by Blaze Ward
The Doomsday Vault
The Science Officer: Volume 5
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
Book Thirteen: Calypso
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Book Fourteen: Svalbard
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Book Fifteen: Ajax
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Book Sixteen: Sunrise
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Read More!
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
Book Thirteen: Calypso
Part One
Javier Aritza glanced up from the complicated electronic board that made up his duty station as Science Officer aboard the private-service, semi-piratical, Strike Corvette Storm Gauntlet. The bridge around him was quiet but poised. The walls were kinda gray today, but the crew wasn’t.
Leaning forward, as his mother would have said.
Angry sharks smelling blood, as his first captain, back in the Concord fleet days, might have phrased it.
Javier turned his head far enough to make eye contact with Captain Zakhar Sokolov, seated atop his command throne chair at the rear of the chamber, everyone else in front of him where he could track them like an omniscient being.
“I don’t want to hear it, Javier,” the man growled. It would have been under his breath, but everyone on the bridge probably heard it in the empty stillness. “In fact, if you say it again, I’m going to start a curse kitty and charge you a quarter drachma every time you mutter it. We’ll use that to fund orphanages, or something.”
Even seated on his command chair, like a king atop a throne, it would be easy to mistake the captain for merely average. There wasn’t much that made Zakhar Sokolov stand out. Mid-fifties. Typical Anglo skin color. Shaved head. Salt and pepper Van Dyke. Average height. Average build.
Javier grinned at the thought. Then he dug into a pocket for a coin and flipped it noisily into the air with his thumb in the captain’s direction.
“This does not feel right,” Javier announced, having paid good money for the privilege. “I realize we’re only expecting to ambush a broken-down, half-blind freighter, but my recommendation would be to go in fully silent, and use extraordinary measures, since you don’t want to leave.”
Give the man credit. Javier got to watch Sokolov count to ten before he sighed quietly. And he pocketed the coin.
“Based on?” Sokolov asked in a voice used to dealing with an annoying, rambunctious eight-year-old in the backseat.
“While you’ve been watching for the big, bad wolf, I’ve been scanning the planet below us,” Javier retorted, trying to not sound too smug about things.
You know, just slightly smug, without totally overdoing it.
The ship’s dragoon, Djamila Sykora, gave him a good dose of stinkeye from her station across the bridge, but nothing she had going today was going to dent his mood. Not even a 2.1 meter tall, killer-Amazon, bad-ass, close-combat specialist known as the Ballerina of Death.
Sokolov didn’t even speak, just posed a question with his face. A sad, put-upon, dad-face.
“The place was terraformed,” Javier continued. “But it was done early on, during the Resource Wars era. And it didn’t work. Life never really took, and it will probably revert to being a dead rock in another hundred thousand years or so.”
“And?” Zakhar cast the word into the space between Javier’s thoughts.
“There is nobody down there,” Javier replied. “No lights. No radio signals. Nothing. And any time you spend on the surface you should have supplemental oxygen handy, as well as a warmsuit, because it is comparable to living at three-thousand-meters elevation, barely above freezing water, in the best places. The farther you get away from the equator, the worse it gets.”
“Somebody is paying us good money to hijack a cargo,” Zakhar observed.
Sokolov turned on that captain’s charisma thing Javier had never managed for more than five minutes at a time.
He was The Captain, all of a sudden.
Javier nodded, an evil grin forming on his face.
“Those people are not delivering that cargo to anyone on Svalbard,” Javier replied.
A beam of electricity seemed to connect the men, the only two here that had been trained, once upon a time, at the Concord Academy at Bryce.
“They’re meeting someone,” Zakhar said, mostly to himself. “And nobody mentioned that to me.”
Javier just nodded.
“Alert Status One,” Sokolov ordered in a hard voice. “Engage full stealth mode. Now.”
Suddenly, the bridge sounded like a Concord warship going into harm’s way instead of a civilian pirate sneaking around.
Javier flipped a single switch on his board that shut everything down to passive scans only.
He might have been sand-bagging the old man. After all, Storm Gauntlet had stolen all the sensor packages from Javier’s old probe-cutter Mielikki. Right now, even on passive, his scan capabilities were probably better than most front-line warships in active mode, let alone freighters.
He had already mapped one hundred and fifty-three minor moons and major asteroids moving around in the darkness between planets.
“Nav,” Sokolov continued. “Find me a different orbital path immediately. Your choice. Not here.”
The pilot, Piet Alferdinck, nodded and began to play a complicated piano concerto on the board in front of him.
Javier repressed a sigh. His old ship, Mielikki, had been piloted by a full AI package, a Sentience named Suvi. In fact, Javier had been the whole crew.
Well, him and four chickens.
He missed that.
One of these days, he was going to see a great many of the people around him hung from a high yardarm in low gravity for cutting Suvi’s ship, her corpse, apart. He had only barely managed to smuggle her personality chips out in a bucket of chicken feed and then pour her into his sensor remote, a planet-side surveying tool about the size of a large grapefruit.
There were days that young lady liked to remind him how much greater she used to be. But she had to do it quietly. If the pirates found out about her, they’d probably execute him in a heartbeat, regardless of the number of times he had saved their asses.
What they did to her after that wouldn’t be worth mentioning.
“Stealth mode engaged, Captain,” a voice called.
Deep. Male. Surprisingly smooth. Kibwe Bousaid, the captain’s executive assistant and general do-it-all.
“Stay alert, but stand down to a small crew footprint under the science officer until we have incoming signals,” the captain called, rising from his station. “I’ll be in my office.”
He took two steps and then pivoted to face Javier.
“We were hired to do a job, mister,” Zakhar intoned seriously.
Javier nodded once, just as serious. He might act like a goofball most of the time, but there was absolutely no margin for error when the trap you had set might suddenly turn inside out on you.
Part Two
Javier kinda enjoyed being in command, as long as he didn’t have to actually do an
ything captainy.
About half the bridge crew had departed with the captain. Paperwork, certifications, stuff.
The dragoon, Sykora, had stayed put, but she was busy knitting. He would have guessed it was a sweater for herself, if pressed. She had laid out one whole back piece like the tanned hide of her latest victim. It didn’t help his state of mind that she was working in a dark, almost umber-colored, yarn, about the color of his skin if he didn’t get enough tan.
She probably knew that.
As long as she and her cannibal tendencies stayed on that side of the bridge, he’d be fine. They’d all be fine.
A chirp brought Javier back to the present.
Somebody had dropped out of jump a long ways out from the planet. From the sensor signal, they had pinged the planet and the inner system pretty hard while they waited for their drives to recharge.
Javier didn’t know the exact model of ship coming, but that was a commercial scanner pulse, and not anything military. Nor a Particularly good one, either.
He assumed a dead-average everything for the freighter, and then down-graded that assumption by ten percent, them being smugglers. Only the military ever had enough money to keep everything tuned, unless you could bribe techs at bases with fresh fruit cobbler, like Javier always had.
Back when Mielikki had a full botany station growing things year round.
Back before Sokolov had turned him into a slave.
Even Janissary was just a fancy title for what he did.
Javier flipped a coin in his head, then went ahead and brought the ship back to full readiness with a triple bell.
Sykora was already watching him like a hawk, but she nodded, then took the time to fold up her knitting carefully, instead of stuffing it randomly into the bag so she could get to one of her pistols quickly.
The woman was a violent psychopath, but she was a professional about it.
Sokolov emerged from his office about the same moment the passive scanners picked up a new signal and beeped intermittently until Javier silenced the alarm.
“What do we have?” the captain asked as he took his grand chair.
Other crew filed in at the same time. Warfare might be imminent. Or plunder.
“Commercial freighter,” Javier replied, reading the signals the intruder was happily emitting. “I’m guessing a Kallasky Engineering Mark IV Windwagon, when she originally rolled off the factory floor.”
“And Creator only knows what she looks like now,” Zakhar said.
If there was a more customizable light freighter hull in the galaxy, Javier hadn’t met it. Kallasky had made this model to be turned into almost anything a new owner desired. And do so cheaply, with whole modules that could be plucked out like seeds and interchanged from a standard parts catalog.
“She should have been in for a major engine tune at least six months ago,” Javier said, studying the readouts.
For a supposed pirate/smuggler, the vessel was a wealth of signals intelligence. Most of it was garbage, but the sheer volume said something.
Mostly that they weren’t trying to hide.
Which really did not leave Javier with a good feeling.
From the looks of the people around him, they agreed.
“What do we have?” Zakhar asked.
“She’s above us now,” Javier said. “Her last jump was conservative, and she’s moving down to insert into an equatorial orbit, but doing it slowly.”
“Any sign of a second vessel?” Zakhar inquired.
“None,” Javier replied. “You’re sure these people are supposed to be smugglers?”
“That was the task we were assigned,” Zakhar said.
Javier nodded, but mostly as a placeholder.
Assigned.
He already knew that while Zakhar Sokolov owned the pocket warship, the man also belonged to what the more lurid news organizations liked to call Pirate Clans. If you had the money, the connections, and the need, you could hire Storm Gauntlet to do things, usually with plausible deniability.
One of these days, Javier decided, he might need to know a great deal more about how that whole underworld thing worked.
Rather than ask another stupid question, Javier routed one of his screens over to Sokolov’s station. He watched the captain look down and study it intently for almost a minute.
Zakhar finally looked up with a very sour taste in the set of his mouth.
“The name Calypso mean anything to you?” Javier asked in an innocent voice.
He watched Zakhar look the name of the vessel up in the encyclopedia.
“Greek myth?” the captain asked.
“That’s the origin,” Javier agreed. “It’s also a fairly common name for ships engaged in scientific research. Aquatic, predating starflight. Transponder identifies the ship as the property of the University of Uelkal.”
“Considering how much someone paid for us to be here, I can’t imagine a screw-up of that magnitude slipping through,” Zakhar observed. “So you’re probably right and it might be a trap.”
Javier nodded grimly.
There were times when he would have settled for being wrong. This was one of them.
Zakhar nodded as well.
“Nav, when they get into their orbit, hide us above them in the gravity well, full stealth,” he said. “If they move, notify me. Otherwise, we’ll wait to see who shows up to play.”
The tea mug appeared at his right hand, almost by magic.
Javier refused to look, though; fully aware that the ship was still inhabited by evil pixies, carefully disguised as wardroom stewards.
Green tea from the color. Chewy, from the way it seemed to swirl with its own whirlpool when he finally looked down.
Javier steeled himself.
He took a sip. Perfection, itself.
Javier knew he was doomed.
A day had passed since Calypso had made orbit. Storm Gauntlet perched above them, like a hawk on a thermal hunting an oblivious pigeon.
The only thing that had broken the monotony was the amount of sensor data he had added, as Calypso had spent their whole time pinging the planet loudly with a sensor package almost as good as the pirate had.
The planet was dead as a doorknob. No question about it. But Javier could have done a full survey thesis just from his notes in the last twenty-four hours. It gave him something to do while he waited for that other shoe to drop. Everybody forgot how dull the waiting bits could be, even if you were walking a tightrope over a lava bed.
His board chirped happily. Around him, the skeleton bridge crew woke up from whatever they were doing.
After a moment, the guy watching the gunnery boards nodded at him. He was a tall, gawky kid with dark, brown skin and instincts almost as good as Sykora’s. Just the person to babysit the big guns while they waited for something.
“Breakaway confirmed, sir,” Thomas Obasanjo said. “Calypso has launched a shuttle.”
Javier sounded the summons.
Sykora had apparently been in the day office with Sokolov, as she emerged one step behind him and took up her station.
“Good news,” Javier smiled his most innocent smile at the giant woman.
“I doubt it,” she sneered back at him.
“Oh, no,” Javier disagreed with a smile. “They just launched a shuttle that’s headed for the surface. You might get to go down and shoot people.”
The way her eyes sorta gleamed told Javier all he needed to know about the woman’s state of mind. Just as frustrated at the inactivity as he was, but at least she had a hope of being able to do something.
Nobody was going to rescue The Science Officer. Not even evil, wardroom pixies.
“I thought you said there was nothing down there, mister,” Sokolov prodded.
“There isn’t,” Javier agreed. “And I’ve just spent a day reading their scanner logs to prove it.”
“How did you read their scanner logs?” another voice intruded as she entered the bridge from another hatch.
<
br /> Mary-Elizabeth Suzuki. Gunner extraordinaire. Dark hair and dark eyes. Lousy poker player. Pretty good dancer.
“I know what frequency they pulse on,” Javier replied as he watched her walk. She was tall and skinny and a joy to watch move, or hold dancing. “That same signal comes back and we can capture it. I know enough major surface features now that everyone on both crews could have something officially named after them.”
“Irrelevant.” The captain did his Captain-thing. He speared Javier with an inquisitive eye. “Why?”
“How the hell should I know?” Javier asked. “You’re the experts at being pirates. Maybe he has to go bury treasure? You know, X marks the spot?”
“Very funny,” Sokolov replied.
The captain turned to Sykora, still all spit and polish formalness.
“Djamila,” he commanded. “Organize a ground team. We’ll pounce on the ship, and Del can insert you on top of them before they can hide or destroy anything.”
She got that look in her eyes. Javier knew he was doomed.
“Don’t forget your toothbrush, Mister Science Officer,” she crooned at him. “You’ll be joining us.”
Javier already knew that. But he’d also take more than just a toothbrush on this trip.
This might be the day when he finally got to kill that woman.
Part Three
In his sixty-five years in this galaxy, Delridge Smith had seen and done pretty much everything, he figured. Hell, in most places, the statute of limitations had even expired, but he’d never gotten around to comparing stupid feats with Aritza. Let that poor kid think he was a debaucherous pig. Del still made Javier look like a Nature Scout by comparison, if you went back far enough.