Privateer Tales 3: Parley (2 page)

Center
Sterra's Gift on display
. I'd lost visual contact with the darts, but knew they were out there. The AI identified their holographic images trailing us, not far back. The ships were accelerating hard and would overtake us in less than a minute unless I fired the engines back up. Thing was, we weren’t some little tug. We were an armored ship with a full load of ammo for our turret. They could outrun us, but our gun range was just as good as theirs. Bring it on!

I flipped
Sterra's Gift
around. With the cutter out of the mix, our odds were pretty good. I accelerated hard in their direction. It struck me that this particular maneuver had been executed by warriors throughout the ages. We thought ourselves so advanced, but when it came down to it, we were just knights tilting down the line with a lance tucked under our arm.

Hail those darts
. I couldn’t figure out how the AI always knew what I meant, but it never failed.

“You want to surrender?” The voice was haughty.

“Stand down. We’ll take you into custody. At least you’ll live,” I said.

He cut off communications.

Send message to darts
. “If you don’t fire on us, I won’t fire my missiles. You light us up, we’ll come at you with everything we have.”

We continued to accelerate toward each other.

“Marny, if you can hold it a little, wait until we are fired on.”

“Aye, aye, Cap.”

“Nick, get a plan for our last missile for both of those darts. Fire it at the first one that shoots. Make it your best shot, it’s all we’ll get.”

“Roger that.”

Just as we got into turret range, one of the darts veered off. It was a confusing move. The dart had limited range, so it couldn’t expect to get somewhere safe. The ship had been piggybacking on the now-destroyed cutter and really had nowhere to go.

The other dart started firing at us. Although still at long range, we were both moving fast enough that I wasn’t thrilled about taking shots head-on. Armor was heaviest on our belly, so I rotated up slightly to take the hits.

“Hey! No fair.” Marny protested the move, since she no longer had the ability to shoot.

“I’ll nose over thirty-five degrees in five … four … three … “

Just as I executed the maneuver, Nick fired our one remaining missile and tracers stitched a path through space from Marny’s turret. The dart dove out of the way, but I followed its descent. Marny anticipated my move and her fire lanced through the small ship, taking out its engine. Nick’s missile was slower to respond to the dart’s path, but with the craft’s engines now inoperable, it caught up quickly. The explosion was brilliant.

The remaining dart
accelerated hard at an oblique angle, not wanting to meet the same fate as its partner.

“Where can
it go?” I asked no one in particular.

Nick was first to answer. “There has to be another ship. They blew up the tug, and that small cutter we hit first certainly wasn’t going to move those barges very far.”

“Nick, would you send our combat stream to Mars Protectorate? They’ll want to log that debris.” One thing all sailors wanted to keep up to date was the massive database of debris vectors in the system. Military ordinance disintegrated after a few days in vacuum. Wrecked ships were another thing entirely.

“Yup. The cutter is on a good line for a close pass with Mars in a few months. Some salvage company will be happy to see that coming.”

“Let’s see if we can find where that dart ran off to,” I said.

We still had a lock on the dart, although it was zipping away at a high rate of speed. I pushed the t-handled throttle forward, stopping short of the emergency burn rate. The cost of fixing the engines after using emergency burn was still etched in my mind from our last adventure, where we’d been running for our lives
, and I’d already done enough damage getting here.

“Nick, can you get a scan on where that dart is headed? See if there’s a ship out there.”

“Working on it.”

The dart must have picked up on our pursuit as it suddenly veered off course. I had to make a decision: follow the dart or follow its original path.

“Nick, project the dart’s original vector. I want to see what’s out there.”

“Okay. I’ve got nothing yet.”

“Understood. Let’s give it a few minutes. He hadn’t started decelerating yet so it must be further out.” My reasoning was that the dart would attempt to meet up with a fourth ship. Spacers generally flew directly at their intended destinations. Given the speeds and distances involved, even small adjustments in angles became significant over relatively modest periods of time.

“Got ‘em!” Nick said. “Sending to forward projector.”

Sure enough, a tug appearing on the vid was accelerating hard away from us. Our superior speed and maneuverability made its action a futile gesture.

“Dart’s coming up on our flank,” Nick said.

Send message to dart
. “Same deal pal, we won’t fire at you if you keep things calm.”

We didn’t get any response from the dart, but the tug spun on its horizontal axis and loosed a volley of bright yellow blaster fire at us. I'd been expecting it and dodged the fire easily.

Hail hostile ships
. “We have missiles locked on. You won’t get a second warning. Stand down your weapons and heave-to.” It was a bluff, but I didn’t believe they had the ability to scan us sufficiently to tell. However, I was more than prepared to pound both ships into dust at this point.

For a couple of minutes all three of us sailed along together with no one taking any action. I suspected the dart and tug captains were in deep discussion.

“Let us take the dart and I’ll surrender the tug.” It was the captain of the tug who’d finally answered.

I didn’t hesitate. Combat was far from a sure thing. “Deal. Send command codes for the tug immediately or we’ll settle this the way I’d originally planned.”

Fujitsu Freighter Model FF718 command codes received.

Lockdown all ship access. Stream all available interior video. Lock all interior doors
.

“We had a deal, Captain. What are you doing?”

“Sit tight. If everything checks out, you’ll be on your way soon enough.”

Keep comm open, but mute outgoing audio
.

“Marny, what should our protocol be here?” Marny was a decorated, retired
Marine. Of the three of us, she would know how best to handle the situation.

“First," she said. "Run the video log back ten minutes. Make sure he didn’t do anything funky.”

“On it,” Nick said.

“Once that’s clear, let him take a walk over to the other ship. They might make a final run at us once he’s loaded, so we stay alert until they take off.”

We all watched the video at 5x speed. The tug’s interior was tiny in comparison to
Sterra's Gift
. Down below, there was only a bunk room that slept two and a small alcove with stand-up galley and a head. The cockpit was on a second level with not much more than two reclined chairs.

We watched as the captain stuffed a couple of packages into the engine compartment and one beneath the pilot’s chair.

“Probably scuttling charges.” Marny said.

Restore audio transmission
.

“You have one chance to fix what you did. Play dumb and I’ll leave you locked in there for the Navy.”

We watched the live vid feed as the captain removed each of the three packages. He held them up, each in turn, as he disabled the charges.

“All systems are reporting satisfactory,” Nick said.

“Move to the airlock. Leave the charges on the floor. You are not allowed to take anything with you,” I instructed.

Th
at earned me a scornful glare, but he complied. I instructed the ship to cycle the lock and the captain stepped inside. Once he was free of the ship, the dart swooped in close. Its canopy lifted with a puff of atmosphere and the captain climbed in.

Terminate communications
.

“Why’d you let ‘em go?” Marny asked.
She sounded annoyed.

“Maybe I’m naïve, but I just don’t want their blood on my hands. It’s one thing when we're under attack, but he was willing to stand down. We could have demanded to take them all into custody, but then it would have meant a fight.”

“A fight we’d have won.”

“I think you’re right, Marny, but I’m not out here to win. I’m out here to live. The odds of survival for all of us went way up when we put the guns down. I’ll take that every time. Thanks for not challenging me in the middle of a fight.”

“I might not agree with what you did there, Cap, but it’s your call. I just want to know where we stand.”

“You okay with it?”

“Can’t say I’m not pissed. Those boys deserve what they had coming.”

“Couldn’t agree more, Marny. I got to be honest with you, though, I hope none of us get what we’ve got coming.”

That broke the tension as I heard her guffaw. “Okay. You got me there, Cap.”

“Nick, can you slave the tug to us? I’d like to get back and search for that lifepod.”

“Already done. You’ll have to take it slow, it doesn’t have a lot of acceleration.”

I set a course to intercept the lifepod that was ejected from
Baux-201
. I wasn’t looking forward to the coming conversation with its sole occupant. Ten minutes later, we pulled up alongside the pod. It was tumbling end over end and the person inside had been ignoring all of our attempts at communication. I was worried about the pod’s integrity and the wellbeing of Captain Chen’s daughter.

“Nick, is the pod still sealed?”

“Yup. It reads green.”

“Shouldn’t it have some way to lose the spin?”

“You’d think. Maybe it’s busted.”

“Okay, I’ve got this,” I said.

I nudged
Sterra's Gift
ahead of the tumbling cube. If I wasn’t careful, I could seriously injure the inhabitant. I flipped us end over end so that we were gliding backwards at the same speed as the cube, but now pointed directly at it.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked.

“Hang on. I’ve done crazier things.”

I ever so carefully popped the navigation arc-jets of my ship. The main engines weren’t anywhere near subtle enough for what I wanted to accomplish and I watched our relative speed on the vid screen. The cube was now approaching us at half a meter per second, which is a quarter of the speed a person walks.

The cube tumbled into the ship, making contact. As it did, I nudged the arc-jets so the ship rotated up slightly into the spin of the cube. The cube's flat surface provided it with nowhere to go and the slight difference in our relative speeds didn’t provide enough momentum to cause the cube to bounce away.

“That’s pretty neat,” Nick said.

“Thanks, bud.”

“Marny, would you meet me in the port cargo hold? Nick, you have the helm.”

“Roger that,” he said.

“Aye, aye.”

The port cargo hold was amidships, nestled just in front of the three large engines. It was one of two formal cargo spaces on
Sterra's Gift
and was empty since we hadn’t had a chance to contract a full load before leaving Baru Manush.

I met Marny in the hallway in front of the door leading to the hold. I looked at her face to see if she was holding a grudge. She was all business, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

“What’s the drill, Cap?” Marny was my height but had at least twenty-five kilos on me, not a gram of which could be attributed to unnecessary fat.

“We’ll go outside and push the lifepod into the cargo hold. I don’t know what we’re getting into. Should be Captain Chen’s daughter. Not sure why we can't get her on comm.”

“Okay, give me a minute.” Marny disappeared into the armory and reappeared in a fully armored vac-suit with a blaster rifle slung over her shoulder and a pistol strapped to her thigh. She was intimidating as hell in armor. Her normally muscular shape took on frightening proportions with the armor hugging and accentuating her every curve.

“Think we’ll need all that?” I asked.

“I’ll get you trained yet, Cap. You’re thinking backwards. What’s the worst thing that could pop out of a pod?”

“Ah, I get your point. Here’s the plan …”

We entered the cargo hold together and waited for the atmo to be cycled out.

“Nick, we’re opening the port cargo hold door. Are we still good?”

“Roger that. The lifepod is floating off the port side about ten meters, you can't miss it. Still not able to raise it on comm.”

Open port cargo hold exterior door. Reduce gravity to oh-point-two in cargo hold
.

I always appreciated an unobstructed view of space and this time was no different. I felt free having nothing between my vac-suit and the expanse of space. I made the tiny gestures that communicated flying instructions to my AI. Blue cones appeared on the bottoms of my boots and on the palms of my hands. I leaned over and jetted out of the hold.

I didn’t immediately see the lifepod, but a subtle blinking amber light in my peripheral vision indicated its direction. I turned my head until the light centered in my vision. My AI projected an outline around the lifepod, but I would have found it, regardless. The flashing blue lights along each side made it hard to miss.

It was a simple matter to push the pod back to the cargo hold. As an asteroid miner, I had a lot of experience moving much larger machines around. The lifepod was a tight fit, but we managed to maneuver it through the doors.

Close door and re-pressurize
.

“Let’s hope I didn’t leave the door on the bottom,” I said.

“You didn’t check?” Marny asked.

I chuckled to myself. “Over on this side.” I was standing in front of the door. I hoped that the .2 gravity had allowed the inhabitant to settle slowly to what was now the floor. Marny joined me. The pressure was almost restored in the hold.

“How do you want to do this?” I asked.

“Knock a couple of times, then open it. I’ll cover you. With all that tumbling, I suspect they’re unconscious.” I did as she suggested
and the door opened easily. Most lifepods didn’t have a locking mechanism other than to hold a seal against vacuum. With atmosphere on both sides, the lock released. Marny held the blaster rifle loosely, but she could raise it instantly if the situation required it.

I poked my head into the lifepod and quickly scanned. Everything was in order except that I’d put the pod into the hold upside down. The sole occupant was strapped into a chair attached to the ceiling, her arms and legs hanging down. I stepped in. “Frak. Marny, I need your help.”

She joined me in the pod and looked up at the dangling form.

“Nice. I’ve seen worse. If you jet up and release the harness, I’ll catch her.”

In .2 gravity, the girl would float down at roughly the speed of a piece of paper in normal gravity. I did as Marny recommended and she easily caught the limp body.

“Let’s get her onto the couch in your quarters,” I led the way out of the pod and opened the cargo hold door into the main hallway. Marny followed me back to her quarters and gently set the girl’s body down on the couch.

Medical emergency override, release the helmet of the unconscious passenger
. Normally it wouldn’t be possible to open someone’s face shield on a vac-suit, but AIs could negotiate in the circumstances of a medical emergency.

The mirrored face shield withdrew into the suit and the hood relaxed, electrical stimulation no longer keeping it rigid. I knelt next to the couch, desperately hoping she was alive.