Chronicles of a Space Mercenary

by Ronald Wintrick

  “It’s too bad you turned me down.” She told me after she had slithered on by, looking down upon me from above, no doubt knowing the affect she had on me. On any red blooded man. “We could have had a very good time!” With that said she climbed away up the ladder, sashaying her hips provocatively as she went. I watched her go with mixed feelings.

  The Kievor Trade Station was well outside human space but the trip to Katon was still only several hours in warp. The distance a ship could travel in several hours in warp was almost beyond normal reckoning. A figure it took a computer to comprehend, and Katon was on the frontier of human space. We had spread far, and yet not far at all. Before we had to prepare for arrival I gathered everyone together in the big recreational lounge.

  “I’ve never been in the habit of asking your opinions before I risked your lives in the past, but I have something highly dangerous in mind.” I stated. “To not only teach the Katons a lesson, but a thing that could be fabulously profitable, as well.”

  “Are you saying you’re going to share profits?” Janice asked me, somewhat facetiously. “That I’ll have to see to believe.”

  “Just how much profit and how much danger?” Manuel asked. “As long as you’re asking opinions.”

  “It must be really dangerous!” Bren commented to Manuel.

  “Well,” I began tentatively, “we’ve set course for the Katon moon Cribon.”

  “The Katon Trinium mines.” Bren exclaimed, aghast.

  “Not the mines.” I said quickly, though I had to admit the idea wasn’t a bad one. “The transshipment depot and the ore freighters themselves. They’re completely unarmed. We hijack an ore freighter and fly it right in. Or push it, or stash it, or whatever we have to do. It’d be worth billions!”

  “Are you crazy?” Bren demanded loudly. “Have you completely lost your mind?”

  “That’s debatable.” I said.

  “The freighters themselves may be unarmed, but they’ll have escorts.” David spat out. “Especially with the price of Trinium what it is now and Cribon the biggest Trinium mine humans possess. The whole Katon Fleet is going to be there.”

  “What’s left of it.” Tanya said and laughed sadistically. We all looked at her just a little strangely, even I, but Tanya didn’t much care what other people thought. She wasn’t bothered.

  “What chance do we really have?” Janice asked once she had fully decided Tanya wasn’t going to turn into a monster right in front of us, never a certainty with Tanya.

  “A very good chance.” I said. “If the odds are too bad we jump right back into warp and get the hell out of there, but if we drop out of warp and there are three or less defenders, and if there are freighters in dock, we sic those nukes on them and after that I doubt there’ll be much left to slow us down.”

  “Sounds just reckless enough to succeed.” Melanie said, and I looked my thanks her way.

  “How much money do you think we can make?” Tanya asked. She was always most interested in the profit of any endeavor, but of course she was only playing along, we had already discussed this in detail.

  “The thing is,” I said, “there’s the potential to make tens of millions of Credits. Whatever’s left after replacing the nukes and repairing any damage we incur, we would split sixty/forty.”

  “Sixty/forty?” Bren demanded. “There’s six of us. How does that equate?”

  “I get sixty percent. The rest of you split the remaining forty.” I said. Even Tanya glared at me angrily at this. This wasn’t part of the plan we had discussed, but I was risking my ship and my life while they were only risking their lives. It was only fair.

  “That doesn’t sound fair.” Manuel said. “That’s kind of greedy, isn’t it?”

  “No deal!” Bren said.

  Tanya glared her own answer at me vehemently. Janice and Melanie looked non-committal. It’s true that I had never offered a cut before, or even asked their opinions about any endeavor I considered, so wasn’t this already a deal?

  “No way Marc!” Bren reiterated. “A six way cut after expenses, or no deal.”

  “I have to agree with Bren.” Manuel said. “This is completely reckless. The odds are totally against us. The compensation should be commensurate.”

  I had been prepared to argue it out to the end, but I actually felt slightly guilty, so I tempered;

  “We can make a fair split, after expenses, but Last Chance gets a cut as well. That’s as far as I’ll go.” No one objected for a moment though there were still a couple unhappy looks. These people were animals and when they scented fear they attacked. I don’t know why I was feeling so generous anyway but I was. I realized how dangerous it could be and felt real guilt. They sensed my feeling and wanted to move in for the kill. Animals.

  “Then it’s settled.” I said, before they could think of new arguments. Give them a centimeter and they wanted a kilometer.

  “Good. Then let’s get to our Stations.” I ordered. “We’ll be dropping out of warp soon enough. Get coffee or tea on the way. I want you all wired and hair trigger ready. When it goes down, it’s going to go down all at once.”

  “This will make us bona-fide pirates!” Manuel said as Janice and Melanie walked out, both of whom, along with the rest of the crew, were ready to do whatever their Captain ordered, trusting in me and whatever Fate might have in store for them. Manuel wasn’t finished though; “We may never outlive this stigma. We’ll find no welcome port. We’ll be considered monsters!”

  “Manuel,” I said, “they started this war! We’ve got the video footage and all the communications that passed between us on data backup, if that ever became an issue. We’ve got proof of their treachery. We’re completely within our rights. No court anywhere outside Katon would convict us. Self-defense is perfectly legal. Once having been attacked, we can open fire on any Katon vessel we encounter anywhere we encounter it, even if they are unarmed. That’s self-defense. We’re preemptively defending ourselves. We’re completely within our rights.”

  “He’s actually correct.” Bren said. “Plus I think they actually have more enemies than Marc, if that’s even possible!”

  “Thanks for your support.” I snarled at Bren.

  “It was my pleasure.” Bren replied pleasantly.

  “I’ve never backed down from a fight before, and you are right that they started this, and all rules should be off, but I hope you know what you are doing.” Manuel said. “If you thought the Katons were mad before, imagine their wrath after this!” With that said and apparently nothing else to add Manuel got up and left. I led Tanya and Bren to the Bridge and we settled in.

  “Are you going to buy a bigger ship?” Tanya asked as soon as I had sat down.

  “We’re gonna need one to fight off the rest of the Katons.” Bren added to what Tanya was obviously saying. “Like a Battleship.”

  “Something big enough to turn Last Chance into an escape pod!” Tanya laughed.

  “Is everyone going in on it with me?” I asked.

  “I’m not.” Tanya said. “You’re the Captain. I’m just First Officer. Suits me fine.”

  “Then the answer is probably no.” I said. “There’s nothing at all wrong with Last Chance.” I patted the side of my Captain’s Chair, really very happy with my ship. I’ve been happy with her as long as I’ve owned her, and even more so since retro-fitting her with the new engine, but I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to own a ship so big it would take fifty or a hundred men just to man the guns. Imagine the fuel rods it would devour!”

  “Anyway,” I snapped at Tanya, “you could afford your own Battleship right now. You buy the Battleship and I’ll tuck Last Chance into an escape bay and crew for you!”

  “I’m saving for a rainy day.” Tanya said.

  “It doesn’t rain in space, Tanya.” Bren told her.

  “It rains on New California.” She replied. “When they let it.” New California was the premiere resort planet of all human holdings, and they did not allow the
poor. I think they actually ejected the poor into space. I don’t know what they would do with you if suddenly you were no longer rich. Hell, they didn’t even allow the rich. They only allowed the super-rich. It was something I had never heard her say before, this interest in New California, and I wondered how long it had been in her mind. Maybe as long as I had known her, knowing Tanya as I did, I knew she could sometimes be very tight lipped about certain things.

  “That’s pathetic.” I said. “You would never fit in there. They have laws there, you know!”

  She gave me an ugly look, difficult on a face so beautiful, but not impossible for her. It showed me she had thought about it, but wasn’t thinking about it with any kind of common sense. A pipe dream, as they say.

  We sat stewing in our own thoughts then, just waiting, psyching ourselves up. There was no telling what the next hour might bring. Death and destruction. Capture and humiliation and torture. We had calculated our re-entry into normal space so carefully that there was no guarantee we wouldn’t come out right beside a Katon Warship, or even within one (such things did happen upon occasion). It might so happen that there weren’t even any freighters in dock when we arrived, either. We just didn’t know. So we sat and stewed in our own juices, each wondering his (or hers) own thoughts. The wait was over soon enough. Or too soon, depending on how you looked at things.

  “Brace for battle!” I announced over ship’s com when the hour had approached. Everyone was in their place and we were as ready as we were ever going to be. It was now or never. Bren started the countdown. The ten second warning. Tanya was relaxed and at ease, as always. If her heart beat faster than normal, it wasn’t for fear of her own life, but the adrenaline pumping anticipation of taking the lives of others.

  The sickening sensation hit me in the stomach as Bren finished his countdown and we began the transition back into normal space. The electric tension of fear sprang into the atmosphere aboard ship as we came out of warp nearly on top of a massive ore freighter. All the Bridge’s port and forward screens were filled with the image of the onrushing behemoth. Nothing but steel hull plates and bulging rivets. No fancy seamless designs here. Just plain old basic engineering. The freighter was longer than a skyscraper and ten times as thick as Last Chance, and we were headed directly into it!

  I jammed my controller over hard starboard and was crushed into the left side of my Captain’s Chair. The Captain’s Chair is ergonomically designed for such maneuvers and without its support I would never have been able to hold that yoke over and we would have been smeared all the way down that freighter. As it was we nearly landed there anyway. We came so close to those hull plates that our maneuvering jets left scorch marks like snails trails down her side, before we began twisting away. Millimeters close at hundreds of kilometers an hour was closer to death than I had been before Melanie had drug me back aboard Last Chance in the Kievor’s docking bay. Closer than I had ever been before. There is no coming back from explosive decompression. Nothing a doc could do for you, in the event the Katons would even want to try.

  Though we came within bare moments of ending everything right then and there, while I was fighting to save Last Chance from her last collision, Tanya was suddenly firing the photon cannon. The red pencil thin beam of the photon cannon sliced out and struck at a Katon Destroyer riding shotgun several clicks behind the freighter, following as escort, and hardly visible at this distance, but no doubt portrayed clearly enough on her targeting screen. As always, no matter the situation, Tanya remained cool and collected and made the enemy pay.

  The photon beam hit the Destroyer, a combination of luck and skill, that sliced the Destroyer through from stem to stern, cutting it in half through the length of her, and the two halves springing apart as the interior atmosphere reacted explosively to the new vacuum around it. In all my years I had never seen anything quite so neat and completely, immediately destructive.

  “One down!” Tanya yelled gleefully.

  “Tanya!” I yelled at her.

  “I’ve got it.” She said calmly. Dead ahead, beyond the two halves of the destroyed Destroyer, a massive Battleship was burning hard to twist around onto us, apparently having been moving in to dock now that the only ore freighter in evidence was moving towards warp and there would be nothing left for it to guard except the dock itself.

  I leveled us off horizontal to the freighter, running along her length, snuggling us in as close as I could get us, even as green fire poured down on us from the Battleship’s many broadside guns, but most of the green fire wasted itself on the sides of the freighter, a green runway down which we now raced.

  Then we ran out of ore freighter. As we flashed beyond the long ship several things happened all at once. A brilliant white flame leapt away from Last Chance and we ran into a wall of plasma fire. Last Chance staggered under the Battleship’s full available firepower, and we immediately lost a dozen of our video feeds. Screens flickered as the signals from still active cameras took up the job of delivering us a live feed of the battlefield we negotiated, and we raced on. Momentarily we were blinded by the double barrage of plasma fire assaulting us and the brilliant white flame thrown by the missile as it leapt away and we raced into its wash. I looked away to avoid the hot flash as the video dampeners were too late, as usual, to completely dim the white hot glare delivered through the video feed, and that was when I saw the second Destroyer, which had been following along behind the ore freighter and which had been invisible before because we were too close to the freighter for our vantage to include it, but it was burning now to come around and I saw its deadly shape nosing forward towards us!

  We were given a moment’s reprieve from the Battleships plasma cannon as they turned to track the oncoming, unexpected missile that was bearing down on them now at several times the speed of sound and quickly accelerating. One shot from one of the Battleships many plasma cannon would end our hopes right then and there but we were never supposed to have gotten so close in the first place. With all of her photon cannon she could hold off a thousand such Last Chances, except when we dropped out of warp right on top of them.

  The missile was Kievor made and worth every Credit paid for it. It twisted and squirmed like a living thing as it fought to find a path through the plasma raining around it to the Battleships massive engines, the target Tanya had assigned it. The only place a single strike would completely incapacitate it. The only place where a single strike could completely obliterate the massive Warship, but I was no longer following its course. It had its job to do and I would have to trust that it would do it. My eyes were now on the Destroyer behind us, in the very worst place for us it could be. Right up our ass!

  I tried to slam the yoke down between my legs and into the deck at my feet, then had to fight with every ounce of my strength to hold it there as Last Chance dove and tried to throw me into the ceiling of the Bridge, just as the red beam of a photon cannon sliced the vacuum right where we had been.

  Then all our screens went brilliant white and then black as the Kievor made nuke defied all the odds and climbed right up that Battleships ass and into one of its massive fusion engines. Its explosion was like a star going nova, or at least it seemed so at this range. Last Chance was swatted as if by a giants hand, more gees than she was designed to withstand, and tossed like a piece of flotsam on a breaker.

  We were already twisting away and the blast served to propel us further on our course, one of those flukes that I get the credit for being lucky for. Luck is a skill, I have always believed, and in luck am I skilled.

  We ran blind for long moments but the consolation was that the Destroyer would be running blind as well. Yet I could not waste time just because we were blind. I knew where that Destroyer had been and I knew that in only short moments both of our scans would be operational again and I needed to be in a position of tactical superiority. The Destroyer was by far the superior fighting vessel and I only had my luck to see us through. We would need it.

  I misjudged both o
ur positions. The blast had blown us farther than I had thought, but it did not matter. The second Destroyer had been closer to the Battleship than I had thought, or the explosion from the Battleship had been fiercer than I had imagined, and the Destroyer had taken a great deal more explosive punch per square meter than we. It had been ripped apart like it had been constructed of nothing more substantial than cardboard. I had not been duly impressed by the Katon’s engineering in the first place, but this was vast and all encompassing.

  The Destroyer had been shredded. Nearly a quarter of it had been vaporized completely and the rest had been flipped end over end and tossed away carelessly. As we watched it flipped away into space, like a derelict Ferris wheel someone had forgotten to turn off but one that no one would ever again ride. There could be no survivors aboard her. Of that there was no doubt.

  “If there is a hell,” Bren said, “we just bought our tickets.”

  Unfortunately I had to agree, as the scope of what we had just done struck me. I had never meant to attack against such odds but there had been little choice, when we had come out of warp and immediately under fire. We were supposed to have pulled away if we had found the odds stacked too much against us and two Destroyers and a Battleship certainly qualified as stacked against us. I should have known they would have Cribon and their shipping operations heavily guarded, with the price of Trinium what it was. Could I really justify this as retaliation for what they had done? At this point I no longer had a choice. Even if I had not pushed the buttons, it was I who had just killed all those relatively innocent men and women aboard those ships, and all I could say to ease my conscious was that they had started it. Well they had.