Steo walked with him a few blocks and got a taxi back to Slank’s club. Entrance to Eroteme? was smoother this time. Steo took Hawking with him.
“New robot, m’boy?” Slank asked slyly.
“This robot is important. To you and me. First though, do you think you have a pilot for me?”
“Oh sure, I had an idea right when you asked me. I’m thinking we may need to change our deal though.”
“Agreed,” Steo said. He was feeling much more comfortable now. Most of the mission was done. He could almost relax.
Slank sat up at this. That wasn’t the reaction she expected.
“Come sit with me.” She waved, and a table and chairs floated out.
“I’ll take that drink you offered earlier.” He sat down, more comfortable than before.
Slank poured him a clear drink. Steo took it. It smelled sharp and pungent, as well as high in alcohol content.
They sat opposite each other, with Hawking behind Steo. Slank eyed the robot, her mind running.
“How do you see the deal,” Steo started. He sipped the drink and found it wasn’t too bitter. He normally didn’t drink much, and he didn’t think Slank knew he avoided drinking while on a job.
“You provided some current information about the Loytz and Petid – not much I can act on, not to make a profit. I would never sell you out. Together with finding you a qualified pilot, one who fits your particular needs, I think should cost something,” Slank said.
“How much?”
“A hundred thousand credits,” Slank said. The price was certainly less than Hawking cost, but more than enough to buy several other kinds of robots. “That plus the hundred thousand for the science vessel Vadyanika makes two hundred thousand credits.”
“I like this liquor. Maybe I was wrong not to take a break here.” Inside he smiled, but he retained his emotionless composure until the deal was done.
“Good,” Slank said, cautiously. She’d never seen him drink.
“I feel like a higher price is in order. You give me the pilot, and the information on the science vessel and pay me … five hundred thousand credits.”
Slank looked at him, then the robot, then back at him. Confused but curious, she said, “For the robot?”
“No. This is a statistical processing robot in civilian terms. In military and exploration terms, he’s a powerful science robot.”
Slank didn’t respond, and made no change in facial expression.
Steo continued. “Formerly of the Forbidden Spin casino. As of an hour ago.” He watched her reaction over the lip of his cup.
Slank’s jaw dropped. In fact, she drooled a bit.
“Didn’t you own part of that casino once, Slank?”
Her mouth snapped shut and her eyes got hard.
“You owned half that casino with its current owner, a man named Vane Tokar. Everybody knows he double-crossed you and took your share. You went underground for a while and resurfaced across town, establishing club after club until finally creating Eroteme?, a profitable and popular energy club. All is well in Nuzdak.” His explanation was plain.
She didn’t move or take a drink.
“What people don’t know is how you left the Forbidden Spin or why you took such a long sabbatical. I’ll come out of orbit. Here’s the deal: help me with a pilot, give me that info on the Vadyanika and pay me half a million credits. In exchange I’ll take this robot off-world and I’ll give you a choice.”
Slank cleared her throat. “What,” she rasped, “what’s the choice?”
“Hawking, are you still connected to the casino?”
“Yes sir. The connection is holding firm,” Hawking said.
Slank raised her eyebrow in surprise.
“If you were to drop the connection, what would happen to the casino?”
“They would immediately suffer uncontrollable losses at the tables. By the time they knew what was going on, they would shut down. By tomorrow they would connect older, less powerful robots who could bring the existing games up to speed.”
Steo waved his hand to indicate that was enough.
“That’s not a choice, and you’re going to do that anyway. So thanks,” Slank said, trying to restrain her sarcasm.
“Hawking, are the casino’s accounting documents also on their network?”
“Yes sir, both sets,” Hawking said.
Steo looked mock-surprised. “Both sets.”
Slank knew what that meant. “Oh my. The casino is running their books illegally. So what? I taught them how! Ha! I’m in no danger and I don’t get anything from that being revealed.”
“Hawking, are there security vids also stored on their servers?”
“Yes sir. All of them.”
“All? Dating back how long?”
“Since before Miss Slank worked there.”
Slank went silent and a pale shade of green. Her face was grim. “You walk carefully now, boy.” There was a hard edge in her voice. She realized their friendship wouldn’t stop Steo from doing what he thought was right. He was annoying that way.
Steo continued, unafraid of her warning. “Vane Tokar doesn’t like to just win. He likes to humiliate people, make sure they remember how he won. He’s got a sadistic streak. He has them beaten to within an inch of their life. I’m going to publicly release Vane’s accounting documents and how he rigged the games. I’ll leave him wide open, his systems available to the public. It’ll take days to shut them off and once the information is out, he can’t get it back.”
He let her absorb what he said.
“This is your choice, Slank. Do I also release the security vids? They’re pretty bad. I can’t make this decision. His victims may be embarrassed again. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. I don’t know. If they’re released, a mob mentality will surface. It’ll spread. Vane Tokar and his guards might be injured or worse. It’s your call, for half a million credits.”
There was a long gap during which Slank wasn’t really focused on the room. She absent-mindedly rubbed her shoulder, as if an old injury still ached.
Vane Tokar was a businessman with a hard edge, but he abused his power, and Steo couldn’t stand that. Steo didn’t review all the vids, but he put together who was probably on them.
“I assume there’s little room for negotiation?” Slank asked.
“Sorry, old friend. None.” Steo honestly felt sympathy for her. He’d made up his mind what he was going to do before he came to Nibs, before he landed in Nuzdak. He needed credits and biomining wasn’t his style. It took some research to find a good candidate like Vane Tokar, someone who deserved some transparency. Steo had mixed emotions that it tied in with his old friend Slank. Originally Steo had decided to release the vids, but he changed his mind when he spoke to her again. It had to be her decision.
“You’ve become more mercenary since we saw each other last,” Slank said with melancholy in her eyes.
Softly he said, “It’s not my trigger to pull.”
Again the room was quiet for a while. Slank cleared her throat.
“Here’s the book on the Vadyanika. The pilot you want is Yuina, a tirrian. You can find her freedancing most nights. Everybody knows her. She’s a highly qualified pilot and she’s running out of money,” she said.
“Ok. Thank you, Slank.”
He waited. Slank looked him in the eye, but he couldn’t read her.
“And the vids? What about Vane Tokar?” he asked.
Slank put her hands on the table, looked Steo in the eyes and said:
“Throw that bastard to the mob.”
CHAPTER 10
Ship Graveyard
Anniva jumped out of her bunk and ran to the bridge when she found out they’d arrived. She wasn’t the first. The chief surveyor Rouse was there. The Omeripax had only a holobridge, an empty white room. When activated, it rendered controls and diagrams in holographic 3D. A holobridge was a large Light Interface. The crew interacted with the ship by moving their hands in the air or
speaking verbal commands.
Seeing the young intern enter the room, Rouse said, “You’re up early. Excited?”
“This is going to be such an amazing learning experience,” she said respectfully. “The technology in the old ship graveyard is archeological treasure. Maybe not useful in comparison to today’s standards, but insightful at least.”
“Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find some clay pots out there,” Rouse said. He had a ruddy complexion and a short white beard. Anniva thought this made him look even more like a professor.
The Omeripax had made a long jump to the Sondren solar system. None of the planets orbited in the sun’s habitable zone so there was no liquid water on them, or life. There was something like an asteroid field here, though: countless wrecked and useless old starships had been left here. Radioactive engines were unsafe to leave floating near inhabited planets, so ships were stripped and flown to places like this. This ship graveyard was huge, containing thousands of vessels and uncountable tons of loose debris.
“Stay around while I set something up. I think you’re going to enjoy this.” Rouse moved his fingers over a small holographic console.
“Did we arrive at the right coordinates? Is everything safe?” she asked.
There was no pilot on board the Omeripax, the computer flew it. They had flown from the inner Crux spiral arm out to the Percaic, a trip that took weeks at high faster-than-light speeds. Since the Omeripax was just a survey vessel, their greatest defense was that no one in the Percaic arm knew they were there. The ship graveyard didn’t have anything of value, either. They would stay, survey the field and return home.
“Yes, we’re exactly where I plotted. There are no pirates, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said. “There, it’s ready.”
Slowly the luminators dimmed. The sun appeared as a glowing ball within the room. A few planets and their orbits emerged next, then the graveyard came into view. Anniva knew the scales weren’t the same: ships were larger than planets in this representation. As data came in, the Omeripax’s computers rendered more.
“The rest of the crew isn’t up yet, but care to make a first pass?” Rouse said with a smile.
“Really?” Anniva asked in wonderment. She was a young associate, eager at the opportunity for scientific study. She wore the conservative black pants and white shirt appropriate for her social position.
“We’re on the edge of the graveyard. We can direct the Omeripax to move in a straight line through the ships and transmit signals. They’ll bounce off the ships and we’ll get data back. It will give us a schematic and rough physical information to begin our survey. The flight will only take a couple minutes. We have enough energy stored in the engines for that.”
Anniva didn’t have to answer.
Rouse plotted a quick, straight course through the floating crowd of dead ships. In a minute they were off and in another few minutes they had stopped on the other side. He selected an option on his console and said, “Here we go.”
The sun and planets receded as the holobridge zoomed in on the graveyard. Black ships and chunks of mechanical wreckage came into sharper view.
Rouse said, “It’s rendering them as the data gets processed. Once it has enough for one ship, it can extrapolate if it recognizes a pattern.”
He waved his hand. “Lighten.” Anniva looked shocked. They floated off the floor.
“You turned the gravity down.” She was glad her hair was tied back so it didn’t float in her face.
“Right. Now you can control the holograms. Reach out, take hold of a ship.”
The holograms weren’t solid, they were just images in the air. She acted like she was grabbing one of the ships and pulled. She didn’t move, but the whole field of three-dimensional objects did. The ship in her hand grew.
It was a wreck. Only two thirds of it remained. Girders jutted into space. Cables and wires hung loose.
She looked around and grabbed random ships, pulling them to her. Here was a bizarre battlecruiser from an alien race. There was a water carrier split so that its enormous, hollow holds were open to space.
“You can move yourself too,” Rouse explained. “Gesture like you’re flying and you’ll move around. Like this.” He made an awkward gesture and moved further off the floor, then glided around.
Anniva tried a different motion and it worked better. “I’m swimming in space!” she exclaimed.
They explored the ship graveyard by swimming around in the large empty room and found wondrous, inexplicable vessels from out of time. Rouse revolved around a strange ship that was probably built by the plenum, a lost (or dead) alien species.
Anniva saw something else that interested her. Deep within the graveyard was a colossal ship, larger than any she’d seen before, bigger than any battleship or freight carrier. The bottom was flat and so was the back, but the top was sloped. As she pulled herself closer, she noticed it showed no signs of a graviton drive. That wasn’t unusual in this graveyard, because many had them stripped or were blown off in whatever event destroyed the vessel.
This ship didn’t show any signs of damage, though. It was like an upside-down rowboat with few features, except that it could probably hold billions of tons of material. That’s what she thought it was, a transporter.
As Anniva swam through the air, she got closer to the ship and didn’t see much she recognized. It looked ancient by any standard. She slipped under it and rose on the other side. She saw tiny glittering lights. None of the other hulks floating through the graveyard had lights.
“Hey Rouse, this one is turned on. It has lights,” she said.
“Hmm?” he said, investigating another ship. “Oh that’s just a mistake in the rendering. When we passed through, our signals only caught one side of the ship. The computer had to infer what the other side was like, so it made a duplicate. Since we didn’t tell it not to, it probably assumed the ship was active so it gave it lights.”
Anniva was doubtful.
Since Rouse and Anniva were looking at ships in the middle of the graveyard, they didn’t notice a dot moving closer to the Omeripax. It came from outside the graveyard too, and it wasn’t a survey vessel.
The alarms sounded. Wall panels flashed, indicating danger. Rouse and Anniva spun in the air.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I, uh …” Rouse stuttered as he brought up a console. He struggled to bring the gravity back to normal.
Anniva reached to the Omeripax hologram and pulled it to her. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, then she saw a line between it and another ship. This one was lit up, and flew directly at the Omeripax. She grabbed it and pulled it toward herself. Red with black stripes, it bristled with weapons. It looked much like a spider with a long tail over its back, and that’s what it was: the destroyer Fire Scorpion.
Suddenly the holograms disappeared and gravity pulled them down to the deck. The room was white and empty again. They looked at each other and that’s when the alarms screamed loudest.
The Omeripax was covered by the Fire Scorpion’s shadow.
A solid missile struck the Omeripax in the aft, near the graviton engines. The Spinebreaker missile plunged completely through the smaller ship, leaving a trail of fragments. The survey ship maintained control, so it only shifted a little. The internal gravity buffered the passengers.
A man burst into the holobridge. “What in the name of science is going on?” he shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Quard!” Rouse yelled. “I think someone is attacking us!”
Quard waved his beefy hands and a console appeared. His hands flew and they got a hologram of just the two ships. “That’s not a pirate. It’s way too big! That’s a destroyer, it eats pirates. Why would they attack us?”
Rouse brought up a communications console. “Other ship, hailing other ship. This is the survey vessel Omeripax. We are on a peaceful mission to explore this field of old ships. We are unarmed. Cease fire! Repeat, we are unarmed!”<
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A missile exploded outside the Omeripax, releasing a spray of projectiles that punctured the ship’s skin in hundreds of places. Inside the Omeripax, lights sputtered.
“Pirates don’t attack first,” Rouse said. “Why would they do this?”
“We have to get out of here!” Quard checked to see if they had the energy and capacity to move.
Elsewhere on the ship, people rushed to their stations. An engineer pounded on the controls to the engine room door, until he thought to check why the door wouldn’t open. The panel revealed that the engine room was open to space. He stood in shock. Then he fell to the floor, weeping for his wife, the engineer who had been on duty.
A third missile exploded near the Omeripax, spraying it again with shrapnel.
In the bridge, the Omeripax’s computer identified the attacker as the Fire Scorpion. Rouse screamed to cease fire. Quard paled as he realized their dire situation.
Anniva was shaken. She wanted to help but didn’t know how. She ran to the door, thinking to get to an escape pod. Then she caught herself and turned around. She couldn’t abandon her friends and co-workers. She thought maybe she could add to the pleas to stop firing, or organize an escape.
Six small missiles pierced the skin of the Omeripax and there was a moment of silence on board both ships. Then the warheads exploded. The Omeripax was torn apart. No systems could protect the passengers. They died in blazing fire or the utter cold of space.
CHAPTER 11
The Fire Scorpion
Surfaces inside the Fire Scorpion were hard, cold steel – designed for function, not comfort. It was a military vessel and heavily armed at that. The bridge was calm. The crew did their jobs while watching the destruction of the peaceful survey vessel. No one asked questions.
The door to the captain’s lift opened and closed with a metal squeal.
Bridge Executive Office Pesht grimaced at the sound. He hated it and wondered if the noise wasn’t fixed just to infuriate him. He stood on his chair and looked over its back at the lift.
The Eye of Orion_Book 1_Gearjackers Page 6