Sydney Chambers

by B. T. Jaybush

  The manager’s words had been said quietly but Sydney felt herself stressing with anger as he fell silent. She kept her own voice to the same level of intense quiet.

  “Manager Rudolph, the Cahan Morrigan is older, but she is fresh from a complete refit — she is no bucket of rust. More than that, it is the dedication and efficiency of a ship’s crew that determines how she does in battle, not the age of the vessel.” She paused a moment to let that thought sink in before continuing. “Your pirates may be better disciplined since Vattermann took over, but they are still only a bunch of cut-throats. I will stack the Morrigan and my crew against any ten of his vessels.

  “As for my own experience —” She broke off, then caught and held Rudolph’s eyes before adding, “This newly-promoted captain is more than a match for Hans Vattermann. Let’s just say that, as far as experience is concerned, Vattermann is far from the best that TSM ever produced.”

  Silence held reign for a full minute before Walter Rudolph finally withered under Sydney’s glare and settled back in his chair with a sigh. “I apologize, Captain,” he said, his voice slow and, to Sydney’s surprised estimation, sincere. “I meant no offense. I suppose that was just my ham-fisted way of seeing how committed you are to this fight, since your bosses don’t seem to be. Sending us one ship when we asked for a lot more is ... well, frustrating doesn’t say the half of it. With everything I poured into my request I can’t help but feel that TSM has underrated the scope of the problem.”

  Sydney held her breath for a long moment, then sighed it out in the same frustration that Rudolph had just expressed. “I actually do appreciate your position, Manager ... Walter,” she said, acknowledging the apology with a nod. “16 Cygni is not exactly where I had imagined to take my first command.”

  Rudolph stared at Sydney a moment before a twinkle returned to his eyes. “Not a cowgirl wanna-be, eh?”

  The captain couldn’t help but be amused by the oddball question. “Not hardly.”

  The manager looked thoughtful. “Then we have something in common,” he said. “Managing a station on the far end of the frontier was not my first choice of postings, either.”

  Sydney merely raised her eyebrows in question.

  “My ‘career,’ such as it was, had ground to a halt several years back — nearly two decades back, at this point,” he explained. “A combination of overreaching ambition on my part and a glacier-like system of tenure on the part of the Confederacy. In the end, I discovered that glaciers aren’t the least bit flexible, so my ambition had to be. As a result of that discovery I let myself be diverted from the diplomatic posting track — where I was getting nowhere — to the management track. Outpost Station was the first assignment that came available.”

  The captain gave a small smile. “It can’t have been all that bad if you’ve stayed here for twenty years.”

  Rudolph shrugged. “Cygni grows on you, Captain,” he said softly. “As does the distance between here and the bureaucratic inertia of the inner worlds. My relative freedom from oversight has become something that I cherish. At this point, I do believe that I would turn down a First World posting.”

  Sydney cocked her head in surprise. “You would?”

  “I already have.” The station manager shrugged once more. “So what can I do to help?”

  Anger completely gone, Sydney relaxed back in her chair. “We took some minor hull damage in that skirmish on the way in,” she said after a moment. “Some parts and a repair bay would be a good start.”

  Rudolph rubbed his chin in thought. “Nothing here at the station to help you with that, Captain. In the same way TSM doesn’t think we need more ships, the powers-that-be don’t think that Outpost Station needs a full-service Starship port. We don’t even rate a maintenance bay. There is a pretty new space dock at Arega, though — that’s the local name for Cyg-B-3. They build and maintain all the in-system freighters there and I suspect they can handle whatever you need. You can bet they’ll be very appreciative of the new source of income.”

  Sydney grimaced. “Not ideal, but better than nothing, I suppose.” She considered a moment. “You mentioned local cops. How about local military? How good is the station security Lieutenant Frye mentioned?”

  “Station security’s been around since the beginning,” the manager said with a smile, “so it’s well established, but it’s only been a token force up until recently. As far as the station is concerned, they are local cops, not a military force. When we began to worry that the pirates might take it into their heads to hit the station itself, though, we expanded it — hired and trained a few dozen folks like Cami — Lieutenant Frye, that is, the officer who escorted you here.”

  Sydney grimaced. “Is there anything like a militia in the system?”

  “There is.” Rudolph nodded. “We’ve got a small but pretty good militia, though what with expecting TSM to send us a force of actual military ships they’ve been put on stand-by. We figured to hold them in reserve for defense of the station. No sense them getting killed when it won’t make a difference.”

  “Logical, except for what you expected from TSM.” Sydney thought a moment. “I’ll need to talk to the militia folks, or at least their leaders. Can you arrange that?”

  “Sure,” Rudolph allowed. “Not right away, though. It’ll take a week or so to round everyone up — some of them’ll have to transit in from A and B.”

  “That’s fine. My first priority is seeing about those repairs, and getting a better handle on the layout of this system. That should keep me busy for at least that long.”

  Rudolph nodded.

  “Send a courier to Morrigan when you’ve got it set up. From what you tell me, it looks like we’ll be over at Cyg-B for the next while. Arega, you called it?” She stood up and held out her hand as Rudolph nodded. “Arega. Thank you, Walter. I’ll be in touch.”

  Rudolph took Sydney’s offered hand, then bellowed over her shoulder while still shaking it.

  “Cami!”

  Rudolph’s office door opened enough to allow the young lieutenant’s head to snake its way in. “Yes, sir?”

  “See that Captain Chambers makes her way back to her ship without getting lost, will you?”

  Cami grinned and opened the door the rest of the way, then stood back as Sydney made her way out of the office.

  4

  Rather than repeat her embarrassing earlier error, Sydney intentionally waited long enough for the young lieutenant to precede her down the hallway toward the elevator. The two walked in silence until Frye had pushed the call button, then turned back to Morrigan’s captain.

  “I hope the manager didn’t make you too angry,” Cami said, sounding almost timid. “He takes all the pirate activity kind of personally, you see. It sometimes makes him pretty irritable.”

  Sydney snorted out a brief laugh and added a sly smile, though she kept her gaze fixed on the elevator doors. “Believe me, Lieutenant, it takes more than an irritable civil servant to make me especially angry.” She paused a moment, then added, “Besides, Manager Rudolph and I did manage to reach a meeting of the minds by the time we were finished. You really don’t have to apologize for your boss — he did just fine on his own.”

  When she heard the lieutenant let slip an audible sigh of relief, Sydney turned to look at the younger woman. “Rudolph is important to you, isn’t he?”

  The elevator doors chose that moment to open, and the two did what was necessary to enter the car and continue on their way before Cami answered.

  “He’s sort of stood in for my parents these last few years,” she told Sydney in a voice barely loud enough for the captain to hear over the elevator’s noises. “His family and mine were both killed in the same transport accident. I was only eight at the time, so....” She let the thought hang, capped only with a shrug.

  Sydney considered a moment. “So just what prompted you to join station security?”

  Cami effected another shrug. “I dunno,” she answered, though her voice
was a bit louder than it had been and contained a certainty that her words denied. “I don’t have a ship, or even a license to be in one other than as a passenger,” she clarified when Sydney’s raised eyebrows conveyed the captain’s unspoken question. “Without shipside access I couldn’t join the militia. But, Captain, Cygni is my home! I was born here — well, not on the station, but on Shenandoah — that’s the planet you’ll know as Cyg-A-3. I love it here at Cygni. This system was a really cool place to be until the pirates started getting really bad.” She paused for a breath then added, “I just felt like I had to do something to help about the pirates.”

  Sydney nodded. Neither woman said anything else until the elevator had finished its descent. Once the car had come to a halt, though, and the door slid open, the captain laid a hand lightly on Cami’s shoulder.

  “Where I come from, Lieutenant,” Sydney said gently, “what you have just described is called patriotism. I have to tell you, I seldom hear it expressed with nearly the eloquence that you just showed me.”

  Sydney had to suppress a smile as the young stationer’s face turned an interesting shade of crimson.

  “I just hope there are a lot more folks around here with the same attitude,” the captain added, then allowed herself a small smile. “I suspect that’s the only way we’re going to survive this whole situation in one piece.

  “But that’s a problem for tomorrow. Right now, now, why don’t you get me back to the Morrigan, like you promised you would?”

  Cami’s face broke into a grin, and she nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, Ma’am!”

  As the TSM officer followed her young guide, for the first time she found herself feeling hopeful about being assigned to 16-Cygni.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  Thirteen Years Before

  Patrick O’Shaughnassey strode with determined purpose along the cratered sidewalk of New Waterford, a city whose degenerate condition belied the delicate beauty of its crystalline namesake. New Waterford was the place of his birth; it was also the site of his first and greatest escape — avoiding the indenture that had trapped his parents, his older brother, and everyone else he knew, by leaving the planet.

  Now, as he walked through the derelict capital city of 16 Cygni-B-2 — a world wistfully called Aerieland by its natives — he kept his eyes locked resolutely in front of him. The condition of the walkway demanded the caution; the desolation around him provided a too-painful reminder of all he had avoided. Conditions had been bad when he left, the day he had turned sixteen … and time had not healed all wounds, not when it came to the misery that had become Irish life on Aerieland. Time had only served to carve the wounds more deeply into the land, and into the psyches of those who lived there.

  While he had made this trip of his own free will, he was not on-world by his own choice. In its usual manner of careless disregard, Capstone Industries, the largest “employer” on Aerieland and virtual owner of the reputedly lush planet, had notified him in spare terms that his brother and sister-in-law had been “involved in a mining accident.” In consideration of his off-world residence he was granted one week to claim their belongings before everything would escheat to the corporation.

  Patrick had stared long and hard at the terse words, starkly glowing on his comm screen. While “involved in a mining accident” was long known as Capstone-speak for dead, the reference to his family’s “belongings” had struck him as somewhere between macabre and inhuman. The only “belonging” left by Sean and Mary O’Shaugnassey that was not already owned by Capstone Industries was their daughter, Patrick’s niece, Chloe.

  Too young to have agreed to indenture, she had become at a stroke his only living family.

  Patrick almost walked past the non-descript shack that was his goal. Set a few feet back from the sidewalk in a depressing yard of dead grass, the only referent that it was the place he sought was a corroded address plate tacked over the front door. It was one of thousands of identical hovels that Capstone supplied for use by its indentured employees, the rent set at a level far above market value and automatically deducted from their purported earnings.

  He paused for a moment at the base of the steps which led to the shack’s ugly, if sturdy, porch. His instincts screamed at him to go, to run away, to pretend he’d never come. The prospect of becoming Chloe’s guardian scared him spitless. Being responsible for a young life was not something he’d ever contemplated; the life he’d forged for himself consisted of scavenging — all right, pirating — among the worlds and wordlets of 16 Cygni B. That life didn’t seem the slightest bit appropriate for a young girl.

  Yet the alternative — allowing Chloe’s indenture to Capstone — was unthinkable.

  He swallowed his qualms, settled his nerves, and mounted the steps.

  “Chloe?” His gentle Irish brogue seemed to crack from his throat as he called out, then added a gentle knock on the door. “It’s your Uncle Patrick, Chloe. Are you there, sweetie?”

  He stood back, awkwardly shifting from foot to foot as he waited. After a minute the door cracked open just far enough for a young girl’s face to peer out at him.

  “Uncle Patrick?” He felt his heart flip in his chest as he gazed at the small face — there was no mistaking that this was the child of his now-dead sibling.

  “’Tis really me, Chloe,” he told her, desperately trying to keep his voice from choking. The last thing an orphaned child needed was to think that her uncle was unsure of himself — or worse, quaking with fear at meeting her.

  Two piercing green eyes stared at him for the longest time. Finally Chloe nodded slightly and opened the door enough for Patrick to enter, then immediately closed it behind him as though concerned that something or someone else would enter as well. When he turned to look at her she stepped up to him, giving him an unexpected if perfunctory hug before stepping back and looking every bit as uncomfortable as he felt. The two stood in silence for a while before Patrick finally found his nerve, and his voice.

  “Sure and you’ve grown since last I saw you, child.” That he managed to speak without his voice squeaking he credited to the saints and their seemingly tireless vigil over his complicated life. “How old would you be now, nine?” It was a best guess, based on his late sibling’s infrequent communications.

  “Ten, Uncle,” Chloe told him. The girl’s brogue was, if anything, a bit thicker than her uncle’s, and there was uncertainly on her face where a smile should have been. “My birthday was last month.”

  Patrick felt his heart quiver once again, and a smile creep onto his lips. “Sure and it was,” he said, then looked around for a chair, finally locating a wooden bench and lowering himself onto it. “I’m wishin’ that I could have been here.”

  Chloe only nodded, then moved over to perch on the bench as well. Renewed silence fell between them for a while. At length Patrick cleared his throat.

  “Chloe, I —”

  “My parents are dead, are they not?”

  Patrick sucked in an involuntary breath, then nodded silently. “Aye, that they are, sweetie, killed in a minin’ accident a few days back.”

  Chloe looked at him. “That’s why the man in the suit came to call.”

  “A man in a suit?” Patrick was surprised; Capstone wasn’t prone to personal visits — but then, it wasn’t often that employees died before enrolling their children into indenture. “Aye, I imagine that’s why he would have come. Yer mum and da had not yet made arrangements with the Company for what was to happen to you. That’s why the Company called me.”

  “I thought so, but he left when I told him I was the only one here.”

  The girl was silent a moment, then slid closer to Patrick and laid her head on his shoulder. “I miss my mum,” she murmured. When he looked down he could see tears welling in her eyes, though there was no other indication that she was crying.

  “I miss your mum too, Chloe,” he said, gently putting one arm around her shoulders. “Your da as well.” The two of them sat t
here in shared grief for most of half an hour before Chloe sniffed once and sat up to look at her uncle.

  “What am I to do now, Uncle Patrick?” The tears were gone from her eyes, replaced by renewed uncertainty and a touch of fear.

  “Why, you’ll be comin’ to live with me, of course,” he told her, and received a stare in return.

  “But you live in space.”

  Somehow the sound of wonder in the girl’s voice brought a real smile to Patrick’s face. “Aye, Chloe, that I do,” he told her, for the first time since his arrival beginning to feel that having a young child to care for might not be such a bad thing. “That I do. And the wonder of it is that I don’t have a boss to report to, or a company to ask permission, to have my family come to stay. No one will say a thing about it. No one can tell me no, or go away, or drop dead.”

  “Your family?” Chloe sounded confused. “I didn’t know you had a family, Uncle Patrick.”

  “You are my family, sweetie,” he told her, and pulled her into a hug. When he let her go he gently lifted her face until he could catch her green eyes with his own pair of azure orbs. “You and me, we’re the only family that either of us has left.”

  Chloe returned his gaze, and after a moment a smile tentatively crept onto her face, for the first time since he’d arrived.

  2

  Present day

  With a sigh, Patrick shook himself free of those memories the sight of his niece so often triggered in him. Chloe — hardly a girl anymore, but a twenty-three-year-old woman — was at that moment lost in thought, her attention riveted on the desktop terminal from which she essentially ran the pirating operation her uncle had founded so many years before.

  He smiled at the sight of her before doing the usual visual scan of his surroundings, checking that there had been no recent air leaks. He was relieved to find none, even though the planetoid on which they were located had proven prone to such leaks in the past. The caves that served as headquarters for the organization were drab, yet ruggedly “homey” after more than a decade of use; the “room” where Chloe worked seemed particularly domestic, containing — along with two desks and the girl’s beloved computer — an eclectic array of chairs and a pair of couches that he knew, from all-too-frequent experience, made passable beds.