Darklight Pirates

The cargo ship’s captain scowled. He started to speak, clamped his mouth shut, then thought for a few seconds before putting into words what he felt.

“This is the damnedest piracy I’ve ever heard of,” he said.

Captain Thebo stood defiantly now, arms crossed on his broad chest. His pale gray uniform was torn in places from the fight dragging him off his bridge. A web of scars glowed pink against his dark flesh, showing past injuries so severe even a decent surgeon could not erase them. Or, Cletus wondered, had the man left them on purpose? Or even had them added to his face to give the impression of a fighter, a spaceman not to be crossed? That grim visage had done him no good. In her exoskeleton, Leanne had burst onto the bridge and plucked him from his chair, fighting impotently.

Cletus had cowed the remainder of the crew easily enough with a single broad spray from his own exo’s laser. They had planned the fight well and performed it with military precision. That same military experience now confused the captain.

“We want nothing in your cargo hold. If you have any Li-Al printer cartridges, we will make an offer for them.”

“I have a few I use to print new tools. Is that why you want them?”

“Our supply is exhausted.”

“You can’t buy them--or steal them--from Ballymore?” The captain’s rebelliousness melted down to interest. Or perhaps it was closer to cunning. The trader in him took over.

“We prefer to blockade the world. We don’t trade.” Donal settled back in the Shillelagh’s captain’s chair. He gestured to Cletus. “We are pirates, but you might think of us more as establishing a blockade to keep away traders. We’ll deal with you on the 3D printer cartridges, then ask you to reverse course and return to your home port.”

“Or Lift for another world where your goods might bring you a fair price,” Cletus said.

“I know you. You’re the Programmer General. And you. You’re his son.”

“I’m Commander in Chief Armed Forces,” Cletus said. “This is an official blockade.”

“So the rumor is true. A coup! You were chased off-world and now you’re trying to choke the life out of the victor. Who was it? My money’s on Aaron Riddle. He was always a sneaky bastard, the kind who’d stab you in the back if you looked away for an instant.”

“Who seized control doesn’t matter,” Cletus said coldly. “Do you accept our terms?”

“What terms? You want a few things I can offer.”

“Sell them or not, we don’t care. Try to continue to Burran or any other port on-planet and we will seize your vessel.”

“The Osprey? You’d try to take my ship? I’m the owner-captain. You can’t.”

“We could have destroyed your vessel the instant it Dropped back from StringSpace. This dreadnought outguns you.”

“I thought my intercept officer was joking about the ship’s profile. That’s why I didn’t try to run or fight.”

“You wouldn’t have been able to do either successfully. You had been boarded.”

“Those exos. Did you burn through the airlock? There wasn’t any pressure warning.”

“We entered, closed the outer lock and burned the inner. If it had been necessary, a single laser shot would have taken out the exterior airlock hatch.”

The captain chewed his lower lip. “You would have killed the lot of us. None of us wore suits for the Drop. Who does?”

“Your emergency procedures are lacking,” Leanne said.

“I’ve never been hijacked before. Sorry if I don’t know how to respond.”

Cletus forced the grin of satisfaction away from his face. Remaining grim kept the captain on the defensive. He and Leanne had devised the assault plan, and it had worked perfectly this time and a dozen times prior since they had returned from Scrutiny. The smallest hint of resistance would have left everyone in the crew dead. The emergency airtight hatches throughout the ship would have failed; Leanne had made certain of that before going to the bridge to capture the captain.

“It’s simple. Do as you are ordered. Don’t trade with this world until order has been restored.” Donal nodded in Cletus’ direction. “My Commander in Chief Armed Forces will give you your permits to Lift from this system. Any attempt to trade with those now in power will result in your ship’s destruction.”

“If you do not agree, you will want to die at the helm of your vessel,” Cletus said. “Becoming a prisoner in our civil war is not in your best interest.”

“Where can I go?”

“Far Kingdom will trade with you, when you show the authorization from Programmer General Tomlins.” Leanne turned slightly, tipped her head and shot Donal a hard look.

Cletus twisted slightly in his exo and found the data feed. A Burran cruiser blasted hard for them and would arrive within an hour, hardly time enough to set the Osprey on its way from the solar system.

“If you need spare fuel, we can trade for your printer cartridges,” he said.

“A pirate giving up fuel elements? I’ve never heard of such a thing. That’s usually what they need the most. Or so I’ve heard.” The captain shook his head. Sweat beaded his forehead. “Next thing I hear from you’s going to be another place to trade. Far Kingdom is too big a Lift for my bucket of bolts.”

“If you are not averse to trading with aliens, the Sporr homeworld is a likely market.”

“Them spiders? I spit on them. I don’t deal with aliens, as much as I’d like to get a cargo of their steel-silk.” The captain turned his head slightly, as if listening to an implanted comlink. This alerted Cletus that something wasn’t right.

The Osprey’s captain moved fast, but Cletus and Leanne both reacted with robotically enhanced speed and strength. Leanne fired a short burst laser that carved the captain’s heart from his chest, leaving behind a cauterized, charred hole. Cletus swung his left fist in a short arc. He needed more time practicing with the exo. His reaction had been that of an unenhanced fighter. He caught the captain under the chin with an uppercut that drove his fist halfway through the man’s brain. Whether this or Leanne’s shot killed him hardly mattered. Dead once, dead twice, dead.

“The cargo ship,” Cletus said. “It’s a trap.”

Cletus tapped into the data flow from the Shillelagh’s intercept officer for a status report on the cruiser accelerating toward them from Ballymore orbit.

“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, switching to a private circuit. “There’s no way the cruiser can match velocities with us and engage if it keeps accelerating toward us.”

“Railgunner, prepare a barrage in front of approaching cruiser,” Donal snapped out. He settled his control helmet, pressed the electrodes to his temples and closed his eyes.

Cletus saw that his father had immersed himself completely in dealing with the cruiser. To Leanne, he said, “We’ve got to separate from the cargo ship.”

“It’s magnetically attached,” she said. “We can’t turn our guns on it at such close range.”

As if they reacted with a single thought, they powered up and ran from the Shillelagh’s bridge, knocking any crew aside that happened to be in their way. As they ran toward the airlock, both spewed orders, ordering the occupying crew aboard the cargo ship to evacuate, to hell with the other ship’s crew. Leanne turned off the magnetic grapples, but Cletus worried more about the distance between the dreadnought and the cargo ship. He tried to intrude on his father’s comlink to have the Shillelagh blast off at top speed, but the approaching cruiser opened fire on them, spraying out an array of sublight kinetics. The ship’s armor could withstand one impact. More would damage the dreadnought.

“The cargo ship has leeched onto us with its own magnetic grapples,” Leanne said as they raced into the cargo hold. “It’s being used as an anchor to keep us from Lifting away from the cruiser.”

“There’s got to be more than that. The cargo ship might be booby-trapped. Riddle thinks in terms of losing a pawn to take a king.”

“Riddle or Weir?” Leanne stopped at the inner airlock hatch.

“It doesn’t matter who planned this. We have to separate or we’re all dead. Stay here. I’ll get to the cargo ship and disarm the bomb.”

“We don’t know there is one,” she said. “But the odds are good that you are right. We both should go. There’s no way to search the entire ship before the cruiser reaches us.”

“It’s a fly-and-die. A suicide mission. It can’t vector in and match velocities with us. That means it is intends to crash into us.”

“Or trigger the bomb aboard the cargo ship.”

Cletus swallowed hard. She was probably right. The cargo captain hadn’t realized he was bait and expendable.

“The cruiser might be a bomb, too. When the two get close enough to each other, both will go, with the Shillelagh caught between the blasts, the nut between the jaws of a nutcracker.”

They stepped into the airlock and buttoned up the exos. Cletus disliked the stale locker room smell inside the suit, but the augmented strength and speed offset his distaste. The air evacuated rather than getting pumped into tanks; time was of the essence. The small puff of exiting atmosphere caused him to wobble slightly, then he stepped forward and looked outside the hull. The cargo ship held itself to the Shillelagh with a pair of thick grapples.

The vibration through the exoskeleton boots caused Cletus to look around. The forward railgun launched a cloud of kinetic missiles in front of the cruiser. He couldn’t tap into the now-secured command circuit to find if his father used the time-shifting bombs that could produce immense blasts. Such bombs required great precision to target properly. Better to rake the cruiser with lasers and hope the kinetic weapons punched holes in the approaching ship, but if Leanne was right, nothing less than outright destruction mattered. The cruiser and cargo ship would handshake detonation codes and crush the Shillelagh between the blasts.

Cletus launched a rocket that crashed into one of the magnetic grapple lines. The silent explosion was blanked by his faceplate polarizer.

“It fused the ships together.” Leanne used her laser to attack the spot where Cletus’ rocket had made the situation even more perilous. A power cutoff would have released the magnetic grapples. Now his rocket had melted the cable and required increased effort to separate the two. “Use your lasers.”

Cletus tried. His right laser began to burn at his arm, then short circuited. He switched to the laser mounted on his left forearm. That failed, too. He started to launch what rockets he had left, then took a deep breath of the stale air to calm himself. The effort made him realize the futility of attacking even a cargo vessel with exosuits.

He thrust out his chin, pushed against a control plate and brought up a new HUD. A few blinks got him to the proper layer. The IR scan showed a nearby escape pod hatch. With a quick jerk, he separated from the Shillelagh’s hull and then cut in his jets. Something happened to his exo circuitry. The power faded for a moment. When the computer restored his electronics, his jets were dead, but he continued toward the cargo ship’s hatch.

A crackling in his ear warned him his comlinks were damaged, too.

“We can get inside. Cut the ship loose and blast off. The cargo ship’s drive is still intact.”

He let out a yelp when he suddenly accelerated. With many of his sensors out, he had to guess what happened. Leanne had powered up and come after him. Her arms wrapped around his waist from behind and together they sped for the hatch he had located.

Although he prepared for the flip, he still let out a howl of surprise when the cargo ship disappeared suddenly and the Shillelagh filled his field of vision. An instant later, Leanne kicked in full power and killed their speed so they settled gently onto the cargo ship’s hull. Cletus wasted no time falling forward on hands and knees to cycle open the emergency hatch. It had been intended for escape from within the ship. He and Leanne tumbled through and were caught up in the internal gravity field.

He immediately discovered a problem. With much of his power driving the exo’s mechanical muscles and sinews gone, he had to carry not only his own weight but that of the suit.

“Get out of it. You can move faster.” Leanne stepped over him and closed the emergency airlock. By the time the inner hatch locked down, he had shed the helmet and worked on the seals under his arm along his right side. She pulled him from the shell.

“Thanks.” Cletus sucked in a lungful of the air, appreciating it wasn’t terrible like that in the exo. Then he realized what this meant. If he had to abandon the cargo ship, he needed another suit. A quick check of the exoskeleton convinced him that wasn’t the way out. It was ruined and would become his coffin if he tried to return to the Shillelagh in it.

“The cargo bay is where the explosives must be hidden. I didn’t see any when I ran a quick inventory before.”

Cletus stood and thought hard, not moving a muscle. Bulling his way to the cargo now wouldn’t work. There had to be another way. He turned and went toward the bridge, ignoring Leanne’s protest. His thoughts tumbled, but now and then a shiny flat surface came up and reflected truth to him.

He stepped onto the bridge and located the XO.

“What’s going on?” The officer pointed to a large display in the center of the compartment. “Our lidar is picking up a ship that’s firing on us--or on your ship.”

“This ship has been booby trapped. When the cruiser gets close enough, it’ll send a signal that will blow you all the way to Andromeda.”

“I want to speak to the captain. He--”

“I found the carrier signal!”

Leanne’s outcry caused the ship’s officers to turn toward the display. She blanked the lidar display to show a feeble green line connecting the two ships.

“That’s the frequency they will use to send the trigger signal. Can you find the transmitter aboard the Osprey and disable it?”

The XO and the com officer thrashed about, sending layer after layer of HUD flying. The com officer let out a cry of indignation and used her finger to trace a circuitous route through the controls. She stabbed out and then used her finger to hook part of the display and pull it away.

“They’re right. We’re set to blow when the signal comes in from the cruiser.”

“Disable it!” The XO’s voice went supersonic with fear.

“I did it already.”

“You were expendable,” Cletus said. “The ship and all its crew would have been blown to atoms.”

“I’m going to kill Captain Thebo with my bare hands.” The com officer made a fist. Her action caused the HUD to writhe as contradictory commands echoed through the control layer. Seeing what happened, she opened her hand to soothe the electronic storm.

“He didn’t know, either. You were all being used. Who hired you for this run?” Cletus saw the answer in the officers’ expressions. They didn’t know. “Chances are good the cruiser’s crew is equally conned. Send a message and tell them to hunt for explosives aboard their ship.”

“I’ve requested that your father stop firing on the cruiser,” Leanne said. “The Shillelagh can withstand likely damage from the cruiser’s weapons.”

“But not the bomb aboard,” Cletus said, nodding slowly. He wanted to help the com officer with the contact but knew better. The cruiser had to be stopped by others, not pirates. Not revolutionaries intent on seizing power from Weir and reinstating Programmer General Tomlins.