In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 18

  “Park her in hold four,” I said on a tight beam to Izin once the containers had floated clear of the Merak Star.

  He didn’t acknowledge my instruction, but came in above us, then glided down to the open cargo hold. The Silver Lining was crescent shaped, with a large maneuvering engine at each ‘wingtip’, giving her a beam four times her bow to stern length. When her starboard engine was alongside, she thrusted gently sideways into the aft hold. Once inside, Izin killed her lateral drift and nudged her down onto the deck where magnetic locks caught her landing struts. When she was secure, I sealed the cargo doors and repressurized the hold.

  “Welcome aboard, Silver Lining,” I said over ship-to-ship. “Shut her down cold, Izin. We don’t want the Drakes knowing you’re there.”

  “Right away, Captain.”

  I started up the Merak Star’s engines again, this time at full power, and headed for Anya’s bubble point, rolling and decelerating only at the last possible moment. We came to a dead stop with barely a minute to spare.

  “We could use the Silver Lining to abandon ship,” Jase suggested as we waited for the autonav to take over.

  “We could,” I agreed, “but I still have a score to settle,” and an aleph-null code to unravel!

  Jase nodded understandingly. “Now that I’ve met them, I don’t like the look of them either. They give all Ories a bad name.”

  The first indication of the autonav taking over was when our sensors suddenly retracted and the spacetime distorters began charging.

  “Here we go!” Jase said.

  I relaxed, hands behind my head. “Time to see what the Drakes are hiding.”

  “Captain,” Izin’s synthetic voice sounded from the intercom.

  “Yes Izin, what is it?”

  “I’m detecting that electromagnetic anomaly again. It’s very close.”

  I smiled, this time knowing what it meant. Gern Vrate was alive! “Don’t worry about it, Izin. It’s just a nosy neighbor from the Perseus Arm.”

  Before he could question me further, the Merak Star’s bubble formed, sending us hurtling at a thousand times the speed of light toward Anya’s secret destination.

  Chapter Five : Acheron Station

  Drift Station

  Acheron Abyss Dark Nebula

  Non-System Space, Outer Draco

  945 light years from Sol

  Population Unknown

  The Merak Star was bubbled up for three days, and thanks to Anya, the autonav refused to share its real time coordinate simulation with us. I was used to flying blind – there was no way to avoid it, no signal of any kind could penetrate a superluminal bubble – but not seeing the autonav plotting our progress against the infallible Tau Cetin charts was strangely unnerving.

  Jase and I took turns standing watch while Izin locked himself in the Silver Lining trying to crack the Consortium’s navlog encryption. In my spare time, I studied the armaments the Merak Star was still carrying for the Drakes in three of its four cargo holds. At first glance, they appeared to be everything the Brotherhood could want, except they were all hard hitting military grade weapons designed for war fighting, and that was the problem. The Brotherhood wanted loot, not glory. The only booty they’d get with these weapons would be corpses and radioactive wrecks. There was no profit in that.

  “Skipper,” Jase’s voice sounded over the intercom in hold two. “We’ve arrived.”

  “On my way,” I said, pushing off in zero gravity toward the forward hatch. Like many large ships, the Merak Star was rigged for artificial gravity only in crew areas in order to lower build costs and reduce energy consumption.

  Izin met me halfway to the bridge elevator, as eager to see where Anya was taking us as I was.

  “Any progress on the log?” I asked.

  “I’ve decrypted a fifth of the entries, but have found nothing useful. Nazari was even more ineffective at keeping records than you, Captain.”

  I was sloppy on purpose, because I didn’t like anyone knowing my business, especially my EIS business. Nazari on the other hand was a stimhead who’d have lost his license the moment he set foot in Core System space.

  “You’ve been reading my log?” I said, feigning indignation.

  “I assure you, Captain, deciphering your cryptic annotations is more difficult than decrypting the Merak Star’s log, and far less stimulating.”

  When we reached the bridge, Jase was scanning nearby space. All four screens displayed a thin black mist devoid of stars with only a single point of light in the distance, blurred by the gas and dust between us.

  “Where are we?” I asked, climbing onto my acceleration couch.

  “The autonav isn’t talking,” Jase replied, “but from the looks of it, I’d say we’re inside the Acheron Abyss.”

  The dark mass of the Cyclops floated in the mist several clicks to port. Being significantly faster than the Merak Star at both super-and subluminal velocities, she must have been waiting there for almost a day.

  “Incoming signal,” Jase announced.

  “Izin, they don’t know you’re here” I said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

  Izin hurried into the corridor, then Jase put Anya on screen.

  “Follow us in,” she said without preamble. “Don’t try to access your autonav or you know what’ll happen, and whatever you do, don’t activate shields or weapons. If you do, we won’t be able to protect you.”

  The screen went blank, then the old assault carrier’s three maneuvering engines glowed to life as she started toward the distant light.

  “If they can’t protect us,” Jase said, “what are we doing here?”

  “They want us looking like a prize, not a threat,” I said, laying in a course behind the Cyclops.

  Jase parked his annoyance, turning his attention to the sensors. “There’s over a hundred ships out there, all sizes, all types, all Drake!”

  It explained Anya’s insistence on secrecy. She was a Brotherhood navigator, a member of an elite group who knew the coordinates of every pirate base in Mapped Space, places so secret that such knowledge was a death sentence to all but the anointed. Bases like Acheron Station were the beating heart of the Brotherhood, where booty, hostages and ships were bought and sold and the long arm of Earth Law was entirely unknown. If Earth Navy ever discovered this location, they’d send in a fleet and blast it out of existence. It was why no Brotherhood navigator had ever been taken alive – or ever would be.

  “Welcome to pirate central,” I said, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake coming here.

  Ten thousand clicks out we passed through a field of gravity mines forming a spherical shell around our destination. The curved space the mines generated was strong enough to collapse any bubble passing through it, providing an impenetrable barrier to superluminal flight. In the event of an Earth Navy attack, the barrier gave the Drakes a chance to escape while the navy wallowed through curved space trying to reach them.

  “Fancy stuff for a bunch of raiders,” Jase said.

  “It’s old technology,” Izin said, back on the bridge now that our commlink to the Cyclops was closed. “Only new knowledge is difficult to acquire. It’s why there were no pirates during the early centuries of human interstellar travel. Back then, Earth’s collective governments had a monopoly on superluminal technology. Now interstellar flight is commonplace and pirates are everywhere Earth Navy is not.”

  “Greed always finds a way,” I said.

  After more than two thousand years of interstellar travel, any thug could buy or steal a ship, equip it with weapons and menace the space lanes – at least the human lanes. Initially the pirates had fought each other for the spoils, then the Brotherhood had been formed, turning raiding into an organized, highly profitable business. The captains pooled their resources, built support bases in locations shrouded in secrecy where Earth Navy couldn’t find them.

  The navigators who knew where those bases were hidden received the largest share of the booty, even more than the c
aptain, because they bore the greatest risk, being the first to die if Earth Navy boarded their ships. The commband Anya wore on her forehead was more than just a communications device, it was her death sentence if she or her ship were ever captured. All navigators had them surgically attached, knowing they would wear them for the remainder of their lives. The commbands carried within them the coordinates of every Brotherhood base and allowed the navigator to communicate directly with Brotherhood ships, negating the need to enter coordinates into pirate autonavs that might be seen by bridge crews.

  The rewards in terms of wealth and power for bearing such risks were great, and should they pay the ultimate price, the Brotherhood ensured all they were owed went to their chosen beneficiaries. It was a harsh but effective system, one neither Earth Navy or the EIS could penetrate, and in spite of the risks, the rewards ensured there was no shortage of volunteers.

  Inside the sphere of gravity mines was a layer of long range sensors monitoring the approaches to the minefield. There were no gun platforms, no robot sentries to engage an attacking fleet because the Brotherhood knew if Earth Navy came, it would be in overwhelming strength. The defenses were designed to warn and delay only, not for a stand up fight the Drakes could not hope to win.

  Once inside the early warning system, the Cyclops performed a half-roll and began decelerating. We followed suit, mimicking the Drake ship’s every move. Soon the station came into view. It was a long, linear structure with cruciform arms branching out from the central spine every fifteen hundred meters. Attached to the arms was a haphazard mix of VRS containers, ship hulls, habitats, storage tanks, agridomes, hangers and shipyards. The derelict ship hulls had long ago been stripped for parts and were now no more than pressurized structures organically integrated into the station’s cross-arms. Small craft and maintenance bots orbited the station like insects around a rotting corpse while scaffold-like docking gantries containing flimsy pressure tubes extended from the station’s arms to battle worn combat vessels of every type. Floating near the station were other Drake ships, maneuvering to dock or preparing to set off to plunder the shipping lanes grazing the edge of the Acheron.

  “Sure is a lot of them,” Jase said warily.

  “Too many,” I said, surprised at how well organized they were.

  In spite of their numbers, the odds were with the traders. Space was vast and a smart captain could avoid the choke points favored by the Brotherhood if he didn’t mind spending a little longer underway. Even so, ships were lost, prizes taken and the Brotherhood flourished on the promise of instant riches.

  “Lots of space docks,” Jase observed, noting how many ships were laid up, surrounded by cranes and thrusterbots.

  “Maintenance docks,” Izin corrected. “They have repair facilities only, no construction.”

  There were many docks of different sizes, but they all held completed ships. There were no partially constructed super structures, no massive hull blocks being aligned, just darkly scarred ships that should have been scrapped years ago.

  “He’s right,” I said, “the Brotherhood are scavengers, not builders.”

  “Then what’s that doing here?” Jase demanded, pointing to a distant dock. He zoomed our optics, revealing a pristine ship surrounded by cranes and gantries. Her hull was as spotless as if she’d just been launched and her four large engines in diamond formation showed no sign of wear. She had a squat bridge amidships, a rounded bow and four cargo doors each side.

  “It’s not a new build,” Izin said, “it’s an upgrade.”

  Closer inspection revealed large thrusterbots were fitting slab armor, big naval turrets, small point defense weapons and shield emitters to the hull. She was unmistakably a structurally reinforced Saracen, the same class Hadley had imaged landing at Loport, now being transformed by the Drakes into the equivalent of a purpose built, cruiser sized warship. It didn’t take long to discover other maintenance docks performing similar transformations on seven more Saracens.

  “That’s quite an upgrade,” I said uneasily.

  “Cyclops hailing,” Jase warned.

  Izin hurried from the bridge, then Jase opened a channel.

  “Follow us around,” Anya ordered, on screen for only a moment.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jase said to a blank screen as the Cyclops pitched slowly and thrusted along one of the station’s massive cross-arms.

  “Her captain’s watching her,” I said, sensing her tension.

  Jase gave me a puzzled look. “I thought she was the captain.”

  “She’s the navigator. Rix is the captain. We haven’t seen him yet.”

  I copied the Cyclops’s maneuver, then as we drifted up past the cross-arm, nine more Super Saracens came into view parked off the far side of the station. They stood with their upgrades complete in block line abreast formation – three rows of three stacked together. Compared to the chaotic structure of the station, the precision of their formation displayed an order and discipline unlike anything the Drakes had ever shown.

  “The Brotherhood appear to have learnt station keeping discipline from Earth Navy,” Izin observed from the hatchway.

  Brotherhood ships were adept at working in teams, but they never flew tight formations. They kept their distance from each other, always ready to run, every man for himself in the face of Earth Navy. Formation flying was the navy’s specialty, designed to bring all weapons to bear upon a single target. Even standing to, these Super Saracens looked ready to fight in the same way, indicating they were fitted with Earth Navy level combat systems that would enable the ships to fight as a single unit.

  “Maybe the Drakes are recruiting Earth Navy tactical officers,” Jase suggested.

  The more I watched the Drake fleet, the more apprehensive I became. Several Super Saracens fighting the way the Drakes normally did, sharing sensor data and targeting at will, would challenge the solitary Earth Navy frigates that patrolled Mapped Space’s outer regions. A fleet of them, fighting as a compact, integrated force could strike any target outside Core System space with impunity.

  “She’s back,” Jase said, eyes on the comm system.

  “Ride the docking beam into theta one niner,” Anya said.

  Jase did a quick check of our incoming signals and nodded. “I see it.”

  “Lock up to the station, and open your outer doors. Cargobots are waiting to unload you.”

  “We’ve got cargo in holds one to three,” I said. “Four is empty.”

  She looked puzzled. “We were expecting a full load.”

  “The manifest says we’re full, but that’s not what we’re carrying.” I shrugged. “Nazari sold the rest for stims.”

  She gave me a disgusted look, but swallowed the story. “Once you’re empty, we’ll begin preparing you to receive your outbound load. Until then, you’re free to access the station, but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Why not?”

  She gave me a scornful look. “It’s full of Drakes, all drunk and looking for fights. You should stay there … where it’s safe.” She cut the signal.

  Jase exhaled slowly. “I’m not one to pass up shore leave, Skipper, but in this case …”

  “I agree. You stay here.” Knowing Jase’s quick temper, he was likely to get into a fight the first time a drunken Drake breathed on him. “I’ll check it out.”

  Jase gave me a surprised look. “If you’re going, I’m going.”

  “No, you and Izin make sure their bots don’t find the Silver Lining,” I said, calculating how far it was to the nearest Super Saracen. “The kind of sightseeing I have in mind is better off done alone.”

  I cycled through the airlock with a stun grenade in one pocket and a combination scanner in the other. The grenade was in case Anya’s horde of drunken Drakes took a dislike to me and the c-scanner was so I could stick my nose where it didn’t belong.

  A flimsy pressure tube, twisting through vacuum from the station’s outer hull, had been attached to the ship by thrusterbots with barely a sa
fety check. It was old and patched and there was a disturbing hiss of escaping air warning of an unseen pinhole leak, but the pressure seemed stable so I quickly pulled myself along the guide cable to the station’s outer door. Once through to hard deck and gravity, I headed toward the station’s backbone, the massive shaft holding the cross-arms in place. The air was musty and laden with a foul mix of human and chemical smells, but tolerably breathable. Somewhat reassuringly, grimy maintenance bots crawled over the bulkheads checking for leaks indicating there was some semblance of pressure discipline.

  The corridor led past dozens of docking ports to a crowded plaza lined with bars, brothels and merchants. It rang with raucous laughter, music and loud voices and smelled of stale drink, sweat and roasting meats. Unlike most human ports, there was not a single nonhuman among them, testament to the fact the Brotherhood shared no secrets with aliens. One look told me I was underdressed in my brown flight jacket, dark pants and magnetic boots – workmanlike clothes but dull compared to what the Drakes wore.

  The men dressed in mismatched body armor sprayed in bright colors, the bolder the better. The Drakes were scroungers, grabbing any piece of personal protection they could find and customizing it according to their gaudy tastes. Punctuating their garish body armor were gold rings: on their fingers; in their ears, and every possible piercing. Beneath the armor, they wore white or gray shirts and loose black pants. Few wore space boots. Most preferred armored combat boots painted with various decorations suggesting they were sufficiently adept in zero-g that they didn’t need magnetic anchoring. It was a competition of sorts, between alpha males jostling for dominance, all armed to the teeth and ready to shed blood at any perceived slight.

  By contrast, the woman came in two varieties: those who inhabited the station and those who did not. The enterprising ladies who lived aboard and maintained a revolving door of clients wore clothes as bright as the men, although more skin was displayed than concealed. Bulges in the wrong places hinted at weapons secreted about their bodies and the freedom with which they moved from one group to another showed they did as much of the choosing as the men. Some were young and beautiful, most were not, but all had eyes alert to the next opportunity.