The Guide
Pox War Runners Episode 3
By
Joshua Done
Edited by
Tanya Andrious & Jana Miller
Table of Contents
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Captain Tatiana of the Yosemite turned off the Ship’s central holographic display as the recording showed Yesler fading into the black of space after our escape. “That’s quite the story, Captain Grumman. It appears that we are at war with the Tarin’Tal. Will you be accompanying us back to Imperial Space? As you have so starkly pointed out, the safety of Imperial Citizenry in Pox space can no longer be assured.”
“Yeah, no kidding. However, I’ve still got some things to take care of; the kid’s parents had some holdings on a few colonies that I need to get transferred to Suzan’s name.”
“Are you sure a few investment assets are worth spending time in Pox Space when there are known Tarin’Tal warships in the area?”
“I’ve run my fair share of gauntlets, we’ll be fine.”
“Makes sense. Which reminds me; if you are adopting the girl, you can make use of the ship’s registrar. We can update the registry on our arrival in Imperial space.”
I nodded. “I appreciate it.”
A young officer ran up and handed the Captain a datapad. By the look on the young man’s face the news wasn’t good. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to cut our conversation short, Captain.” She said. “We’ve received a distress signal from a small pressure dome colony and trading post along our route. The drone was barely functional but the message was clear.”
“But you have to make a bee line for the Empire with this intel,” I finished for her. “I think I know where this is going.”
“Right,” she agreed. “I’d like to offer you a letter of marque.”
“OK,” I said. “I guess I didn’t know where this was going.”
“A letter of marque,” she continued, “So that you can take care of little things like this for us while we rally the fleet.”
“Um…” I said hesitantly. “I’m not really a war ship; I’m not even really a captain. I just run shipments from planet to planet. I’m a merchant.”
“From your story and the looks of your ship I’m sure you can handle yourself in a scrape. Besides, what merchant can pass up the Imperial rates on downed enemy craft and soldiers?”
She had a point. Imperial Privateers were paid handsomely by lords and Military sources alike; it was far better pay than running trade and power supplies.
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll do it.”
Tatiana entered a few commands in her pad before looking up. “Excellent. Your Imperial registry has been capitalized and my personnel will have military rounds loaded on your ship by the time you depart. We’ll be passing the drop point in twenty minutes.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed.
“Happy hunting; now you’ll understand if I leave you to the registrar, I’ve got some reports to prepare.”
I turned to go, remembering Suzan at my side. She had been almost perfectly silent since we’d boarded the cruiser, which stood in contrast to her normally inquisitive self.
“What’s the registrar?” she asked, as a Jr. Officer lead us through the maze of corridors within the ship.
“The registrar takes care of everything official in the Empire. All the documents, licenses, deeds, and things like that.”
“Wow, the alliance has like 10 different organizations for that,” she said as we walked through the small doorway.
“Ten different organizations for what, sweetie?”, an elderly woman behind the single desk asked.
“For everything that you do, the alliance has lots of people all doing it. You must be so busy.”
“Well, you see, we do things a little differently in the Empire. We have a lot less laws and we keep everything like licenses in individually encrypted computer cores that are matched with the capital as often as we can. It makes my job very easy.” The old woman leaned back in her overstuffed chair and sipped a small cup of tea. “In fact, I asked for this position. We get to travel to so many places and meet so many people like your self, I feel like I’m retired and traveling.” The woman chuckled in the way only grandmothers are capable of and finally introduced her self. “I’m Ellen; it’s nice to meet you to. What can I do for you?”
“Well, Suzan here lost her parents in a ‘Tal attack.”
Ellen’s face turned to a picture of sympathy. ”Oh, I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed. “You look like you are dealing with it quite well.” For a second the odd combination of grief, anger, and something cold and calculating returned to the little girl’s face.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “But I miss them so much.” Ellen nodded, which ushered in a moment of awkward silence.
“Well, I hate to ask this, but is Mr. Grumman here going to be taking care of you, or are you coming with us back to the Empire?”
“I’m adopting her,” I said, putting a hand on Susie’s shoulder.
“Oh, good.” Ellen looked relieved and smiled, taking a few minutes to type some information into her console. “So, can I have your full name Susie?”
“Suzan Sylvia Baxter.”
“OK, I’m going to record your response. Do you accept the adoption?” she asked.
“Yes,” Suzie agreed.
“Wonderful.” She smiled again. “Would you like to switch your last name to that of Mr. Grumman, keep it the same, or share?”
“Um…” Suzie looked at me, uncertain. The look on her face reminded me of my friends in school when they didn’t know the answer to a surprise quiz.
“It’s up to you,” I said.
“Share,” she said at length.
“OK. And do you swear to follow the laws of the Empire?”
“Yes.”
“OK,” Ellen said, hitting a button and causing a slip of thick paper to print onto the surface of her desk. Your name is now Suzan Sylvia Baxter Grumman. Congratulations, you are now an Imperial citizen.” Ellen handed Suzie a piece of paper with a line of family crests on it, a small paragraph of legalese, and my family line showing her as the newest branch.
“Wow!” Suzie exclaimed. “That was fast. It took mommy longer to get her spaceport license.
“Like I said,” Ellen smiled, “We do things differently. You two have a nice day now.”
“Yeah,” Suzie said, studying the thick paper as we left. “What is this first picture?” she asked as we walked, following the Jr. Officer’s directions back to the pressurized docking bay where the Vermillion waited.
“That’s Lord Dietrich’s family crest,” I explained. “My family lives in his domain, so he’s our lord.”
“But I thought Imperials were citizens? In school they said anyone with a lord is a slave.”
“That’s not really true. We choose our lords, we can switch allegiances, and we can choose not to have a lord. But there are so many benefits to doing so.”
“Oh,” Suzie said, looking back at the paper and trying to tie in the abstract concepts. “Then these people are your lord’s lord and on?”
“Yeah, that’s about right; all the way up to the Emperor.”
“Cool! she exclaimed. ”So you’re connected with the Emperor?”
Her eyes were getting wide and I laughed. “Well, as much as anyone in the Empire can without ever meeting him. Basically it means everyone is under his protection and law.”
“Oh,” she said again, turning back to the paper. “That’s pretty cool.”
“I agree,” I said, stepping into the broad platform of the landing bay.
“Hey!” Suzie shouted, pointing at a group of men that were painting over the HMS section o
f the ship’s designation. “They’re messing with our ship!”
The men looked over at us and snickered, pulling away the stencil pad they’d been using. “Why’d they change the m?” She asked. “They made it a capital.”
“It’s because Captain Tatiana gave me that letter of marque.”
“You mean that one that says they’ll pay us for killing bad guys?”
“Yeah, that one,” I agreed. “It means that our ship isn’t the Hyperion merchant/mercenary Ship Vermillion, but the Hyperion Military Ship.”
“But aren’t privateers mercenaries?”
“Depends on who you ask,” I said. “And the Empire says that if they can give us orders it counts as military.”
“Hmm…” she voiced skeptically. “I guess that makes sense.”
“Well, I’m glad we have the lassie’s approval,” a deep voice rumbled from behind us. I turned and was presented with a mountain of a man dressed in a mechanic’s uniform. “My boys have ‘er all loaded with first rate munitions. She’ll cut through anything smaller than a juggernaut just fine.”
“Nice. Tell your captain thanks for me.”
“Aye,” he nodded, “I’ll do that. Kick them a tall one for me, will ya?” he said, sticking his hand out like a cedar plank.
“Sure thing,” I said, shaking his hand.
“They were nice,” Suzie said as we left the protective shielding of the landing bay.
“Yeah, it doesn’t pay to be a jerk in the Empire. Not that everyone has figured that out, not by a long shot, but the military tends to be pretty good.”
“That’s good,” Suzie said emphatically. “They weren’t at all like they told us in school.” I grunted. Fred had complained to me countless times about the crap they’d been feeding her daughter in Yesler’s school system. I guess he wasn’t just talking about the food.
There was a slightly strange sensation as the Yosemite re-entered Gravity Stream only a short distance away and then we were alone on the outskirts of a dense asteroid system. By dense I don’t mean the sparse, random floating objects of the Sol system’s asteroid belt, but the thick tangled mass of rock and debris that most people in older times had come to believe made up the asteroid belt. I’d always been a fan of history, especially history about old Earth. It was always interesting how many people believed the asteroid belt was something along the lines of the closely packed remains of a shattered planet, the type of density only found in the remains of moons and a few pockets in the Kuiper Belt.
“Something’s on sensors,” Suzie said, watching the main screen behind both of our stations. There was a signature moving back and forth above a domed structure on the small moon’s surface.
“Looks like its exchanging fire with something on the surface.” I zoomed in the image on the area they were attacking. “It’s actually a few thousand feet to the south of the buildings. I’m guessing it’s a defense turret of some sort.”
“So… we should help them out right?”
“Yeah, and we get paid to do it, too.”
“OK,” Suzie chimed cheerfully, switching her display to the customized combat mode she used. She was a wizard with computers, and targeting systems were no exception.
“OK, we’ve got their attention.” I started counting down. “Contact in three, two, one.” A lance of energy hit the ship as the Tarin’Tal patrol ship ceased its bombardment of the planetary instillation and turned its guns on us.
“Can we take that thing?!” Suzie asked, as the full size and scale of the ship came into perspective.
“Probably,” I tried to reassure her. “They’ve had to use energy and weapons attacking the colony, so it should be easier. Lets strife their underbelly and see how these new cannon rounds work.” I slammed the ship’s accelerators and spun as the Patrol ship opened fire with its main kinetic weapons, creating tunnels of space in which I definitely didn’t want to find myself.
Everything seemed to slow as the huge ship approached. I tweaked the Vermillion’s trajectory and unleashed our forward cannons. The weapons weren’t designed to fight anything as big as the Tarin’Tal patrol ship, but they now had the added bit of military rounds. The resulting explosions decompressed huge sections of the enemy ship and disabled their main weapons. “Keep hitting that hole!” I shouted to Suzie as we pulled around for another pass. “They’re bound to have reactors close by to power those weapons. We crack those and they’ll blow.”
“Right!” she shouted back. It was nice having someone else controlling the turrets; we could continue firing even when we weren’t facing the enemy. Each round threw out more and more debris from the ship; the tactic was clearly working.
I didn’t know why a lone ship would be out here alone. ‘Tal never fought well alone; their nature was to invade en mass against primary targets such as entire planets or shipyards. I’d never heard of them sending a single vessel against a lone colony like this. Something didn’t smell right.
“They’re turning to run,” Suzie called. That didn’t make sense either. But then again we didn’t have any small-scale actions to go off of either.
“Hold on,” I said, flipping the craft vertically after our last pass. We were now facing the ship’s engines and I sent a round of cannon fire into their main thruster, killing its thrust instantly. We spun again, flying the length of the ship and sending another volley into the hole we’d dug in her bow. There was a shuttering explosion and the whole craft began to crack in a wave of cascading explosions.
“That was easy,” Suzie said, snapping her targeting computer back and pulling her feet onto the chair with her.
“Speak for your self,” I groaned as I pried my hands from the steering controls. I hadn’t realized I’d taken a death grip. “I like to look my enemy in the eye. I don’t like ship battles. Too much power and too little control; next thing you know I could press the red button instead of the blue one and get blown up for it. Just like that,” I snapped my fingers, “And we’d be erased from existence.”
“Well, when you put it like that it doesn’t sound as fun.”
I spent a minute catching my breath before I realized the colony had been trying to contact us. I hit the button that opened the frequency they were using. “Crypta colony to Imperial craft Vermillion, please come in.”
“This is Captain Grumman of the HMS Vermillion, go ahead.”
“Thank you Captain, I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”
“Probably die in the vacuum of space when the pressure dome collapsed,” I said.
“Um…” The man at the other end sounded very confused.
“But I didn’t and you’re alive. Where can I park?”
“Oh, right. Port three is open. We’ll see you there.”
“That port looked really rusty,” Suzie said as we walked into the airlock.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s in active use. These scrap heap colonies may not be very pretty, but they work just fine.”
“It stinks,” she said as the door opened and colony air flowed in.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Not much we can do about that.” There was a delegation of people just inside the airlock.
“Welcome to Crypta!” one of them said. He had more bluster than the others and seemed to be in charge. “What brings you to our fair colony?”
“That dead hulk in orbit.” The group held a series of looks on their faces that said they didn’t understand. “OK, how about this. We’re from the Empire and we’re here to help. We were hitching a ride with a passing cruiser and they asked us to take care of things here.”
“Not that we don’t appreciate your help, but why didn’t they come?” he asked.
“More important matters were pulling them to the Empire; namely, the fact that there are Tarin’Tal warships in Pox Space.”
“The Empire is willing to go to war to protect Alliance territory?” he asked.
“Well, I think the more pressing matter to the Emp
ire is the treaty violation and the fact that the ‘Tal will be on our doorstep if they wipe you all out.”
“Ah, good point. Anyhow, welcome to our city. We’ll be more than happy to refuel and re-supply you for your help.”
“Thanks, but we were just refitted by the Yosemite, so we’re good.”
“Oh. Well then, enjoy your stay. I’m sure the local merchants will give you their best deals and our trademark safes are open to your use free of charge.” The local boys didn’t waste any time clearing out after they heard we didn’t need any expensive fuel. I didn’t blame them though; alien attacks can put anyone on edge and make you suspicious. Even those that help you out aren’t immune to that suspicion.
“Why are their safes a trademark?” Suzie asked. “Well, when this place was founded they figured they needed an edge to set up business, so they started claiming to be the ‘Switzerland’ of Pox space.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
I suddenly felt very old, condemning the education system of another generation and another planet. “Switzerland was a country on Fallen Earth famous for their banks and vaults.”
“Oh, well, that makes sense,” Suzie replied cheerily, although I thought she was only half paying attention because she was distracted by one of the many shops along the corridors selling brightly colored, shiny trinkets that young children found irresistible.
Well, I thought, it won’t do any harm to spend some time here. Maybe it will let Suzie feel like a kid for a little bit. It’s not like we are short on cash right now.
“Suzie!” I called. “Don’t run off too far. Stay where I can see you.”
“Yeah, OK!” she called back, as she played with a little noisemaker frog that croaked when you pressed down on it.
Maybe it was the glint of light off the reflective fishbowl helmets, maybe it was the unique sound of Silfon armored tentacles walking on the metal decks, maybe it was a smell I couldn’t place, but somehow I was unsettled by something and my only thought was Silfon.
I’ve had dealings with their reclusive race on a number of occasions, all of them bad. They cheat, lie, steal, assassinate, enslave, and torture at will. They are governed by no moral code but their twisted desires; and I knew of no redeeming factor to their race. I had friends indirectly killed by Silfon, set up to fall so the aliens could move in and take their assets in joint ventures. The Empire was currently at peace with them, the AHW too, but I doubted that would last long. We even had trade treaties, but I would never, under any circumstances, do business with a Silfon. It’d be safer to sleep with a nest of cobras.
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