We really had no choice.”

  The commissioner sighed. “Perhaps you are correct; perhaps not. Either way, nothing changes.” He cleared his voice and straightened his shoulders. “Show Captain Felpett in when she arrives. I have to think about how to break this news to the Unity board of directors.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You realize what this means, Mynax? This is it, this is the end. The Merchants’ Unity is dead.” He closed his eyes. “Prophet protect us all from the pirates.”