Tom kept himself from falling as he stumbled forward then turned around and chased Mark around the bus trying to kick him back as Mark dodged away.
Jolleen suddenly looked sick. "Damn it Mark I am going to wring your neck and kill you before the damn implants do." She started chasing him as well thinking about beating some sense into his head. What she should have done years before when she first laid eyes on him long before she joined the club.
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Blackbeard sat in his overstuffed reclining, massaging, spa heated, magic fingers, power chair behind his big mahogany desk puffing on a cigarette liaised with drugs as he looked through a huge set of old fashioned binoculars. His desk was on a short pedestal allowing him a 360 degree view out the windows at the port below and the city beyond to the north. He had already spent 20 minutes examining the Ports perimeter fence and the derelict hulks that kept blocking his view of and irritating him. One of the biggest ships that irritated him the most was a round ball almost three thousand feet in diameter.
A monster of a ship that was almost a thousand years old made of solid titanium, aluminum and steel. Built during the darkest of the dark ages when planets where just learning to build ships again and had not yet re-evented foam steel, (that was lighter and stronger than aluminum and more heat resistant than titanium) that was just a memory back then after the destruction of the Galactic Empire's central manufacturing worlds. The old ship was so heavy, it‘s old inefficient engines taking up most of the center core space could barely lift it even before you added cargo and passengers. With a maximum speed of a light year a week only the desperate would have made it to England while only a fool would have even tried taking it farther through the crossing to the next star some 5 light years away. The reason most of the ship hulks where ringing the old Star Ports perimeter fence. Thanks to a government that thought little of Tramps but did not believe in letting them go out and get themselves killed from stupidity. Partially from an ancient mandate from the Galactic Unified Human Empire about safety.
At least it was being dismantled without costing him a fortune and was basically paying for itself in scrap metal to get rid of. Though the prehistoric ship’s equipment proved to be highly prized across the near Galaxy providing a nice bonus. Stripping the inside of the hull without damaging the valuable relics was taking longer than he liked though. Each piece had to be carefully recorded and documented and then removed making sure all of its associated parts and controls went along with it. Some of the problem being that no one had any idea what some of the equipment was even for, let alone what went with it.
Most of the rest of the hulks lining the fence not already scrapped where made of Carbon Composites that required as much to scrap as it cost to build them. The very reason most of them where still sitting there with far too many flat saucer shaped ships that were overly popular in the middle ages when the crude ships were the only ships that were cheap enough to be mass produced. Next to the solid steel ball; Blackbeard hated one particular ship almost as much. A saucer hull 3 thousand feet across and two hundred feet tall not only still on its landing gear but made entirely of composites making it so expensive to scrap that not even the planetary Government could afford to get rid of it. But he hated it mostly because it was sitting on the ports center pit. The only pit big enough to hold it with no possibility of ever lifting off again without new engines. Big short engines and no way to drag it off a pit that was completely surrounded by a large plasticrete warehouse with its own gantry. The other pits and warehouses surrounding it just added to the obstacles in the way.
Not that he needed such a large pit but it was the principle of the thing just sitting their taunting him with its presence. He even fantasized about blowing it up but that would even cost more to clean up the resulting mess. The Damn environmentalists. So for now it was just a damn warehouse. Not that he did not have enough warehouse space but he found out quickly that warehouse space had a habit of getting filled. If you had something to fill it with and he had hundreds of taken ships full of cargo that needed stored waiting for shipment to the inner stars of the Empire. And somehow the cargo just seemed to keep showing up. Though part of the problem was him wanting to keep up the appearance that it was a busy wealthy port and it was easy to tell if ships were loaded or not when they landed and frankly it was as good a place as any to store the shit. Though he wasn't stupid about it and only a fraction of the total he had was here even if it was quite a lot.
Shaking his head in disgust at all the hulks even if technically they were his hulks; a flash of light and a dilapidated sickly colored fanbus caught his eyes parked next to an old warehouse just across the street from the north east gate to the port properties outer fence several miles away. Starring at it through the binoculars just long enough to notice a couple of young men and what he thought was a woman (but wasn’t sure) chasing each other around the bus in the parking lot in front of an old warehouse. One of the young men clutching a shiny box in his hand looking like he was trying to been the other over the head with it as the box caught the suns reflection again with a flash. He decided it was not a threat to his Port when one of the young men or was it a girl, punched the other on the shoulder and then ran into the bus as the others chased him or her. Something was different about the last one's eyes but he quickly decided it was his imagination as the boy disappeared into the bus with the glittering box in his hand. Shaking his head he placed the binoculars on the corner of his desk and went back to work.
His office was the old 20 foot round glass sided ground control center at the top of the control tower of the old port’s recently remodeled administration building that came with his acquisition of the entire port. It not only afforded him use of the thick armored, Engine Blast Proof roofed warehouses and cargo handling facilities but room to berth 24 ships in staggered pits arranged in a horseshoe shape south of the tower with long concrete warehouses between them. A huge 25th pit was located in the center of the horseshoe shaped rows of pits, big enough to handle the biggest Battle Ships the old Imperial Empire had. Including one of the largest Saucers ever produced that made an emergency landing 7 years before using old system maps and ignoring Orbital Controls guidance to land in the old supposedly closed Space Port without the money to make repairs and a government refusing to let it go beyond into the outback even if it did. With the mile wide donut shaped warehouse completely inclosing the central pit the damn ship could not even be dragged off or out of the pit. The office building with the tower he sat in, a mere two miles away from that donut warehouse ring that all the other warehouses were connected to and the eye sore of a ship.
Shaking his head Blackbeard scanned the Miles of paved container storage yards that ringed the horse shoe of pits. He did not like keeping cargo that could possibly be identified as Pirated out in the open. Though there was growing stacks of sanitized containers. The sanitation process was time consuming and finally the work crews he had brought from off planet were starting to get ahead of the shipments headed in towards the Core Worlds of the Empire. He was going to have to start thinking of moving the ships that had been moved by one of the huge tracked ship haulers and sat down haphazardly across the container yards instead of simply hauled to the perimeter fence with all the others. But there were two main problems preventing him from moving the 27 ships scattered around the hundred some square miles of container yards.
One problem was that all the damn ship lifters had simply broken down after years of neglect as all the credits for maintenance of the old port was transferred to the new Space Port to cover the cost of construction overruns to get it competed and open on time. Fact was that 3 of the 4 monster ship transporters had broken down with a ship in their cradles scattered around the Container yards. The 4th had been stripped trying to keep the other 3 working and still sat in its parking spot bare of many of its critical pieces of equipment.
The Second problem was the simple fact that every one of the ships not alrea
dy shoved into the row of ships lining the perimeter fence had a bank or government lean against it and ownership was still working its way through the Planet’s court system. Though once that was done, they too would probably join the rest of the ships along the perimeter fence since their age, lack of weapons and lack of maintenance and functioning equipment was most likely the reason they had gone bankrupt in the first place when the Government demanded minimum safety upgrades before allowing them to take off again. Upgrades most Tramps could not believe any planet would actually enforce on a lowlife Tramp, let alone were needed even though England spent not just a few credits publishing the fact across a hundred planets that had to be crossed to get there. The stories of Tramp ships coming back out of the Out Back beyond rich was simply too compelling. No one kept track of the Tramp ships that never came back. The fact that most of them were Trampships did not even registers on Blackbeard except for feeling frustrated that the damn English liberal do-gooder Parliament had robbed him of tens of thousands of new easy to acquire slaves before they even made it across to the Russian State. He secretly considered the hundred thousand plus families and crewmen the Government was holding in the dozens of Tramp Camps as his personal property that the English Government was keeping from him.
A third and actually the main reason that most of the ships were still scattered around the Container yards was simply that he really didn’t need the container yards the ships were sitting on yet. Besides in his mind, having the ships scattered around the port actually made it look more like a real active port at a glance even if the ships never moved.
No, the thing that irritated Blackbeard most while filling him with pride and the first thing Blackbeard saw every morning he looked out his office window was the odd 152 spaceship hulks forming a ring just inside the outer fence. Most of the hulks disgusted him but they were all his hulks. The one good thing about the ring of old hulks lining the fence was that they provided complete security from any prying eyes; especially the police and other authorities.
He had paid a minor fortune in bribes and fees to get the old port and maintain it’s off planet status. Credits well spent allowing him to launder stolen cargo from the surrounding sectors of star systems and reap a hug fortune shipping it out this planets new Space Port to planets deep inside the Empire. Planets that would suck up the cheap goods without questioning the low prices as long as the cargo came from and stamped by a legitimate empire planet. But the best point of all was the simple fact that all the credits were clean Empire credits easy to spend any ware.
Over the years he had built up his ties with legitimate trade companies and routes and tested them with almost a hundred shipments that had already made more money than he had spent and with the stockpile of the more valuable items built up from half a hundred plundered ships now sitting in the old port's warehouses, his wealth and power was about to explode. With a ship load going out a couple times a week now. A tempo he had been slowly working up to for a year. Smiling he watched another booty loaded ship drop down to land in one of his pits as a cargo packed maglev train slipped out towered the new port. In a couple of weeks he would have a ship load a day going out and double that in a couple of months. All headed in toward the Empire’s Core Worlds. Each and every one of them paying him a fortune with each shipment.
Leaning back in his chair he started thinking. It was probably about time he headed back out to his asteroid base and started planning on increasing his fleet’s takings in England now that the war was over and the English military was so drastically reducing its military. Save his ships a lot of time going all the way to England’s new Russian provinces. He may even think about starting to edge out into the Outback. Though that meant picking up and repairing some mega transports to make the long voyage across England to replace the ships that he was using to buy other pirates taken cargo for pennies on the Credit. So they could start taking their own ships again.
Only thing was, over half the ships that he knew were being taken in the Outback, went someplace else deeper into the Outback. One reason he had backed and even pushed the other Pirate Bosses into destroying the French systems was to get rid of the his last competition to laundering taken cargo back into the Empire. All the other pirate Boss fools could see, were the fat pickings of a French State that had been beaten down after 10 years of pirates concentrating on the French crossing with the English crossing cut off as too risky to do much ship taking during the war. Though that hadn’t stopped many of them. Thank Godstar that the English had kept a corridor (light years longer, skirting well into the Void) open around the Russian State for civilian ships headed to and from the Outback or he would already be looking at trying to ship bulk cargo through his little port. The vast quantities and low return and the fact it was impossible to hide what planet it came from and when it was shipped even with a simple hand scanner made it risky. The fact that bulk shipments went through so few hands from production to receiver simple made bulk cargo less lucrative and more hazardous in the long run. A million tons of Yakama Grain showing up a hundred light-years from Oceanus, where all Yakama Grain went, would immediately set off all kinds of alarms. And all it took was a simple FTL Gram to Yakama to confirm it was a pirated load. No, one had to be extra careful dealing with bulk cargos so he tried not to take very many of them though they still could be gotten rid of on the Black Market, where the profits were even worse. That is unless you wanted to risk taking bulk food to a starving planet cut off by heavy pirate traffic over a couple of decades. Usually by the time a planet would accept any bulk food ignoring where it came from, the planet was too broke to pay for it. Then delivering it to starving desperate masses was more risky than taking a damn battleship. You were more likely to get your crew killed and the ship destroyed by desperate mobs going after the food than paid. Though he had enough damn bulk cargo ships drifting around the rings rapidly deteriorating, he could afford to lose a few. But damn, good crews were hard to find and losing a crew for a few million Credits was not cost effective.
No, he had 30 some large bulk transports hidden out in the planet’s asteroid rings and now that the Port was going along without any hitches it was time he started concentrating on getting rid of them. Not to mention the 40 or 50 thousand captured crewmen from transport ships taken and even lost combat ship crews his ships had stumbled across all the time after the smaller battles between England and Russian warships. He could not believe how many battles his shadowing ships had come across that both sides had taken so much damage there was no one left to rescue the crews from dying ships.
The rescued crews as the freshly created hulks were striped, brought the best prices at the slave auctions on both Greece and Constantinople. It was past time he made a trip to one of the slave planets, (though he could not make up his mind which one), before they started dying at too high a rate in the hell hole prison in the asteroid he had them in. But then they were doing a good job mining fuel ore from the supposedly plied out mines in that damn rock. He did not have to worry about buying bad fuel for his ships on the black market. Not to mention, with the slaves being fed by free food from taken bulk carriers, he was getting all the fuel his fleet needed for free. But then he had enough fuel to last a few years as he built up a new slave labor force.
Taking the slaves to market would also give him a chance to clean out the thousands of escaped slaves running around the thousands of miles of tunnels and caverns when he stopped the food shipments forcing them out into the open or starve. It would make his little hunting trips through the caverns more rewarding. That is until they starved to death or he shot them all and the memory of him shooting half-starved slaves begging for food really was not that much fun even if they did scatter once the shooting started. To damn easy. No there was nothing like tracking down and hunting well fed escaped slaves hiding in the rugged tunnels that knew you were hunting them to kill.
His intercom beeped. “Yes! I am busy. What do you want?”
“The report you have
been waiting for has come in sir. The Comm station in the French system is definitely down with Pirate attacks reported before it ceased transmitting.”
“Good. Any word on the 50 ships I sent there to help?”
“No sir but they have had plenty of time to reach the system and should be in the thick of the battle.”
Blackbeard started to turn red. “Hell with battle! I don’t want my ships in the thick of the damn battle. I want them there to loot the damn planet for me. I don’t give a whore’s teat how many ships we or they take. They are supposed to leave that for the other saps to risk. I don’t’ want my ships damaged. Repairs are too damn expensive.” Slapping off the comm. He knew it was a waste of time yelling at his stupid assistant. All he could do was trust that his Admiral would follow orders and keep his ships out of the damn ship to ship fighting. Though his ships could not help taking damage as they took the prime orbital factories and warehouses for the best loot. He even gave the Admiral permission to land on the planet if the target was lucrative enough but that had risks all its own. “Damn it too hell.” He cursed wishing that he could have gone himself to make sure things where done the way he wanted them. Making sure his fleet got the best spoils. But he dared not.
Turning, he looked down at one of the ships in a pit on the back side of the port. It had yard cranes and lifts surrounding it with big holes cut in the side to get at the engines for major repairs. It was costing him a fortune to get the damn old ship overhauled on this damn planet with all its rules and regulations. If it wasn’t for the weapons and the armored hull making it equivalent to an English cruiser, he would have had it hauled off to one side of the port with all the other hulks. It was his own damn fault though. If he had not gotten in such a hurry to get its cargo down here so he could get it through the new port and to the buyer that was willing to pay top Credits, he would have checked the damn engine certification tags. He had plenty of ships already with good tags. But once the damn ship landed, the damn English Safety launch directorate Engine inspector red tagged the ships Engines as unsafe. Forcing him to get it over hauled here on this god forsaken expensive planet. The shit of the matter was, his maintenance manager back at the damn rock had already scheduled the ship to have its engine over hauled at the rock by his slaves with stolen parts as soon as it arrived. He just thought he could get one more trip down here with it.
Tramp Wars: The Enemy Page 18