by Chris Hechtl
There was a spatter of dark almost hysterical laughter around the room. “Are you kidding? We're sport to them. When we are no longer useful, they chuck us out the nearest lock laddie,” the dwarf growled.
“Thought so,” John sighed.
“So, it's important to be useful, but not too useful. If you get too useful than someone else becomes a liability. You catch my drift?” Ian said warningly. John nodded. “Bad things happen. Accidents and all that.”
“What he's saying is that if you kiss ass too much and fix things too well, than the Horathian's will weed out the borderline people. We don't want that Admiral,” Sprite said. Irons grunted. He didn't need her translating that for him.
“What I'd love to know is why? Why do all this?” John said, waving his hands.
“Well, it's partly fun for them,” Ian said, hunkering down into a squat. John joined him. He looked over to the dwarf. The man had massive gnarled hands. He was a brawler, but also a hard worker.
“It's also their policy on weeding out aliens,” the dwarf rumbled. He pointed a meaty thumb at his chest. “Vestri Sindri.”
“John Doe,” the Admiral replied.
“You must be quite the engineer to keep that ship running.”
“A fair bit,” John replied with a knowing smile. The dwarf stared at him for a long moment with one bushy eyebrow raised. After a moment he made a huffing sound in amusement.
“And yes, I know the origin of your name. Well, the first part is Old Norse mythology for the Western dwarf. Sindri was the name of the dwarven smith in Norse mythology who made the gifts of the gods including Mjolnir.” He cocked his head. “A fine name for an engineer.”
“You don't say,” the dwarf rumbled, chuckling. He slapped the Admiral on the shoulder. Irons didn't flinch. “You and I will get on just fine then,” he said, chuckling.
John nodded to him and then returned his attention to Ian. “You were saying cap. I mean skipper?”
Ian nodded in appreciation at the catch. He looked around and then tucked his hands in his armpits. “We've picked up a few things. For instance, Horath is no longer set to just put their anti alien policy on their own world. Now they want to expand it. They've been doing it for years.”
“You don't say,” the Admiral said.
“From what we've gathered, Horath has managed to rebuild dozens of small warships and has over thirty freighters in its merchant fleet. That was all before they became aggressive and began sending out raiders.”
“I see,” John replied darkly.
“And that was oh, about five or six hundred years ago. They've been taking their ill-gotten gains back to Horath. There is no telling what they've done with it all since then. Or what else they have found.”
John made a face. “Yeah,” he said, remembering some of the intelligence reports they had gotten after the battle of Pyrax. Some of this he knew, but... he shook his head. “Not good,” he murmured.
Ian looked at him. “Understatement of the century,” he exhaled noisily. The engineer looked up as someone spoke his name. He waved and moved off, patting Irons on the knee as he left.
Ian snorted. “I think he was bucking for a fight just to prove he's still a hard headed bastard,” he said in an aside to John. John sniffed softly.
“Some people bond over a fight. Honor of a warrior,” John replied.
“Yeah some. We've talked him out of it. We get enough bruises from the Horathians,” Ian said darkly.
“I know,” John said, rubbing his temple. He could feel the bruise there.
“Go get cleaned up,” Ian suggested, waving him to the small sink. “You look like shit.”
“Gee thanks,” John replied dryly. Straightening up. “I think I will.”
He went over to the small sink. People looked up and got out of his way. Some with dark looks, some with their heads down. He cataloged them, not just in who might be a threat, there were a few, but also in who had some spirit left, and who didn't. Of course one brief encounter wasn't much to go on, but it was a start.
There were sixty-four non-Horathian prisoners in the twenty capacity brig of the destroyer. They took prisoners out in lots of six to fifteen each shift depending on the work. Sometimes they formed work parties doing cleaning jobs; sometimes they were broken into smaller groups and then chained to consoles to man unimportant parts of the ship's engineering.
Irons wondered about the wisdom of that. He could use it. Placing bugs or a virus... nanites. It all came back to nanites. He put the thought aside as they continued. From the sound of it, what they were telling him was a well-rehearsed lecture.
Most of the ships companies had been taken intact. However, two ships had failed fusion reactors, the Jaw-te and the Anderson. One had a plasma leak, which had gutted the ship. She was a derelict. The other ship had her reactor and hyperdrive offline. Both ships were being used as parts. The apparent plan was to get at least the other two ships functional enough to leave the system.
“That and the prison barges,” Ian said darkly. “My Deianira and Franx's Le More.”
“Prison barges? I didn't detect any power readings from them,” John said.
“That's because the Captain had them shut down the moment you showed up,” Ian replied darkly. Now the Admiral knew why some looked at him with hostility, they blamed him for...
Ian shook his head. “I know what you're thinking, and no, not all. Some maybe. Probably definitely lost some. But it's not your fault.” He turned to the compartment at large. “You hear me? It's not on him. It could have been him, or someone else, or the sick bastards. Get over it,” he said gruffly.
After a moment there were a few sheepish or grudging nods of acceptance. Ian stared a few hardheaded people down until they looked away. Finally he returned his attention to John.
“They used heat exchangers and batteries to keep the life support minimally functioning. Now that you are caught,” the smile he had wasn't nice. “Now that you are caught they will hopefully switch the power back on.”
“How many?” the Admiral asked.
“I don't know if we have hard numbers. A couple hundred,” Ian said.
“More or less. Most likely less now.”
“Misery loves company,” Captain Franx said.
“Entirely too true in our case,” Ian sighed. Some among the group nodded.
“Occasionally the Captain would send over a work crew made up of prisoners to get a part or to do a survey. Usually it is make-work. Dangerous make work, but we don't have a choice.”
“Why not use the crews on the wrecks?”
“Oh, sorry, I'm talking about the dead ships.”
“Oh.”
The Admiral glanced at Bard. The big man was lounging back, head back, eyes closed. He seemed to have nodded off, recovering.
Both the Jaw-te and Anderson were dead they would never fly again. From the sound of it, Anderson, the ship with the least amount of damage had her hyperdrive melted down. Irons wasn't sure how that was even possible, the dark matter in the drive should have destroyed the ship had the shell been breached. He glanced at the diminutive engineer. He might have had a hand in it, John mused. He couldn't blame him, a little act of revenge to make certain the bastards didn't run off with his baby.
Anderson was little more than a skeleton now. Jaw-te wasn't far behind, but the ship's components didn't mesh well in the surviving ships.
“It's all that Supreme Secretary President Pyotr Ramichov. He's the ruler of the Horathian system. Only now they are declaring it an empire and him as their first emperor,” Captain Franx interjected with acid commentary. “He just had his coronation, they got a courier in with a stick. The Horathian's here even got to watch,” he said, indicating the dark LCD mounted in the one corner of the ceiling. “He wants every scrap of hardware shipped back to the Horathian home system. They are building for an offensive.”
“Empire huh?” John mused. “I had heard the old Federation was...” he let the leading question die w
hen no one answered; they just hunched their shoulders.
“Emperor,” Ian glanced at the others in the room. “Ramichov is a conqueror, determined to turn himself into the “First Emperor of Man” on the ashes of the old Federation. He has been planning on building a human empire, destroying any and all aliens that they can find. They've already taken a half a dozen worlds.”
“Really?”
Franx nodded. “They had their hooks in Finagle, Garth, and Dead Drop.” He glanced over to the dwarf who had come back to stand nearby. The dwarf nodded, adding his considerable weight to the subject.
John pondered that for a moment. “Where else? You said six?”
“More than six. But they announced six, the three Franx here mentioned, plus this fleet has taken New Horizon, Hinata, Konohagakure. They dispatched a force to hit OTBP too.”
Sprite plotted each mentioned world on a star chart. They made sense, well most of them. OTBP, or 'Off The Beaten Path' was a cul-de-sac agro system that was indeed, off the beaten path. Apparently the Horathian's were being thorough.
“No doubt they've rolled right through them as well. No one has any defenses,” Sindri rumbled, shaking his head.
“I heard Hinata and Konohagakure both put up a fight, but not much of one. All they had were a few antique gunships.”
“Like spitting in the wind,” the dwarf rumbled. The others nodded and murmured in misery. “They've already started,” he turned his head and spat. “Cleansing procedures on those worlds. Aliens and Neo's rounded up in internment camps for processing. Genocide, all neat and tidy,” he growled.
“Admiral, ask them about this fleet they mentioned,” Sprite urged as the Admiral struggled to keep his poker face. Rage raced through him at the idea of killing millions.
John cleared his throat. Some of the murmuring dropped away. “Yes?” the dwarf asked.
“Ian, you mentioned a fleet?” he said, turning to the Captain.
McGuyver nodded. “Two,” he said, holding up two fingers. “Task forces. One headed east from Horath under the command of a Rear Admiral Cartwright. The other is this one. They have been sweeping up ships and colonies as they go. They don't seem to be in a hurry though.”
“Maybe someone gave them indigestion,” Sindri rumbled.
“One can only hope,” John murmured. He turned frowning for a moment. “The thing is, I remember one ship here, the one that attacked me.”
“The rest aren't here. Something about in Beta 101a1.”
John hid a flinch, knowing what they were probably up to. Sprite was right. He waited for the 'I told you so' but she merely nodded on his HUD. Pursing his lips in thought, Admiral Irons tapped his implants and tentatively felt out the area once more while listening to the others explain the situation.
“Are they supposed to meet up or something?” Sprite finally asked. She plotted the progress of the two phantom fleets on the map. “Do they have any information on the makeup of the fleets?”
John cocked his head. He used his text file. “Not now,” he replied cursedly and then returned his attention to the briefing.
“As I said, they are short handed. We're the slaves. We are required to perform scutt work periodically, usually cleaning gangs or work in the waste recycler. They don't trust us with anything dangerous,” Ian said, smiling a sour smile.
John nodded.
“Even high radiation work from time to time. I've gone out into the dark a few times, and a couple of our guys were tapped to play bot inside Anderson's reactor before they yanked it out. That didn't work out for them.” He looked away bleakly.
“Two of our people have died from radiation sickness, the last one Oro died a week ago. They left him in here a couple days before they finally spaced him,” Sindri said.
“We've got another guy, Merlo over there,” Ian waved to a bald skeletal male near the head. “He's had a high dose, but we think it wasn't fatal so he is recovering. Don't mess with him; he's been through enough. And when the cancer's kick in...” he shook his head.
John glanced at the male, scanning him. He had cataracts forming over his eyes, tumors boiled under his skin. He was alive, clinging to life for some reason. He'd lost all his hair and over ten kilos in weight but had lived through it.
There was one medic, a spacer with first aid training. He was Horathian. Two of the surviving officers had first aid training but they left that duty to the Horathian since he could get supplies out of the guards, they couldn't.
Admiral Irons picked up that the ship’s crew was short handed; they had captured four other ships earlier. Those ships were gone; apparently they had used the materials from the recent captures to get them off to who knows where.
The four prize crews that had been sent off had cut the crew down to a skeleton watch. There was the single squad of guards, six of the bridge crew, a handful of engineering officers, and thirty eight of the original one hundred enlisted remaining. Plus about a dozen trustees, men and women who were not from Horath but had professed an interest in the Horathian view. Those numbers didn't include the eight guards and one officer on each of the prison ships.
Most of the trained personnel were off on the prizes; those that remained were either draftees from the prize ships or people with questionable skills.
“That's insane. Why would a Captain willingly give up good people?” Sprite commented.
“Perhaps they needed them in order to man the prize ships. Now he had dregs,” the Admiral replied through the text chat, trying to focus on the other prisoners.
“So, everyone works? Including them?” John asked, pointing a finger briefly to a Horathian.
Franx looked to where he was pointing and his face soured. “Course not.”
“Ah,” John replied thoughtfully. “Now I see an advantage to their being in the brig.”
The other Captain looked at him as if he was crazy. John shrugged, smiling crookedly. “Think about it. They get to sit on their racks all day while everyone else busts their butts.”
“True,” Franx replied, but there was no humor in it. He shook his head.
“They are spread thin, with so many ships to man. The crew of one ship was never meant to cover seven, now eight ships,” Franx explained.
“They have no one on Anderson and Jaw-te right?” the Admiral asked.
Franx shook his head. “The constant short crews is making the current crew work double shifts, and some of us prisoner slaves have even been drafted to fill in when there was a hole in the schedule or someone was injured. Four of the enlisted were down with a flu bug they had picked up from one of the prizes, and the exec had them isolated in sickbay to prevent contamination of the rest of the crew.”
“Lovely.”
“The problem, at least from their viewpoint, is that they can't trust us. So, they have to have someone watching us at all times, and going over whatever we do. Which pretty much makes having us man critical functions out.”
“True,” John replied.
“The flu... they blame it on us,” Ian said darkly. “I wonder about that.”
There was some dark talk about the illness, was it really the flu or an STD, or worse.
“It doesn't matter,” Franx said firmly, waving a hand to cut the discussion off. John nodded. Discussing that wasn't productive.
“Do your job, whatever they assign you. Don't muck around, and don't drag ass. They are just looking for some excuse to beat the crap out of you,” Franx said, turning to John. “You're going to get beat a lot the first week, just to show you who's boss. Get over it. Don't hunch up or it'll go worse for you. Try to protect your head and torso as much as you can.”
“John nodded.
“The bastards love to find something, anything to use as an excuse to torture... I mean punish you for some transgression.” His face went bleak and angry for a moment. John noted the long lines and crow's feet. He revised Franx's age upward by at least a decade. “Whipping is a favorite way of dealing out discipline to the slaves an
d crew. It depends on the guy doing it. Some sick bastards...” he shivered ever so slightly and wiggled his ass.
John winced, not sure he wanted to know more. Hell, certain he didn't.
“Admiral, the two fleets act like a probe in force; sent out to steam roll the sector. If they hit anything hard enough to stop them, like oh, Pyrax, they send back word,” Sprite interjected in the lull. “We need to warn Pyrax.”
“Speculation,” he texted back. “Later.”
He listened as the prisoners described some of the tastes of the Horathians.
The pirates raped the crew on their off time, men and women alike. Fortunately they hadn't had any off time in two weeks. The pressure was building up, Irons realized, when they did finally get the go ahead to unwind, it would be ugly for the prisoners.
He listened to them relate some of the things that had happened; glad he had cybernetics to hold down his gorge.
Most of the aliens and Neo's were used as toys for the sadists. Any who refused to play were either tortured or were thrown out an airlock. By now there were only a couple of neo chimps and two genie humans left on the prison ships, or so they had heard. Some of the victims had given up hope and managed to go out on their own terms, committing suicide in one way or another to deny the Horathian's the satisfaction of watching them die. After one chimp had killed a Horathian and then committed suicide, they had taken out their ire on the survivors, making it a point that if any prisoner harmed one of them ten of the prisoners would be tortured to death.
Refusing to eat was a slow death. “There are plenty of others here who would gladly take your food. A few were refused food for one reason or another. We watched them die,” Franx said.
“Yeah, that's not happening,” Sprite, said to the Admiral.
“Happy accidents are another way. But you have to be sure it won't leave you alive,” a man next to Franx said. “Had that happen to a guy. Welsh. He tried to fry himself. He survived, but his arms were baked. They dumped him in here, all stinking of burnt flesh. It took him days to die. It was horrible to see him. I wished they'd put him out of his misery,” he said roughly, turning away. “We all did, but they wouldn't.”