Without Mercy

by Eric Thomson

  WITHOUT

  MERCY

  Siobhan Dunmoore Book 5

  Eric Thomson

  Without Mercy

  Copyright 2018 Eric Thomson

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living, or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada

  By Sanddiver Books

  ISBN: 978-1-989314-00-5

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  — One —

  — Two —

  — Three —

  — Four —

  — Five —

  — Six —

  — Seven —

  — Eight —

  — Nine —

  — Ten —

  — Eleven —

  — Twelve —

  — Thirteen —

  — Fourteen —

  — Fifteen —

  — Sixteen —

  — Seventeen —

  — Eighteen —

  — Nineteen —

  — Twenty —

  — Twenty-One —

  — Twenty-Two —

  — Twenty-Three —

  — Twenty-Four —

  — Twenty-Five —

  — Twenty-Six —

  — Twenty-Seven —

  — Twenty-Eight —

  — Twenty-Nine —

  — Thirty —

  — Thirty-One —

  — Thirty-Two —

  — Thirty-Three —

  — Thirty-Four —

  — Thirty-Five —

  — Thirty-Six —

  — Thirty-Seven —

  — Thirty-Eight —

  — Thirty-Nine —

  — Forty —

  — Forty-One —

  — Forty-Two —

  — Forty-Three —

  — Forty-Four —

  — Forty-Five —

  — Forty-Six —

  — Forty-Seven —

  — Forty-Eight —

  — Forty-Nine —

  — Fifty —

  — Fifty-One —

  — Fifty-Two —

  — Fifty-Three —

  — Fifty-Four —

  — Fifty-Five —

  — Fifty-Six —

  About the Author

  Also by Eric Thomson

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  — One —

  Carrie Fennon carefully opened the hidden compartment’s hatch a few centimeters and listened, eyes narrowed in concentration. Her ears, finely attuned to Kattegat Maru’s background noise, picked up no suspicious sounds. Her nose, however, detected a faint, almost feral alien scent and the unmistakable tang of blood mixed with the freighter’s natural aroma of metal, ozone, and lubricants.

  She pushed the hatch aside and stuck her head out of the shielded cubbyhole hidden behind a stack of environmental recycling pumps. Somehow, Carrie knew she was the only living being left. Kattegat Maru no longer seemed as alive as she did a few hours earlier before the pirates struck not long after they dropped out of hyperspace. A shiver ran down Carrie’s spine, and she felt nauseous at the idea everyone else could be dead, that she shared the ship with seventy corpses, including that of her mother.

  After a short scramble up through the opening, Carrie stood on the main engineering compartment’s dull, scuffed deck. She paused again to listen, then cautiously crept around the pump stack, nervous eyes looking for evidence of violent death.

  But engineering was empty, its crew vanished without a trace. A quick glance at the status display, twin to the one on Kattegat Maru’s bridge, told her that the freighter still traveled at sub-light speed on the same heading as before; that her systems still functioned, and that her compartments were pressurized, save for the hangar deck. The space doors were open, a clue that no one remained to close them after the pirates left.

  Why didn’t they take Katie with them? Or destroy her? Why did they just leave? Sure, she was old, but she could still outsail most ships her size.

  Carrie gingerly stepped into the main corridor running along the freighter’s spine from engineering to the bridge. No untoward sounds disrupted the starship’s familiar, soft purr. Nothing triggered a subconscious alert.

  Members of multi-generation spacer families such as the Fennons developed an almost symbiotic rapport with the starship that was both their home and their livelihood. Other than the oppressive sense of emptiness, Katie felt eerily normal, as if everyone had stepped off for an hour or two so they might play a prank on the captain’s daughter.

  Merchant crews who spent their lives in interstellar space were partial to practical jokes, anything that might relieve the boredom of a long crossing. But not if they carried a full complement of passengers. Or at least they wouldn’t carry out a prank that might in any way involve them. Captain Aurelia Fennon wouldn’t stand for it. Kattegat Maru’s reputation was precious to her, as it had been precious to Carrie’s grandfather, the late Nemo Fennon, who first sailed Katie off the slipways and into deep space.

  She passed the circular stairwell connecting the freighter’s decks. Upward led to the passenger cabins, downward to the crew quarters and the hangar deck wedged between the forward and aft cargo holds.

  Though Kattegat Maru could land on worlds whose gravity didn’t exceed one point two standard gees, Aurelia Fennon preferred to shift goods via shuttlecraft where there was no orbital station with transshipment facilities. It spared her ship the stress of repeated takeoffs and landings and prolonged her life.

  Carrie glanced up and down the stairwell, knowing she would eventually have to visit every deck, then continued forward to the bridge, stopping every few steps to listen. But she heard nothing out of the ordinary. Katie was humming along as she usually did between faster-than-light jumps.

  A smear of blood on the scuffed deck greeted her just before the bridge’s open door. Carrie paused again, suddenly fearful of entering her mother’s domain, one forbidden to her unless she stood watch in her capacity as an apprentice merchant officer.

  She took a deep, steadying breath and then entered. The bridge, like engineering, was devoid of life, with nothing to show it was crewed only hours earlier. A small, almost unnoticeable blood spatter covered the helm console as if someone had struck the duty quartermaster’s head. The captain’s chair sat as empty as the others.

  Carrie reached out to touch it, to see if she could still sense her mother’s warmth, but the seat was cold. Fear transfixed her with its icy spear, and she fought the urge to hyperventilate.

  After a few minutes, during which her thoughts seemed to enter a state of suspended animation, she studied each of the bridge consoles in turn and realized everything seemed intact. The pirates, or whoever their attackers might be, didn’t carry out the orgy of destruction conjured by her fevered imagination while she hid in the shielded compartment, invisible to even naval grade sensors.

  Carrie retraced her steps to the circular staircase. She cautiously climbed its metallic treads, careful to make no sound, and stepped off one deck higher, where an open door piercing the airtight bulkhead gave admission to the passenger accommodations. She still keenly felt that sensation of emptiness, of being alone.

  The first door to her left opened onto the saloon and she finally saw evidence of human occupation. Half-empty drink bulbs, food wrappers, and other assorted items littered the tables as if someone hustled the occupants awa
y without warning. The cabins, on the other hand, appeared as desolate as the bridge, with nary a personal item in sight. Forty-five paying guests gone without a trace.

  They weren’t wealthy, to be sure. Those with money traveled on one of the liners crisscrossing the Commonwealth. Or if they had urgent business in a part of the human sphere threatened by Shrehari incursions, found berths on fast traders capable of outrunning Imperial warships. But the price suited budget-conscious travelers or those for whom anonymity was more important than comfort.

  The crew quarters proved to be just as devoid of human life, but personal belongings, including her own, remained in evidence as if the attackers didn’t give her shipmates time or even permission to pack. The crew’s mess, however, appeared as spotless as it should be between meals.

  Carrie wound her way down the staircase until it ended on the hangar deck, just outside the control room. One glance through the thick, armored window told her Kattegat Maru’s shuttles were gone.

  She closed the space doors but didn’t bother pressurizing the hangar. Then, Carrie visited each of the six cargo holds. All but one seemed undisturbed. Cargo hold C, used for small, high value items, was empty. When she accompanied the first officer on his daily rounds a day earlier as part of her apprenticeship, it had been filled with standard, albeit small cubic containers.

  The nervous energy that kept Carrie going since she left the cubbyhole ebbed away and she slumped to the deck, her back against a bare metal bulkhead. Tears welled up in her eyes, and when one rolled down her cheek, she wiped it away with a brusque gesture.

  After a while, the urge to cry subsided and a ghostly voice, that of her mother, reminded Carrie she was a Fennon, a spacer born and bred. Someone trained from infancy to survive anything the galaxy could throw at her, including pirates who turned Katie into a ghost ship.

  She climbed to her feet and, with deliberate steps, returned to the bridge. Since the mysterious attackers didn’t shoot everything up, maybe the subspace transmitter still worked. There must be a Navy ship somewhere within a short FTL jump, considering how closely Kattegat Maru skirted the frontier. And if that didn’t work, she would get to sail solo a year before completing her apprenticeship.

  — Two —

  “The ghost has struck again, Lord.”

  Acting Strike Group Leader Brakal raised his angular, bony head, crowned by a strip of bristly fur, and speared Urag with eyes of unrelieved black. The Shrehari officer’s mouth opened in a semi-feral snarl, exposing cracked, yellowed fangs.

  Left in charge of the strike group by dint of seniority when the Admiralty recalled its commanding officer, Admiral Hralk, to the capital, Brakal quickly sank into the quagmire of administrative minutiae. In despair, he took to patrolling the stars with his cruiser Tol Vehar, its brother Tol Vach and two Ptar class corvettes instead of moldering aboard a misbegotten orbital station at the hind end of nowhere.

  “What has the poxed human done this time?”

  “Convoy Yulin Twenty-One vanished after sending out a distress signal that an unidentified ship, which seemingly appeared out of nowhere, attacked them.”

  Brakal’s gloved hand slammed down on the metal desk.

  “May the demons of the Underworld rip out their throats. That makes three more transport ships and one Ptar class corvette lost to this damn apparition in the last ten days.”

  “Yulin Twenty-One carried our monthly resupply.”

  “I know that.” Brakal’s sneer twisted a face that could be considered handsome by Shrehari standards but would remind a human of nothing so much as a demented gargoyle. Urag, who’d become inured to his commander’s moods long ago, didn’t reply.

  “Send a message to the staff. I want a full briefing on the event and recommendations within the day. Let us see if they can propose a practical course of action, or if they’re merely good enough to deliver bad news.”

  “As you command.” Urag vanished into the corridor.

  Alone once more, Brakal turned his seat toward a thick porthole and stared out at a faint red star in a part of space the humans called, not without justification, the Rim.

  Ever since his return from the distant human colony with the unpronounceable heathen name, he and Tol Vehar had been engaged in fruitless patrols designed to probe Commonwealth defenses on the far flank of the war zone. Then, Shrehari ships began to disappear without a trace.

  The sparse distribution of inhabited systems at this end of the Rim sector meant shipping was mostly an isolated business, without any secure, acknowledged star lanes. Yet this ghost kept not only finding Shrehari vessels that should be hard to detect, it even seemed to operate with impunity inside Imperial space, if the latest little disaster was any indication. The Empire could ill afford a war of attrition, not after the most recent, thoroughly unsuccessful attempts to break a stalemate that just wouldn’t end.

  Adding to Brakal’s long list of grievances, the ghost was directly responsible for Admiral Hralk’s recall to Shrehari Prime so he might explain why ships were vanishing in his area of responsibility with no human prize or wreckage to show for the losses. It left the squadron’s senior commander in charge of the sclerotic, unimaginative Strike Group Khorsan staff who seemed to delight in tormenting him with bureaucratic nonsense.

  After several weeks in their company, Brakal suspected the Deep Space Fleet’s staff officer corps was the Empire’s real enemy, not the humans. So he fled aboard his ship, now under Urag’s temporary command. Yet their baleful influence kept reaching out across the void to torment him.

  At least no one protested his appointment of Tol Vehar’s secret police spy as Strike Group Khorsan’s chief political officer. It allowed him to leave the incumbent on the orbital station with the rest of the staff and went a long way to make sure the latter kept their plots against him as innocuous as possible.

  Should Regar’s superiors on the home planet find out their agent’s loyalty belonged to Brakal instead of the Empire’s secret police, they might suffer a collective brain aneurysm. If they possessed brains in the first place. Regar certainly never missed a chance to express his opinion of the Tai Kan, albeit in private, and would occasionally go on at length about the stupidity of the entire organization.

  However, if the ghost wasn’t run to ground soon, Brakal would follow Hralk into the Admiralty’s hallowed halls, perhaps never to emerge again this time, whether or not his loyal spy kept watch. But it was the devil’s ion storm that brought no one good tidings. At least Urag seemed to enjoy being one of the rare Deep Space Fleet captains with no Tai Kan officer looking over his shoulder at all hours, something the thrice-damned humans didn’t have to countenance.

  As if summoned by the demons themselves, Regar’s cynical features appeared in the open doorway. He too wore a warrior caste ruff of fur across the top of his ridged skull, a reminder he preferred to think of himself as the Fleet officer he’d been years earlier rather than a political watchdog.

  “The staff should soon be stirring like an iragan blasted from its century-long slumber,” he said. “Your ill humor at the latest news will travel at speeds unheard of if Urag has any say in the matter. And with a tone so pungent it will give them a century of indigestion.”

  Brakal grunted.

  “Trying to cheer me up, miscreant? Bring me the head of the ghost ship’s captain. Then perhaps I can inherit Hralk’s robes along with his endless chores.”

  “Sorry. The only heads I can bring you sit on Shrehari shoulders and most in Strike Group Khorsan aren’t worth harvesting. Although,” he took on a thoughtful expression, “I might take a few for simple enjoyment. Your benighted chief of staff, for instance. No doubt he still believes the mantle of command should have been his upon Hralk’s departure. You might find things working better without his constant interference. I mention it merely as something to consider when we return to base.”

  “I wish it were that easy. Until he openly defies me, his position must remain secure. The Honorable Gra’
k has many connections inside the nobility, and cannot fall to a casual assassin’s knife, not even if it’s wielded by a Tai Kan officer.”

  “Pity. If you showed fewer scruples, you might be further ahead.”

  “If I were less scrupulous, I wouldn’t be the warrior I am. The uninhibited exercise of power corrupts without limits, Regar. You should be intimately familiar with that idea.”

  “And yet it will take warriors with fewer scruples to force this farce of a government onto its knees and make them sue for an armistice with the humans. Four more ships gone without a single loss inflicted on the enemy, and deep within our sphere of control too. If these small defeats are generalized throughout the war zone, our shipyards will not keep up, and soon the advantage of numbers will fall to the hairless apes.”

  “Your words need hearing in the Imperial Palace and the Admiralty, not in this miserable office. I know the humans are slowly gaining on us. The imbeciles back home, however, refuse to see the truth.”

  Regar’s bitter laugh echoed off the bare metal bulkheads.

  “And you think they would listen to a Tai Kan officer whose true allegiance lies with the Fleet? They’d just as soon slit my throat.”

  “Then barring a sudden intellectual awakening on the homeworld, let us hope we can do something about the demon scratching at our door before Tol Vehar is the only Imperial ship left in this sector.”

  “You forget Chorlak, although it is under Tai Kan control.”

  Brakal made an obscene gesture.

  “Bah. A damned pretend-corsair fraternizing with human outcasts and traitors in the Unclaimed Zone. What good is he to the war effort?”

  “His crew might help us find the ghost, Commander.” When Brakal didn’t reply, Regar said, “I can use Tai Kan lines of communication to pass the word of a human that appears out of nowhere, looks nothing like a proper ship of war, and strikes without mercy. Allow me private access to Tol Vehar’s otherspace device so I may use Tai Kan codes and interrogate the nearest retransmission array.”

  A grunt.

  “Do it. But make sure I don’t end up owing the diseased Tai Kan any favors.”