by Gary Jonas
Chandler shook his head. “No credits required. I have the giftwrapped recovery of a stolen luxury yacht, but when you raid the shipyard I need you to feed me all the information on who piloted that ship to the dock. I have no hope of getting it otherwise. I need to talk to him to get details on where a hostage might be kept.”
“You sure about the ship?”
Chandler shrugged. “About as sure as I was when I told you not to dance with that big-nosed woman in the bar on Prana.”
“Yeah, I married her.”
“Like I said, have I ever steered you wrong? What do you think? Stolen ship for some information?”
The man smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hank pulled up a visual of the planet Trent from the nav library on the main viewscreen. Its primary moon, Mordi, Randol’s home base, was their destination. They were making slow progress to it. The damaged hyperdrive kept them at only twenty percent of their maximum speed.
Sai sat on Hank’s lap with her arm around him. He zoomed in on Trent’s surface. The patchwork quilt of crops and the beauty of the oceans brought back memories.
“It reminds me of Hava,” Hank said. “Early mornings rising up out of bed to do chores. Fresh breakfast on the table when I got back.”
“Were your parents settlers, or had your family been raised on the planet?”
“Well, my dad was a soldier, born in the heart of techworlds. He joined the Confed and then left service with them to join the forces of one of the local human confederations on the edge of Manspace. He fought in the Cygnus uprising. He was wounded. Never quite healed right. Never talked about it much, but you could tell. He mostly just bummed around after the war. Odd jobs here and there. I have no idea what brought him to Hava, but that’s where he met my mother.”
“Farm girl and spacer romance story?” Sai traced her finger down Hank’s cheek, to his neck, and then she started playing with the bit of chest hair that was exposed in the notch of his partially opened shirt.
Hank smiled. “Pretty much. My mom would tell me stories about it when my dad wasn’t around. He didn’t talk about the past, ever. Good times or bad. He lived in the moment. One harvest at a time.”
“Did you have any brothers or sisters?”
“A younger brother, Roger. He died one winter of a sickness. We never figured out what it was. That’s the problem with a lot of these frontier worlds. Strange new microbes, not enough money to afford the latest medical technology. Things take a few generations to mutate to infect the human population. Likely it killed those without some sort of immunity and the rest of us will be never be bothered by it again.”
“Sounds like a hard life.”
“I thought so at the time. Looking back, it was pretty much paradise compared to the alternatives I’ve seen.”
“I don’t know if I have any brothers and sisters or not. No way of knowing.”
“You didn’t exactly have a pampered existence. Looks like it made you into a tough customer.”
Sai smiled and raised a fist toward Hank. “You know it.”
Hank took her small fist into his hand and brought it to his lips.
“Hank, it’s funny. Kids just don’t have any idea about what their life is really like until they look back. They don’t know they’re poor. They don’t appreciate it if they’re rich. I was warm and cozy in my room at Dirion’s. I didn’t know until later that it was basically a rat hole. Kids just have no clue about life.”
“I got news for you, darlin’—we still don’t. But I try my best to appreciate every good thing that happens in life every day. Tomorrow might be a sight less pleasant.”
Sai stroked the hair on Hank’s forehead. “So what finally happened on Hava? Why did you leave?”
“Well, like I said, I grew up milking cows and dodging horse shit. But as I grew, I developed a bad habit. I started to dream. I would stare up at the stars and wonder why anyone would choose to live on Hava rather than explore the galaxy. I got sick of the work and the monotony.”
Hank made an adjustment on the control panel.
“I was a stupid teenage kid, just the kind that joins the military. I signed up for a stint in the Scout Corps. It sounded exciting in the pamphlets—discover new worlds, make first contact with alien races, be a hero. They don’t print the casualty stats. My academy graduated two hundred, but only twenty-five were left after our first year in the field.”
“It must have been hard on you,” Sai said.
“You and your partner are out there so far from normal human life that you think you are the only humans in the universe after a while. I think Elsa is the only reason I didn’t crack up.”
“It’s about time you mentioned me,” Elsa said. “I thought you two had forgotten I was plugged in.”
Hank chuckled. “Elsa and I spent a lot of time working, exploring, drinking. That was before the accident, of course. She was just a lanky young lady with midnight-black hair and a mean temperament.”
“Some things don’t change,” Elsa said.
“Finally, I knew it was time to come home. Returning from my last tour of duty, I had the chance to stop by Hava on my way to HQ. There’d been a plague. Another microbe … some mutated virus. It devastated the population. This time it hit my mom and dad. They were long gone. If I’d stayed on the farm, I’d probably be dead, too. At the time I wondered if that hadn’t been my proper fate. All I know is that my childhood and everyone in it might as well have been a dream.”
It was quiet in the cockpit. Sai looked at Hank with moist eyes and whispered, “We all travel crooked roads. You can only move on.”
Hank sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring you down.”
Sai put a finger to his lips. “It’s okay.” She leaned over and kissed him.
Elsa’s voice interrupted their cuddling. “Well, if you two are finished with your hanky-panky, I need you to go back and look at the hyperdrive. I think you need to adjust the plasma flux manually.”
“If I didn’t know better, Elsa, I’d think you’re jealous.”
“I’m convinced she’s going to get tired of you pretty soon. You really aren’t as interesting as you think you are.”
“What? I am amazingly interesting. I fascinate myself at times. But more than that, I am roguish.”
“Roguish? As in dishonest and unprincipled? I suppose so, but I hardly call that an attractive trait.”
“No, no … sexually mischievous and happy-go-lucky, and women love that.”
Elsa let off a synthesized snort. “Only in holovids. In real life it gets annoying very quickly.”
“Sai, what do you think? You like roguish, right? It sets the juices flowing. Doesn’t it?”
Sai stood up and laughed. “No comment.” She left the pair bickering and went into the galley.
Lieutenant Commander Richmond was true to his word. In exchange for the information on the yacht, the Confed pulled the shipyard records and gave Chandler everything he wanted.
Rocco’s obviously forged records indicated that the ship had previously belonged to a Jack Melville out of Freemont City on Hampton. Chandler was not surprised when he discovered that Melville was a factory worker and had been dead for twenty years. That trail went nowhere.
But Chandler still had the pilot who had delivered the yacht to the shipyard. The ship hadn’t been conjured out of thin air; it had been delivered from some location, somewhere. Luckily, the pilot was a real, living, breathing, drinking person, and he wasn’t hard to find.
His name was Remo, and he was trying to make Chandler go broke buying him beer. Together they sat in a booth at a dive bar in Gardenburg, the largest city on Matilda.
“Let’s get back to the question,” Chandler said.
“Sure, I got nothing else to do but sit here and answer a bunch of fool questions,” Remo said, slurring his words. “But since you’re buying? Why not?”
“Where did you pick up the yacht? What sys
tem? What planet?”
“It’s really complicated.”
Chandler sighed. “How can it be complicated? Where did you go to pick it up?”
Remo laughed. “I went where they told me.”
“And where exactly was that?”
“Nowhere, I picked the thing up in open space. It was just floating. They gave me the control codes so I was able to dock with it and bring it in.”
“Didn’t you think that was pretty suspicious?”
Remo looked at Chandler with a blank expression. “I’m a very trusting person.”
“Yeah, I sensed that when I first met you,” Chandler said. “What were the coordinates?”
“I don’t remember the coordinates exactly, but it was in the area of the Outrigger Rift.”
The Outrigger Rift was a treacherous area of space that butted up against a major trade route. It was an odd area of asteroids, small planetoids, and bits of random matter and dust all drifting in a chaotic mass. There was something inherently wrong with the fabric of space-time in that particular part of the universe. Some theorized that distorted gravitational waves had ripped apart multiple star systems in the region, leaving the area looking like a junk pile of creation. No one knew for sure, but it was obvious that something catastrophic had occurred.
There were thousands of hiding places and no way to track ships in the midst of the swarm of debris. It was a perfect base of operations for pirates because even knowing that the outlaws were there made no difference. It would take the entire Confed fleet years to conduct a complete search.
“Can you get me the coordinates somehow?” Chandler asked.
“Maybe, if I had enough motivation,” Remo said.
“I could make it worth your while.”
“How?”
“Does seventy-five credits sound good?”
“A hundred would sound more inspiring,” he said, smiling.
“Done,” Chandler said, handing the man a credit stick. “Now where do we need to go to get the coordinates?”
“My pants,” Remo said as he reached into his back pocket. He withdrew a small device, then tapped a few keys. He scrolled through a list and found what he was looking for.
“Let me send it over.”
Chandler took his notescribe out and received the coordinates.
“There you go,” Remo said, pocketing the device. “Good luck with that.”
Chandler looked at the numbers—the coordinates really were in the middle of nowhere.
“Who contacted you? Who hired and paid you?”
“Listen, buddy, I’m happy to have the work. I do my job and take the pay. People know what I do and how to find me. They tell me where to go, and if the money is good I move things from point A to point B. Simple.”
“You realize that the ship was stolen,” Chandler said.
“I don’t know nothing about stolen ships. I just deliver them.”
“I have it on good authority that it was probably stolen by Thorne.”
Remo nodded. “Odds are that’s true. He steals a bunch of them. I know. I used to work for the crazy sword-carrying bastard. I spent a year on that rock he calls his lair.”
“You’ve been to his base?”
“I just said I spent a year there.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s in the Outrigger Rift.”
“Where?”
“No idea.”
Chandler sighed and rubbed his forehead. “What do you mean? You lived there for a year.”
Remo nodded. “Yep, and in that whole time I never set my butt in a pilot’s chair. I never saw the readout of a nav computer, and I didn’t want to. I never told anyone I could pilot. You see—”
Remo put an arm around Chandler and leaned in. His breath could have peeled paint.
“—I wanted to leave after I got my money. No one who knows where the base is gets to leave. Sure, they get paid better, they get first dibs on the food and the hookers, and they have better quarters, but they’re just high-paid prisoners. Thorne can’t afford to let them out. The Confed would find ’em and get ’em to talk and Thorne would have a battlecruiser up his butt.”
Remo took another drink. “Thorne is crazy, but he ain’t stupid.”
“Can you give me some information about the base? Tell me the layout, how many men, the security?” Chandler asked.
Remo nodded. “Sure, give me enough money and I’ll tell you everything.”
“Do you know where they keep prisoners?”
Remo shrugged. “I know the general area. But they don’t normally let the grunts in that part of the base.”
They haggled a bit and determined a price. Remo detailed the number of men and the number of ships normally stationed at the base. He wasn’t sure how they determined their targets. They lucked out on a few, but typically he knew they set off on sorties with a known target because they were well prepared.
He roughed out a map of what he knew of the base. He said it was an old mining asteroid or moon. All underground. They didn’t really have much internal security except for the areas that were off-limits. It was a secret base, after all, and they all knew each other by sight.
Chandler had found the ship, found someone who knew the inner workings of the base, and even knew the area where the base was located, but space was still a big place. He needed a pilot. Someone in the inner circle who knew the actual coordinates.
“Stupid question, but do you have any idea how someone could contact Thorne?” Chandler asked.
“His comlink ID number?”
“Sure,” Chandler said.
“That really is a stupid question. He calls me. The money appears in my account. I don’t call Thorne.”
“Here’s another. Let’s say I wanted to have Thorne contact me, how could I do it?”
“Just go to the Rift, sail slow, and look rich and stupid. That shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. If he’s out there, he’ll find you. Eventually.”
Glenn, Thorne’s second-in-command, walked from the communications station to the pirate lord’s command chair and quietly said something into his ear.
“Who is it?” Thorne asked, incredulous. “Run that by me again.”
“Your boss, sir,” Glenn said. “Or at least that’s who he claims to be. It’s our informant.”
Thorne stood and paced the command deck of his flagship, the Naglfar. In the three years Thorne had been working with his anonymous informant, he had only once before been contacted directly, and it hadn’t been pleasant. At that time, Thorne’s men had just flubbed a raid on a freighter loaded with expensive military equipment. They had blown it up by mistake, destroying the cargo. The man had not been pleased and had threatened to start giving his information to someone else in the future. It had taken a lot to calm him down. But this boss business was pushing it.
“Clear the room and put it through.”
Glenn ushered the command staff out the door, locked it, and went to the communications station to patch the connection over.
The image of a black, featureless figure appeared on the main viewscreen. The man was using a stealthcloak filter to protect his identity while still displaying his outline. The background was hazy and indistinct. “Thorne, I am not a happy man,” the informant said, his voice distorted.
“What’s the problem?”
“You’re the problem,” the figure raised an indistinct finger and pointed it at Thorne. “I asked you to do a simple task, to intercept and destroy one little trading ship, and now I hear that you attacked and it got away. You’ve failed me.”
“Little trading ship, my ass! The fleet got a report that the Elsa had been spotted and we tried to converge on it. Unfortunately, one of my Marauders got excited and engaged it before I got there. I was looking forward to some action, too. No matter, I won’t have to punish them. All we found was the wreckage and a vapor trail. This was not some harmless trading vessel. It had a plasma cannon mounted on it! That’s information that co
uld have proven useful, had you mentioned it in your message.”
“Field operations are your department. If your men are stupid enough to engage a ship without adequate backup then they deserve what they get. My problem is that now I have to change tactics. I have to risk exposing one of my assets to prevent that ship from arriving. It’s a complication, a surprise. I don’t like surprises. I expect you to carry out my orders.”
“Orders? I find it curious that you think you have any ability to order me to do anything. You’re not my superior. It would be a stretch to call you a partner. I do all the actual work. I chose to follow your little tips here and there because it’s been profitable to us all. But I’m not your employee and I’m sure as hell not your servant. You’d better get that through your head. Or I may have to explain it to you in person. You shouldn’t rely on the protection your steathcloak affords. I can find you if I put my mind to it. That issue aside, how important could one trading ship be?”
“Important enough that I feel a promotion is in order.”
“Promotion? What do you mean?”
“Your second-in-command, Glenn, is now in charge.”
Thorne laughed. “Over my dead body. You’re delusional.” Thorne turned to face Glenn. “Isn’t that right, Glenn?”
Glenn drew his pistol and shot Thorne, point-blank between the eyes, without saying a word. Thorne collapsed in a heap on the deck. Glenn holstered his weapon and took his place in the command chair.
“Very good, Glenn,” the informant said. “The Elsa is attempting to land on Mordi. They expect to be welcomed, but they will be sent away. Send strike ships and ground ops teams to the area. I’m giving you the communication protocols for Randol’s security force. Monitor their transmissions and follow the Elsa’s progress. Intercept them.”
“Aye. I’ll accompany the men myself. They need to be watched carefully. They aren’t the brightest bunch.”
“By the way, is your name really Glenn? Don’t you have a better pirate name? I don’t think Glenn presents the right level of imminent threat for a pirate lord.”