Wrecker's Moon

by Patrick McClafferty

  Wrecker’s Moon

  By PD McClafferty

  Copyright © 2016 PD McClafferty

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9864245-5-7

  Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. The Den

  2. The Convoy

  3. History Lesson

  4. The Smith Family

  5. Wecarro

  6. And Then There Were None

  7. A Second Chance

  8. Recovery

  9. Wecarro Reprised

  10. Meetings And Rendevous’

  11. The Refinery

  Chapter 1

  THE DEN

  Mocking laughter brought her back to her senses, and Kelsoe struggled to open her eyes. The worn deck plating was cold against her cheek and the side of her head where she’d been punched pounded like a kettle drum. Swallowing, she tasted the coppery tang of her blood. It took a supreme effort to slowly push herself into a sitting position, her back against a chill corridor wall. Taking deep breaths to calm her wildly beating heart, she slowly took in the figure standing before her, starting with the heavy work boots and loose grey shipsuit that did nothing to conceal the powerful frame of Kir-Tan TelBareth. In her mind she groaned.

  It had been her fault, really. She hadn’t been paying attention on her way back to the wrecked ship where she lived, when Kir-Tan had stepped out of a darkened side corridor and sucker punched her in one motion. She’d caught a brief glimpse of his flaming red hair just before his fist struck the side of her head. Now he stood, hands on his hips, leering down on her.

  “I told you not to make trouble for us.” Kir-Tan growled as he glanced over his shoulder to give the other four members of his gang a smirking grin. Kelsoe noted in an offhand way that his teeth were brown. “The shift boss never even knew about the drugs we took off that last wreck…until you told him.”

  “You know the rules about keeping plunder for yourself.” Kelsoe shot back angrily. “Besides, those drugs make you crazy and a danger to everyone. We all live in a closed environment here on the moon, and one screw-up from you while you’re high and we’re all breathing vacuum.”

  The young man made a dismissive gesture, and then his eyes narrowed. “How would you know the effects of the drugs?”

  She shifted her position slightly. “I read, Kir-Tan, and I study. When we lure a ship in to crash on our moon I read up on her drive systems, her hyper-electronics and her cargo. You should try it some time.”

  “I read a book—once.” He mumbled in reply and looking down, seemed to see her for the first time since he’d knocked her to the floor. “Sooo, now that you’re down there…” He said, taking a step forward to loom over the fallen girl.

  Pushing a strand of glossy black hair from her face, Kelsoe gave him a wide-eyed innocent look, that should have made him wary, but didn’t. “What do you mean, Kir-Tan?” She asked in a soft contralto voice, slowly flexing and unflexing her right hand to loosen the muscles as her implanted AI, at her direction, increased her adrenalin and oxygen levels, tripling the strength of her muscles. As close as he was, she caught a whiff of Kir-Tan’s sour body odor. Fear left a bitter taste on her tongue.

  Hooking his thumbs in his belt, fingers pointing toward his crotch, he stepped closer. “You know what I want,” he whispered, his voice rough with lust. Behind him one of his sycophants giggled. Reaching out, she brought her hand up between his legs, grabbing his crotch with her right hand. She felt the heat of his body through the thin material of the shipsuit, and the young man’s grin widened… right up to the point where she began to squeeze.

  For as long as she could remember, Kelsoe had been a slave and then, when she showed a natural talent for the equipment, assistant to the Den’s Chief Engineer, G'Fleuf Bolsorg, the grey-skinned tentacled creature that ran much of the maintenance in the Den. She’d been operating cutters and power wrenches from the time she could physically lift them, and as a result was exceptionally strong in her hands and arms, not just for a human, but for any flesh-and-blood creature. Having a small AI implanted in her hip, thanks to G'Fleuf, that could boost that strength by three hundred percent simply by increasing adrenaline and oxygen in her blood, was merely icing on the cake. Kir-Tan’s face went white as his mouth opened in a silent scream. “Why, whatever is the matter Tan?” She asked, her grey eyes icy. Getting young, and not so young, women alone in the far corridors of the Den was a favorite tactic of Kir-Tan, but it had never happened to Kelsoe until now. It wouldn’t happen again, of that she was certain. The young man’s green eyes widened as the pressure increased. Taking a deep breath, she squeezed as hard as she possibly could with a grip that could bend metal or snap tools. Beneath her fingers and inside his baggy shipsuit, she felt something crunch. Tan gasped in pain and folded to the deck, his eyes rolling back into his head. Brushing her hands off and ignoring the wave of dizziness that swept her, Kelsoe stood and gave the members of Kir-Tan’s gang a cold look before she held out her right hand, fingers hooked threateningly like a claw. With hands protectively over their crotches, the four turned and bolted down the dim corridor, leaving their fallen leader where he lay. Kir-Tan was a tall young man, eighteen years old and nearly six feet two inches to her five foot ten inches, but now it was he that lay groaning in the corridor at her feet.

  Her eyes followed the progress of the running cronies for a moment or two and then, snorting to herself in derision, she bent to retrieve her fallen bag of parts painstaking removed from the navigation section of the latest victim of the Wrecker’s Moon. In the Empire navigational charts the name was officially, and appropriately, known as Charybdis. The victim this time had been a half-mile long liner named the Lunare Queen that had split open like a ripe melon on impact. Stripping the bridge, navigation and engineering of useful hyper-electronic equipment was her job; messy and often disgusting after a bad crash, but somebody had to do it if they wanted to go on getting fed. The twenty bosses, including the different shift bosses, that held the Den in their iron grip lived deep underground with their private guards and controlled the only food replicators and, of course, the Lure; the complicated device of what some said was alien manufacture that could twist jump coordinates in such a way that ships coming out of the local jump space node would wind up on a collision course for the moon, where the wreckers waited. The Lure was used judiciously, and only when a good profit could be made. The two hundred and seventy wreckers of Charybdis had a good thing going for them, and they knew it.

  Kelsoe Shaheera Trikellien paused in rubbing her bruised fingers to punch the combination to the hatch of the crashed science vessel that she called home. The Den was a collection of crashed ships and underground caves, all connected by an elaborate series of tunnels and corridors that spread out in a wide deep crater on the Wrecker’s Moon like a strange spider web. The least damaged of the salvaged ships, the former Science Vessel Dellingham now supplied power and air to the rest of the Den. The door swung open on well-oiled hinges and Kelsoe stepped into the main living area of the ship. The air lock had been removed sometime in the distant past and the interior of the former Fleet ship now smelled faintly of sandalwood incense.

  “I’m back!” She called out wearily, shutting and locking the door behind her. The patter of a dozen small steps echoed down the corridor, and G'Fleuf Bolsorg shuffled into the room on his dozen tentacled legs. The height of a ten year old human child, G’Fleuf looked like a walking grey skinned octopus. If it hadn’t b
een for the small green backpack he always wore to provide him with suitable air to breath, and the small silver medallion about his neck, the illusion would have been complete. He stopped in the center of the room, his saucer sized golden eyes growing wider.

  “You have been hurt.” He murmured from the small silver device on his chest. G’Fleuf didn’t have vocal cords that would reproduce human sounds so the silver medallion, a product of Empire engineering, received the audio output directly from his brain, and converted it into understandable speech. A small tentacle uncurled from his upper torso, one of two he used for manipulation, and gently touched the purpling bruise on the side of her face.

  Kelsoe dropped heavily onto the battered couch, slipped off her boots and propped her feet up with a sigh of bliss. “Kir-Tan TelBareth caught me in the corridors.” She groaned, setting the bag of valuable parts on the couch beside her and closing her eyes.

  “What???” G’Fluef’s tentacles bristled. “Did he…” Usually a walking dictionary, the small Drugud, it was as close as Kelsoe could come to pronouncing his species’ name, seemed to be at a loss for words.

  “No.” She replied, not bothering to open her eyes as she held up her hand. “I amped-up and gave him a 500 psi squeeze. He got the point almost at once.” She chuckled. “Not bad for a fifteen year old, eh?”

  “Not bad for anyone, my dear. Did you kill him?”

  “No.” She admitted, her face slipping into a frown. “But I think I ensured that he will never procreate, thank the gods.” Her voice was beginning to slur from weariness.

  “It might have been better if you had killed him. He will be after you with a vengeance when he recovers.” He paused. “Kelsoe?” He asked, but she was already asleep. Quietly he picked up and opened the bulging bag beside her, and again his eyes widened as he slowly withdrew a king’s ransom in fragile hyper-electronic circuits. The golden eyes looked down on the young woman fondly. “Not bad for a fifteen year old indeed.”

  She murmured something, rolled over and opened her eyes. The room was her own bedroom and she frowned, unsure how she’d gotten there.

  “Time?” She said to the air.

  “The time is ten thirty a.m.” A neutral voice said out of the air.

  She settled back against her pillow and pulled the warm blanket up to her chin. It had been about eleven p.m. on their twenty four hour clock when she had finally gotten home. She smiled to herself. As battered as I was when I arrived, G’Fleuf probably let me sleep in. Kelsoe mused as her fingers went unconsciously to her face. She frowned. Her head should have been a large throbbing mass of pain today, but she felt…fine. Tossing her blanket aside, she grabbed her old tattered but very comfortable blue bathrobe and headed for the door. The mirror in the bathroom showed her a moderately pretty, serious young woman with shoulder length black hair tousled from sleep and grey eyes that sometimes appeared blue, shooting a questioning look back at her. There was no sign of a bruise on her fair skin.

  “Hey!” She called out when she reached the main room. “What the hell did you do to…”

  “Kelsoe.” The recorded voice of G’Fleuf said from the air. “I set this to reply when you started shouting.”

  I wasn’t shouting. She grumbled to herself.

  “You seem to have forgotten,” the voice continued, “that this is a Fleet Science Vessel. Although we’ve seldom used it in the past, it has a wonderful sick bay, complete with regeneration and bio-enhancement modules. Three hours in there fixed you right up, and before you say anything remember that it is written into my contract that the bosses run the replicators and the Lure. I run everything else. I can’t help it if they forgot that I have a sick bay available. While you were in the chamber having your bruises repaired, I had a chance to install the corneal implants we spoke of earlier, along with a tiny induction microphone implanted in your jaw bone that will allow you to communicate subvocally to your AI, or to anyone else you should chose to communicate with. Once they are activated and linked to your AI you should find many things much easier.” Kelsoe worried for a moment at his reference to many things, and then began to laugh at G’Fleuf’s flair for the melodramatic. “There is fresh fruit in the reefer, and hot klah. I will be back about noon.”

  Sitting on the faded couch sipping the hot, sweet, slightly cinnamon cup of klah, Kelsoe reminisced about her life in the Den. Her earliest memories were of G’Fleuf caring for her. From a young age she had been told that she was the child of a starliner survivor, and after her mother’s death was claimed as a slave by G’Fleuf, a bribe to keep him working on the complex systems that kept the Den alive, and that only he seemed to understand. She had watched other residents of the Den who were slaves of other owners, and their lives were quite unlike hers. While they lived in fear for their lives, she lived in…comity. For her first few years she was simply G’Fleuf’s go-fer; going fer this and going fer that. Later, when she showed an aptitude for complex equipment with her quick nimble fingers and quicker mind, she began to help her small owner in more delicate matters. He, in turn, began to teach her, first the basics of reading, writing and mathematics, and later science and the arts. The crashed starships usually had extensive libraries all stored in neat, shock proof crystals. G’Fleuf found to his surprise, that Kelsoe had an appetite for learning that was nearly as eclectic as it was insatiable. When she hit her teens G’Fleuf began to teach her human biology, along with a variant of the martial arts named Kran-Chak, usually reserved for the Staarkand Empire’s Special Forces. Kelsoe began to develop certain suspicions about her owner when G’Fleuf started to give her weapons instruction in the small but very complete holographic range on the science ship, but she was having altogether too much fun and decided to keep her mouth shut.

  The door to the ship swung open, and G’Fleuf padded in on soft noiseless tentacles followed immediately by a small hover sled piled high with supplies and equipment. “I’m glad to see you up and around.” The sled followed him like an obedient dog into the galley, where he began to unload bins of food into the pantry and the reefer. “I picked up our food allotment for the week, and repaired a moisture condenser in section seventeen.” He shut the reefer door slowly. “The equipment here is falling apart, you know, and won’t last more than a few more years, even with our repairs.”

  Kelsoe gave him a level look. “I know. We’re doing three times the repairs we did a year ago. What are we going to do?”

  G’Fleuf cocked his head, actually the upper quarter of his body, to the side in a purely human gesture, answering her question as he often did, with another question. “What would you have us do?” He prompted, his golden eyes intent.

  She chewed her lip for a moment before answering. “Keep our eyes open,” she finally volunteered, “and make plans to leave.”

  The small Drugud’s face was unreadable but then it always was, however a tension seemed to go out of his tentacles. “Very good.” G’Fleuf let out a small hissing laugh. “But keep your ideas to yourself and me. The bosses would kill us if they knew.”

  She glared at the small creature. “I’m not stupid, you know.” Her voice was harder than she’d intended.

  “I know, Kelsoe.” The small silver speaker was silent for several moments. “You should grab a quick meal and get back to work on the Lunare Queen before the snitches notice that you’re missing.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I was enjoying my day off.” She grumbled in a whiny little girl voice, but her grin took away any bite the comment might have had as she headed for the kitchen. “Thanks for patching me up.” She said over her shoulder, her face buried in the refrigerator.

  “It was my pleasure.” G’Fleuf replied softly.

  The liner Lunare Queen sat at the end of a five mile long trench it had scooped out of the rocky soil, its nose crumbled against the side of a white quartz cliff, cracks like a dropped egg running up its smooth shining sides. Two miles away to the lunar south lay the remains of another ship, this one no more than chunks and pieces o
f glittery metal scattered over the bleak lunar plain. In the far distance Kelsoe could see still more glints from other crashed ships.

  “I hear that there were survivors.” The driver of the small ten man salvage sled muttered over his shoulder on the open com. To his side the dusty white lunar plain slipped by as the sled, floating a yard above the well-traveled road, approached the crashed starship.

  The man sitting behind him shrugged. “There were four or five.” His voice was bleak. “All men.” His grin in the clear helmet was desolate. “They had real pretty suits though. Too bad they won’t need them anymore.”

  “Damn!” The driver rumbled. “We need more women. The ones we got are getting a little… tired.” Kelsoe heard him let out a nasty laugh, and shuddered. The fate of most women in the Den wasn’t pleasant, and only luck had kept her from joining them. The sled slowed as it neared the crumbled nose of the vessel, and Kelsoe tapped the driver on the shoulder. He glanced at her as she picked up her bag of tools. “Probably not very nice in there.” He muttered.

  She shot him a flat look. “It isn’t, but I dig out the electronics because I like to eat.”

  “There is that.” He returned. “I’ll be back in two hours, and then every two hours for the rest of my shift. Meet me here if you want to go back.” The girl gave him a thumbs up, not even bothering to turn around. Her footsteps raised clouds of white, snow-like dust as she walked toward the broken ship.

  The emergency lights were slowly failing, casting haunting shadows in the crushed and twisted corridors of the huge starship with a flickering yellow light. Stepping through a wide crack in the hull, the young woman shivered as she imagined what it would be like trying to navigate the corridors of the ship in the dark. In the bridge the crew were still strapped to their seats where they died, flash frozen with looks of horror on their grey faces. Ignoring the bodies, smashed screens and generally bent appearance of the bridge, Kelsoe went straight to a wall at the back of the room where a panel stood open. Clipping a small magnetic light to the metal hull above it, she went to work carefully removing the small, exquisitely expensive components. Starliners like the Queen had nothing but the best.