Pandora’s Crew

by Gorg Huff

  “Everyone, this is the captain. We are seeing what appears to be an act of piracy, and we are going to interfere.

  “Tie them in, Pan. Let them see what’s going on.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Fifteen minutes later, and nothing much had happened. John made sandwiches and a soup for Checkgok. Jenny was in the galley, rubbing her eyes and yawning.

  Danny followed Checkgok into the lounge. “What we seem to be seeing is a slugging match between a big fat merchant and a small cutter. We didn’t see them before because of the distance, and until they started venting plasma there wasn’t much light from them. Pan, you want to add some detail?”

  Pan did, throwing graphics of the battle up on the screen. “I don’t see how that small one can carry much cargo.”

  “Me, either. It looks like a customs cutter,” Danny agreed.

  “It’s not squawking a great house ID. In fact, it’s not squawking any ID at all.”

  “Pirate,” Danny said with certainty. “No one but a pirate would fail to squawk ID in these circumstances. In fact, the only strange thing is that even a pirate should be squawking false colors until they have their prey nailed. How far out are we, Pan?”

  “Hours yet, Captain. Even at maximum acceleration, we will take four or more hours to reach effective range, and that only because they are moving in our general direction.”

  “All right, everyone,” Danny said. “I put us on an intercept course as soon as we saw those folks over there. But I am aware that it’s not just me and Pan anymore. So I want to hear your thoughts.”

  Location: The Brass Hind

  “Skipper, we have a new target,” Boyle shouted across the bridge. Everyone was strapped into acceleration couches, and they all had on their interface caps, but Drake protocol was always to use voice reports and data transfers.

  “Where away?” Captain Flatt asked, even as she pulled up the data on the new source. “What the hell is wrong with you, Boyle? That merchy is a good three hours out. We’ll finish our meal before we bother with dessert.” She giggled.

  Captain Rosalyn Victoria Flatt didn’t worry much about the past or future, which was how she had ended up in her present position. She led the mutiny because she was pissed at the first officer, and she was more surprised than anyone that her side had won. She was good at that, running on instinct. She turned her attention back to the large hauler. “I want that big mother,” she said, pointing. “I want her IDs and rutters.”

  “Aye, Skipper.”

  But Rosalyn was back into the comp, feeling the flailing sails of her ship as she flung another thousand BBs of magnetic round shot at the fleeing large hauler. The Brass Ass jerked and shuddered with every shot.

  Location: The Sicily

  “Why don’t we just give up, Captain?” asked George Stuart with sweat on his brow and desperation in his eyes. He was Bill Davis’ first mate on the Cordoba merchant ship, Sicily.

  “I would, George,” Bill turned his accel couch to face George, “if I didn’t have a pretty good idea who that is over there.”

  “Who?” George asked, turning back to the radar and lidar readouts as the cutter’s accel stuttered again. More shot was coming in.

  “It was the Drake customs cutter Brass Hind, until there was a mutiny six months back. The Drake Combine sent out a warning about her.”

  “What!” George’s head whipped back around to look at Bill.

  “That’s right.” Bill snorted. “The Drakes would normally rather rot in hell than send us a heads-up. But the crew of the Brass Ass is a special case. They spaced the captain and first officer, along with about half the crew, then they did it again to three more ship’s crews in as many days before the Drakes knew what was going on.” He shook his head. “No, George. If it was a normal pirate, I’d say ‘have as much grain as you can hold,’ but I have no desire to breathe vacuum.”

  “Me neither, sir,” George agreed. The Sicily was big and slow, but to move as big a ship as the Sicily slowly required really large, powerful sails.

  “Ms. Cooper, see to shifting some of the wheat to the hatches for tossing,” the skipper said. “We’ll give ‘em some grain, whether they want it or not.” A grain of wheat is neither very heavy, nor even very hard, but enough of them, moving fast enough, will kill a ship.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The vacuum-dried whole grain wheat came in five ton drums. To eject it, the drums had to be moved from the cargo hold to the engines. At the base of each mast was a venting jet. Anything from ship’s waste to pocket nukes could be vented. They might have tried tossing the drums instead of individual grains of wheat, but it was easier for the sails to toss dispersed loads.

  Great drones carried the five ton drums to the vent tubes’ side ports and emptied a drum into each of the twelve sails’ vent tubes. Sixty tons of puffed wheat was spewed out the ports at temperatures like unto those at the surface of old Sol. They would have been burned to pure carbon, but there wasn’t enough oxygen for the combustion. The wheat-stiffened plasma was caught by the super strong magnetic fields of the sails and those magnetic fields moved it, forcing it outward away from the ship and shifting its vector as it was passed from field to field until the four stern sails released it, directly toward the projected position of the pirate frigate.

  Inside the Sicily, the crew held on as the whole ship bucked under the stress of the sudden extra mass being sent on its way.

  Location: The Brass Hind

  Rosalyn, hooked into the computers, felt the shift in the enemy’s accel and knew that around sixty tons of something was headed their way. There were two options and time enough for either. She could shift her course a little and avoid the blow, or count on her own sails to bat the attack aside. But for Rosalyn there was really only one option. She stopped stepping aside for anyone the day of the mutiny.

  Location: The Sicily

  “They aren’t shifting, Captain,” George Stuart said, sounding confused.

  “The crazy fucks have a lot of confidence in those over-powered sails,” Captain Davis said. “Look at the change in the flap pattern.”

  George shifted his perception to the interface and the sensors’ read of the pattern of the frigate’s sail shifts. It was all very fast, several hundred times each second. But there were gaps in the coverage, and the wheat the Sicily threw would travel the full length of the frigate’s sail in about a thousandth of a second. As George watched, the pattern of the frigate’s sail shifted just a little and stabilized so that when the puffed wheat arrived it would be swept aside by the front A sail.

  “Shit,” George muttered a few seconds later when the frigate passed through the point where it should have hit the wheat, and the only effect was a very slight increase in speed as the frigate managed to use their shot as reaction mass.

  Location: The Brass Hind

  “Hull scoring, Skipper,” Boyle shouted. “Some of that shit, whatever it was, got through.” Then, after a moment, in a much calmer voice, “Nothing serious. No penetrations and none of it hit anything critical.”

  “Load grapeshot,” Captain Rosalyn Flatt shouted in fury. How dare they scratch my paint?

  Grapeshot was hundreds of thousands of magnetized round balls half a centimeter in diameter. They were heavy. If one of those suckers hit, it would do more than scratch the paint.

  Location: The Pandora

  Danny Gold looked at his crew through the Pan’s cameras. A Parthian merchant, a cook, and a ten-year-old kid . . .

  Danny almost changed his mind. “Look, people. We have some time, so everyone take a breath and think things through. There are two ships out there. One of them is flying a Cordoba merchant ship beacon. It’s the Sicily, a grain ship. The other isn’t showing a beacon and is chasing the Sicily, so it’s a safe bet that it’s a pirate. This is none of our business, and the safe bet would be to swing around out of the way and let them slug it out.”

  Danny stopped and looked at the virtual images of Checkgok, Jenny, and
John. “I’m not going to do that. Not unless one of you has come up with a good reason I haven’t thought of. Because there are people on the Sicily. From her size, about sixty people. And because they are already shooting at each other. That doesn’t say good things about the brains of the Sicily’s skipper unless he knows something I don’t, but I think if we just leave, the wrong people are going to die. Anyone have any comments?”

  John looked at Jenny and Jenny looked at John while Danny watched. There wasn’t a lot of the “oh, great adventure” excitement that Danny was half-expecting from the kid. What there was, was determination. That was apparently enough to stop anything John might have said before it passed his lips.

  “I am confused, Captain,” Checkgok said. “What is our interest in this? The Cordoba are not our clan and are even, in a sense, opposed to our clan. Would it not be to our relative advantage to let them be damaged?”

  Danny tried to think how to explain, but Jenny didn’t give him the chance.

  “There are people in that ship. Human beings.” Jenny stopped and turned a little pink, but continued doggedly. “What if they were Parthians? Would you be so quick to wish them dead?”

  Checkgok didn’t take offense. At least Danny didn’t think it did.

  “Actually, Jenny, I would have the same question if it was an all-Parthian crew over there. We parse relations differently than humans. If they were from Clan Zheck, I would argue for going to their defense because we are at least potential allies of that clan. But if they were, for instance, from Clan Coff, I would oppose it.”

  Jenny tilted her head and said, “Parthians are weird.” Not as though she resented Checkgok’s position, but just as a point of information.

  “I have often thought the same thing about humans,” Checkgok agreed. Then, turning its eyestalks, one to Jenny and the other to John, it continued. “I take it this is a human-morality-based decision, Captain?”

  “You could say that, yes,” Danny agreed.

  “In that case, we should probably do it. What is the level of risk?”

  “Pan?” Danny asked.

  “There is considerable risk, but between us and the Sicily, we will probably win. If it were just us against the frigate, I would doubt our chances. But with us and the Sicily, we should have a good chance of victory. Most pirates don’t have nukes, so the battle will be sand and shot. It isn’t safe by any means, but neither is it suicide. There is too little data to be more precise.”

  Danny knew that Pan wasn’t explaining fully. A ship conned by an artificial brain like Pan was a more effective fighter than a ship that was using a crew, because it had faster and more flexible responses. While two ordinary merchantmen would be fairly easy meat for a frigate like that one over there, when you included Pan’s artificial brain in the mix, her estimate of the odds was probably spot on.

  Then Pan spoke again. “Captain, the pirates have fired. I can’t be sure, but I suspect grapeshot.”

  “Right. Pan, how far are we? Can we get a comm laser on the Sicily to coordinate and be sure what’s going on? For that matter, comm the pirate. It’s just possible we have this all wrong.”

  Tension mounted as Pandora moved toward the fray.

  Location: The Sicily

  Bill Davis felt the explosions as the BBs of grape that got through converted chunks of the Sicily’s hull into plasma. Damage Control reported Able Spacer Joann Fletcher was dead, killed when one of the BBs vented the corridor where she was working to space.

  George Stuart said, “Captain, I have a comm from that merchant, asking what’s going on.” George threw the message up on screen three and they saw a blond man in a sloppy captain’s cap requesting a situation report.

  “What’s going on is we are being attacked by the Brass Ass and getting the shit shot out of us.” Captain Davis took a breath and got himself under control. “Send them what we have, George.”

  Location: On the Pandora

  “We received a response from the Sicily, Captain, identifying them and informing us that the pursuer is the Brass Hind. It is a Drake customs cutter that went rogue some time back. We haven’t gotten a response from it, not that I see it making much difference. We are hours out of range, Captain, and it will be a fast pass when we do reach effective range,” Pan said.

  “Sure. But if we can work with the Sicily, they might be able to move this Brass Hind into the path of our shot.” Danny fed the Pan several vector graphics of how they might work it.

  “Possible, Captain, but it would take a great deal of luck.”

  “True. But even if it doesn’t work, it will be a distraction, and the Sicily needs all the help we can give her as soon as we can get it there.” Danny said. “Send her the suggestion.”

  Location: The Sicily

  “Skipper,” Allen Stuart said from the comm, “I think our savior is nuts.”

  “I’m a little busy here, Allen.” Bill was trying to juggle more damage reports and get someone to fill in for Bannis, who was going into the autodoc for the bends from the same hull rupture that killed Joann. “Would you get to the point?”

  “They want us to maneuver to put the pirate in the path of their shot in four minutes, eighteen and seventy-three one-hundredths seconds.”

  “What?”

  “It’s in the message queue, Skipper. Message eighteen with attachments.”

  Bill scanned the message for a few moments, vectors in his mind’s eye. “It’s crazy enough that it might just work. They’re far enough away that it’s going to be pretty hard for the pirates to guess just how hard they’re throwing anything from the accel change.”

  “Well, Skipper,” George Stuart said, “they aren’t waiting for our acknowledgement or agreement. The Pandora just fired something at someone.”

  From his voice, Allen guessed his older brother George thought the people on the Pandora were as crazy as Allen thought they were.

  Location: The Brass Hind

  “Captain, the Pandora fired,” Boyle said.

  “How rude!” Rosalyn giggled, feeling more amused than anything else. She scanned the log for a moment and realized that she couldn’t tell how fast the cloud of shot would be coming and that even though she knew the general direction, they would be very hard to spot on radar. “Shift us a couple of klicks to galactic north. That ought to get us out of the shot cone.”

  “Aye, Skipper,” Boyle said.

  Location: The Sicily

  “They’re ducking, Captain,” George said.

  “Which direction?”

  “Galactic north.”

  “Shift us east then, like we’re trying to duck too, and get a little extra distance.”

  “The Pandora is firing again,” Allen said. “You know, Skipper, I bet it looks to the pirates like the Pandora is responding to their change in vector. You think this might work?”

  Location: The Brass Hind

  “This is totally unacceptable.” Rosalyn pouted. “I don’t intend to spend the next two hours dodging shots from a dinky little freighter. Mr. Boyle, please prepare a hunter-nuke for launch.”

  “Skipper, we only have three of those left and we can’t get more.”

  The frigates had an official inventory of ten hunter-nukes but three disappeared from stores before the mutiny and they’d used four since. Hunter-nukes were launched the same way as other missiles, but they had fairly powerful short-range rockets that would let them home a little bit. They also had a nuke that powered a magnetic pulse strong enough to trash any but the strongest magnetic sail.

  “I know, but I don’t care. That ship over there is up to something and I’m not going to wait to find out what it is the hard way.”

  Location: The Pandora

  “Captain, we may have a problem,” Pan said, and Jenny felt her heart beat a little faster. She was scared, but everything was so slow. It wasn’t like a game of Ship Combat at all.

  “What’s up?” the captain asked.

  “The Sicily just sent us its read of
the motions of the Brass Hind and it has just thrown something at us.”

  “And at this range that’s a problem because . . . ?”

  “It’s small, Captain, and a single unit.”

  “Oops,” the captain said. “Did the Drakes equip the Brass Hind with hunter-nukes by any chance?”

  Jenny remembered Pan saying earlier that the pirate wouldn’t have nukes.

  “From the download the Sicily sent, yes, they did. The Brass Hind had a complement of ten of them.”

  “Ten. Oh, good,” the captain muttered. “I’d hate to think we were causing them to use stuff they didn’t have plenty of.”

  At first Jenny thought that Captain Gold had gone crazy, but no. He was making a joke. She was almost sure.

  “Very generous of you, I’m sure, Skipper,” John said. “But, being a lowly cook, I would just as soon they didn’t have enough to bracket us.”

  Captain Gold sniffed loudly over the comm. “How very plebeian of you, Cookie. I am constantly amazed at the practicality of the lower orders.”

  Jenny giggled nervously. They were both joking, and that made her feel better. Her lessons taught that with the distances involved, it would be five minutes or more before the hunter got anywhere near in range. And even with its seeking capabilities, they could probably get out of range of one. But ten?

  “What can we do?” Checkgok asked. “How do these missiles work?”

  Jenny was glad it asked. She was too embarrassed to do it.

  “They have passive sensors and lock onto the electromagnetic signature of the ship they are programmed for,” Pan explained. “When they get close enough, they turn on their rockets and adjust their vector to intercept. When they encounter the magnetic field of the sails, the nuke goes off, powering an electromagnetic pulse that interacts with the sail field to trash the mast. If the feedback is strong enough, it can blow out the engines. At the least, it will cripple us, and if we dodge they will wait a little until our new course is set and fire another one. The one good thing is, normally at this distance we wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of its course as we do, if we’d seen it at all. Thanks to the Sicily and their download, we have a good read on its course.”