The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  They sabotaged the power suits and moved on.

  The next squad of Vuurick defenders were armed as they were with novaplast shields and blades. Danny caught the first of them half through a hatchway between connecting compartments and rushed to keep him—and the fighters behind him—bottled up there. Danny engaged him shield-to-shield, blade-to-blade. The Vuurick was bigger and stronger than the frail human, but his six appendages worked against him in the confined space. And Danny was faster.

  They thrust and parried at each other for a while, neither opponent giving ground. The Vuurick carried a full-sized shield and used it to full advantage, blocking most of the hatchway with it, each time he needed to step back at arm’s length and rest, or mentally regroup, for another sally. Danny quickly grew tired of the tactic and thought his anyweapon to extend its blade, and keep extending it, until it was thin enough to fit through the small sliver of space between the top of the open hatchway and the top of the lead Vuurick’s hand shield. Once it was beyond the shield, quick as an attacking viper, Danny had the blade curve and grow downward, shooting forward too fast for the eye to follow, until it pierced the mercenary’s skull.

  The Vuurick fell like a sack of wet cement, while Danny thought his anyweapon back into a more traditional cutlass shape. Beyond the hatchway were nine more defenders, getting ready to surge forward, and Danny was out of breath. He didn’t think twice about simply stepping aside, on his side of the hatchway, knowing with absolute certainty that Kyal would be right behind him.

  Once the way was opened for her, she surged ahead, through the hatch and into the next compartment, picking up the dead Vuurick’s body as she did so. Then she proceeded to swing the body this way and that, using it as a massive bludgeon. Fully surprised by this bizarre tactic, all they could immediately do in response was duck and dodge. That gave the rest of Danny’s crew time to flood into the room, where they carefully picked their opponents and made short work of them.

  “Are you okay, Kyal?” Now it was Danny’s turn to ask, as he stepped into the room, after the last defender had fallen. The Sendarian warrior woman had a number of sword and knife cuts on her body. Her blood ran a lighter red than his—more the color of pale rust. Her exoskeleton had a few novaplast plates included in its structure. But they only covered the most vital areas. Full protection would have made the mechanism too heavy to operate, even for her remarkable strength. She looked down at herself in her usual, disinterested way.

  “Superficial,” was all she said.

  They continued on, advancing toward the ship’s bridge, fighting when they had to and avoiding confrontation whenever they could. When the way was blocked, Danny would use his anyweapon to cut a new route through a bulkhead. Its unbreakable blade could be thought into such exquisite sharpness that it could slice through anything less than the outer-hull material. Once an opening cut was made, Kyal would peel back the metal (or sheetplast, in some cases, where recent repairs and updates had been made to the ancient vessel) and they’d be free to proceed once again.

  Less than twenty minutes after they’d first set foot out of the Egg’s shell, they arrived on the bridge.

  Brodogue and his prize crew were already there.

  Three Oeerlians were dead on the deck, pools of azure blood seeping out from their bodies. A half-dozen more had been herded into one corner, under guard by two of Brodogue’s bullyboys. They whistled their distress in music so sweet no human composer would ever be able to approach, much less duplicate it.

  “I saw your trick, Danny!” Brodogue laughed, clicking his sincere admiration between his words. “But it didn’t work! Inspired us to take our own risk and construct our phase door right into the bridge! Dangerous gambit, eh? All of the electronic crap between the hulls interfering with our phase picture—likely to short the door out mid-passage and cut us into bloody gobbets!”

  Brodogue was lying on the deck, along with the dead Oeerlians. His personal aide, a trained medic, was tending to a vicious burn wound in his upper torso. The injury smelled of crisped flesh and salty decay. Yellow blood-pus hissed and sputtered out of the edges of the plasma burn.

  “We made it though!” Brodogue continued. “And won!”

  “How do you figure?” Danny said. He wanted to ask about his captain’s injury, but wouldn’t shame him by discussing such things in front of their captives. “We boarded the ship before you did.”

  “But we captured the bridge first and took their surrender!” He winced as his medic squirted a thick paste out of a tube, directly into the wound’s main fissure.

  “It was a boarding race. We boarded first! Case closed!”

  “Fairly argued,” Brodogue said. “We’ll split the bonus equally among the two crews.” This elicited a short cheer from pirates in each crew. “You made me proud, once again, Danny. Well done!”

  Brodogue died an hour later, never having left the bloodstained deck of the captured trader.

  Danny watched from the Merry Prankster’s bridge as the giant Oeerlian ship powered up its engines in preparation for the two- or three-week run it would have to make to build up sufficient momentum for even the most shallow dive into underspace. A prize crew from the Prankster was onboard and would take it to where it could be sold, either in whole or stripped for parts. Looking in-system, toward the distant primary, Danny could still make out the reaction drive glow from one of the merchant ship’s launches. It was packed to the scuppers with all of the surviving Oeerlians and their Vuurick mercenaries. With no diving capability in the launch, limited to travel through normal upperspace, by the time they’d arrived anywhere they might plead for help, the pirates would be safely away, back to where no one could ever find them.

  The Prankster’s crew (his crew now, he had to remind himself) had argued vociferously against letting them live. Those filthy, greedy merchants had caused their beloved captain’s death, and such a profound debt could only be paid in the coin of wholesale massacre. Besides, in order to let them live, Danny had to give them one of the trader’s largest launches, which was cash out of every crewmember’s share.

  At first, Danny tried to argue logically. Brodogue had always let the survivors go when he could. It was part of their ancient code. When it was clear that his imprecations were falling on deaf ears—or aural plates, as the case may be—Danny drew his anyweapon, formed it into a standard Kell blaster (the same kind that had so recently felled their captain), and burned the primary leg stalks off of one of the loudest protestors. He knew from long experience that any hint of mutiny had to be dealt with instantly and brutally. It seemed to do the trick. The crew returned to their duties, sullen and reluctant—but they obeyed.

  Once the ponderous merchant ship was a pinpoint glow in the distance, Danny ordered the Prankster’s engines lit up for standard noncombat acceleration. He set the course back the same way they’d come, so they could recover the undamaged attractions on the way. Then he promoted Kyal to First Mate and gave her the watch. This came as an obvious surprise to young Credogue, who must have expected to be given the slot as a matter of course. Both sets of his undecorated grappling hoons were at full extension, embarrassing the other Plentiri on the bridge. But the Second Mate didn’t seem to notice their nervous agitation.

  “I’ll be in my cabin,” Danny said. He was in a foul mood and his head was pounding, as much due to the events surrounding his ascendancy to the captaincy as to the aftereffects of the recent chase conducted in an internal field set at maximum.

  “Which one?” Kyal said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Will you be in your old cabin or your new one? As the new captain of the ship, you’re entitled to move into—”

  “Belay that talk,” Danny growled. “Brodogue’s quarters will be kept as they are, unoccupied, until a decent period of mourning has passed.”

  “Very good, Captain,” Kyal said. “I’ll circulate that order among the crew.”

  Back in his cabin, Danny tried for long hours to sleep b
ut failed. Then he tried to read, but by the twelfth time he’d read the same paragraph, without any notion of what it said, he gave up. So he lay in his bed and made mental plans for the changes he’d begin to institute, starting with his next watch. He considered whom he’d reward and whom he’d demote, and whom he might have to kill in order to consolidate his new position. There was always some blood spilled whenever a new captain came into power. Even under long-standing traditions and the supposedly inviolate code, it was in the nature of pirates to be prickly about those they allowed to lead them.

  Sometime during his calculations, Danny finally fell asleep. Sometime later, he was woken, abruptly, when a dozen crewmembers crept uninvited into his room. They had Kyal trussed up neck-to-ankle in constrictor tape, which even her great strength couldn’t burst. It was the sound she’d made when they dropped her unceremoniously onto the deck that woke him.

  Danny frantically blinked the sleep out of his eyes. In short time, he noticed Kyal helpless on the deck, the grumbling mob crowded into his quarters, and he noticed Credogue at the head of it.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Kyal said. There was a reddening bruise developing under one eye. “I’d finished my watch and turned the ship over to the Second Mate, without incident. Damn it, but I was sound asleep when they came for me, or three or four more of them would be dead by now!”

  More? How many did she kill then? Enough that they’d never let the two of them live through the night? Danny struggled to think.

  “Don’t call him Captain,” Credogue said. “No one confirmed him as our new captain.”

  “True,” Danny agreed, “but as First Mate, I am the acting captain, until a formal assembly of election can take place. And that can’t happen sooner than twelve days after a vacancy by death or resignation of the previous—”

  “Don’t quote the book to me, Danny Wells! The Plentiri wrote most of what’s in it. My accelerated ancestors—may they dive ever deeper into the seven thousand underworlds—forged those ancient covenants. What has a human ever added to it?”

  “Not a thing,” Danny said. “Only a confirmed raider captain can participate in the Council of Lawmaking, and since I’m the first human to come this close to achieving that rank—”

  “He’s stalling for time,” one of the other crewmembers said. “Kill him and let’s be done with this ugly business.” Danny was shocked and saddened to recognize the speaker as Reedu Jillijon, the Prankster’s unflappable sailing master, who’d always seemed authentically fond of him in the past.

  “No one’s going to be killed today,” Credogue said, silencing the others before they could voice any agreement with Reedu’s proposal. “This isn’t a mutiny and we aren’t cutthroats in the night. This is a simple correction of a past oversight. Danny Wells can’t become our captain because of the laws which govern us, because he was never a proper member of our crew. He first boarded the Prankster under false pretenses, a case of mistaken identity. Since that was never adjudicated, he can’t now be subject to our code, nor can he claim its protections.”

  That much was true enough. Danny was never formally invited into the crew and so had never formally joined it. It was all a big mistake.

  In the winter of 1964, Danny was driving his rusted lime-green Volkswagen Beetle home from college for Christmas vacation. He drove alone down a narrow and desolate country road, which traversed the rolling wheat fields of eastern Washington’s high Palouse. He was trying to coax a few more miles out of the tired old thing, but had begun to suspect that it was done for. It was getting dark, and the car’s engine, which had never run well to begin with, had started to burp and sputter in ways that he’d not heard before.

  “Come on, you poxy tart,” Danny cursed, “give me just a few more miles. Get me to the next service station and all is forgiven. Hell, just get me to a town with a bus station and I’ll let you finally die in peace. I promise!”

  Something popped loudly under the floorboards, and Danny began to smell gas fumes seeping into the passenger compartment.

  “No! Don’t do this to me! I’m sorry I called you names!”

  Danny was nineteen years old and had no firm idea of what his future might hold. He was by no means sure, but at times he thought he might want to become an engineer, or an architect, or perhaps pursue a poly-sci major and study police work—the advanced kind that led to FBI jobs and such. He also thought he might possibly be in love with Rebecca Meyer, whom he’d met last semester outside of his intermediate fencing class. He was going out of the gym just as she was coming in to seek a signed deferment from the required one PE class per semester for all underclassmen, and they’d danced briefly in the doorway, trying to maneuver around each other. She’d giggled at his cute “toy” sword, his white knee-length fencing knickers, and his white knee-high socks, which she’d thought looked darling and later described as precious—but in a good way. He was taken with her immediately.

  Rather than drive straight home this time, from Moscow, Idaho, to Pasco, Washington, taking major roads that actually had more than one lane at times, Danny had agreed to drop Rebecca off at her family farm out in the vast Palouse. He tarried too long there, meeting her parents, whose names were Bob and Hazel, and then (perhaps more important) meeting her horses, whose names were Rascal and Applejack. It had already begun to grow dark before he was once again on his way.

  Now he was pretty thoroughly lost, navigating a single-lane country road where one had to pull over to let an oncoming car (or more likely a tractor or harvesting combine) pass. Adding to those troubles, his rickety old Beetle, which had been dying for as long as he’d owned it, was almost certainly in its final death throes.

  With a final loud cough, followed by a sad little rattle, unable to make it up a small rise of the road as it surmounted yet another rolling hill, the car stalled and died. When Danny tried to turn the engine over again, all he heard was a few angry clicks. Strangely, now that the inevitable had finally come to pass, what he felt most wasn’t anger or resentment, but a sense of relief.

  “Good riddance,” he said, abandoning the thing where it had died. He took his one suitcase, buttoned up his fleece-lined corduroy jacket, and began walking, never so much as pausing to look back at the ugly little car when he’d crested the rise.

  He walked for ten minutes in the rapidly increasing dark, as the road dropped down to follow the winding Palouse River valley for a time, before jutting almost due north.

  “But I don’t want to go north,” he complained. “I need to head west.” But since west wasn’t an option, he continued along the road. Gradually wheat fields began to give way to scattered stands of pine trees, as he trudged up a long hill that showed no sign of cresting anytime soon. Eventually, he left the fields behind entirely and entered a forest proper. He passed a small green sign that read: WELCOME TO STEPTOE BUTTE STATE PARK.

  “Lovely,” he said. “I guess this means no town soon.”

  Turning back would mean at least a fifteen-mile walk to the last town he’d passed through, before his car gave up the ghost. It would also mean revisiting the Volkswagen’s carcass, which he was loath to do. It was getting too cold out to walk fifteen miles, so he pressed on, gambling that something in his current direction would be closer. He could just make out a great dark shape ahead of him, blocking out most of the visible sky.

  “Mister Butte, I presume.”

  And then a turn of the road brought him in sight of a set of very bright lights glowing up on the butte’s summit.

  “Saved,” he said, and picked up his pace.

  Twenty minutes later, he and the winding switchback road arrived at the summit together, where he saw an impossible sight. A large blue egg-shaped thing was floating motionlessly, low over the top of the trees covering the butte’s uppermost cap. The thing was as big as a ranch house, and the source of the lights. Several beams of bright light shone out from the otherwise featureless object, one of which pointed directly earthward, illuminating the extraordina
ry creatures standing there. There were two of them. One looked like nothing so much as a giant fat slug, with a dozen slimy tentacles of various lengths and sizes growing out of it in a tight cluster two-thirds of the way up on its body. On what Danny imagined was the creature’s head, there were eye-stalks, a giant flattened parrot’s beak, and two sets of curved horns that would sink almost completely into the black, blubbery flesh, before extruding out again, in an odd pattern and rhythm. The other creature appeared a bit more human, but only in the sense that almost anything would seem more human compared to the slug thing. It looked more or less like what one might get if you put a warthog’s head on top of a skinny gorilla’s body, and then put the entire thing inside a yellow space suit. Both creatures were holding devices that were unmistakably firearms of some kind.

  Danny stood transfixed and gaped in a mixture of horror and disbelief. He must have made some kind of sound, because the two things turned to regard him.

  “James!” the warthog ape said, in barely recognizable English. “Damn it, boy, but your leave was up nine hours ago! We were just about to abandon you!”

  The other creature just spouted an elaborate series of angry clicks, much like the sounds his car made when he’d tried in vain to restart it.

  Danny felt his knees give way and vaguely saw the ground rushing up to meet him. “Drunk again,” he heard someone say, as if from a great distance, just before the darkness took him completely.

  When Danny woke again, he was in bed, in a small metal-and-plastic room. The warthog ape was standing over him, along with two other creatures, just as impossible. One was a bundle of prickly green spheres, of different sizes, squeezed together in a loose, undulating mass. The other looked like a jellyfish in a steel mesh cage.

  “And I say again this isn’t James Crowder,” Jellyfish said in perfect, unaccented English. Danny couldn’t tell how the thing was producing speech.