“Your arrival, yes, but the other ship, the uh… Herald of Spring, was supposed to be here two weeks ago. There are penalties for late delivery, you know.”
“Captain, why are we going over this again? This was all hashed out, as I said, six months ago. We all agreed to the modified cost of shipping, with the understanding that STEVE simply does not quite have the top speed as the much newer Herald. If you think to haggle a lower price now, I’m afraid you are sorely mistaken.”
Every time the other captain spoke, a chill went down Morgan’s spine, and it was bothering her fiercely. He was being rude, yes, and it was odd he couldn’t even be bothered to remember the name of their regular supply ship, but that wasn’t it. Something about his voice, it was setting something off within Morgan, something primal.
“This isn’t about haggling, friend, this is about penalties. We expect and demand prompt delivery, so we can keep our schedule. If our schedule slips, it disrupts the dozens of other ships who come here to restock in return for selling us their ore.”
Oh. Oh my. His accent. I know that accent. I still hear it in my nightmares. He speaks like the pirates did. The ones on the Fate.
Morgan did everything she could to stamp down on the feeling, reminding herself that she’d had similar bad experiences with men who had a pronounced Albion accent, but to fear everyone from Albion because of it was ludicrous. It only felt different to her because she’d not met any others from whatever planet this man and the pirates had come from.
It didn’t work. As the captains argued back and forth, she got the same shiver.
The only thing saving her at the moment was that she was observing the conversation, but not actively a part of it. She was standing to the side, outside the area that was visible to the other captain on his holo screen.
Her distress must have been evident, as Lieutenant Bill caught her eye and jerked his head toward the back of the bridge, outside the range of the audio pickups.
“What?” he asked her quietly, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” Morgan insisted, shaking her head.
“Hardly,” Bill said before she’d even had time to finish. “I’ve never seen you so pale, and your hands are quivering.”
Morgan sighed.
“It isn’t rational. It isn’t even his fault.”
“What isn’t?”
“It’s just… he’s from the same planet as the men who attacked the Fate of Dawn. His accent, it’s pulling up bad memories.”
“You’re right, that isn’t rational,” Bill said, motioning her towards the nearest chair, which happened to be communications. “Sit down for a moment.”
The tech vacated his chair for her, and she sat.
“Just because it isn’t rational doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” Bill continued. “Especially when you’re dealing with trauma.”
“I know, its just…” Morgan trailed off as the console beeped at her, incoming message, marked priority. Guess I’ll be looking at it myself after all, she thought as she pulled it up, the House’s symbol proudly displayed on the message bundle.
“Perfect timing,” Bill said, glancing over her shoulder at the message. “You could use a distraction. Leave the negotiations to the captain. He can handle those just fine. You just focus on this. After five months, I’m sure something important has happened. I just hope they put it in there first.”
Morgan looked for the list of contents, agreeing wholeheartedly with Bill as she saw the sheer size and number of messages included.
At least most are marked personal, she noted, marking those for dispersal to the crew.
The first message from the House wasn’t actually, but was a warning passed along from the Navy, Zion’s in this case.
‘Alert Bulletin:’ it started, in big angry bold letters.
Just what we want to see first thing, a scary warning from the military, Morgan thought as she read on.
‘Marked increase in ships in the asteroid belt failing to make routine contacts or rendezvous. There is no, repeat, no indication of piratical activity, nor distress calls from the overdue ships. Furthermore, there have been no ships entering the system via the gates over the last two years that aren’t either local or confirmed to have left again. Regardless, with this warning, the Navy is officially declaring a state of heightened alert to all ships in the area. This warning is especially for local space conditions that might prove hazardous to smaller vessels.’
This, on top of the distress call we received, and the odd gaps? Morgan thought, a frown creasing her face. But if it was just the Black being the dangerous place it always is, wouldn’t there be more distress calls?
Pushing that message to the uplinks of all the officers, she dived into the rest of the message traffic, looking for anything else about the missing ships. There wasn’t any.
After a few minutes she realized, to her supreme frustration, that the priority messages weren’t sorted by how old they were, but how important. Meaning that the naval bulletin was a few weeks old, but showed up first, while messages from the entire rest of the five months they’d been out of touch were jumbled together according to some priority list she couldn’t understand.
Why is a directive to change how we store a certain foodstuff more important than updated packages for the system protection suite, and both less important than an announcement that the captain of the Daystar Fading was taking a temporary position on the station because she is pregnant?
“Anything vital, Black?” Captain Rain asked, startling Morgan, who had not heard him approach.
“I’m worried,” Morgan said without thinking, as the captain’s eyebrows rose.
“Oh?” he asked, gesturing for her to continue.
“How did the rest of the conversation go?” Morgan asked instead, trying to work through what her gut was telling her.
“You’re worried, but you want to change the topic?” Rain chuckled. “Can’t be all that worried then, I take it?”
“A few things from different places are standing out for me. I’m playing catch-up with my brain. The station captain is one of them. How did it turn out?”
“He wants us to send someone over to apologize in person for being late, and bring with them a new copy of the agreement.”
“How is being in person going to change anything?” Bill asked, stepping up to stand next to the captain.
“I don’t know, but he insisted on it.”
Something else clicked in Morgan’s mind.
“He.”
“Yes, he.”
Morgan’s fingers flew over the controls of the communication console, pulling grunts and aborted curses from her as she mistyped one thing or another.
Finally, she found what she wanted, a tidbit of the trainings she’d gotten right before they left.
“What was his name?” she asked Rain, looking over at him as a picture hovered on the screen.
“You know, he didn’t say,” Rain said. “And they contacted us, so I didn’t need to ask to be routed to him.”
“Well, he doesn’t look much like Captain Hanover here,” Morgan said, pointing at the screen. “Captain Margaret Hanover.”
“So they changed captains? That would explain why he’s taking a hard stance on us, trying to prove he’s worthy of the position,” Rain pointed out.
Morgan shrugged, already trying to dig into the message dump they’d received. Keyword search was helping, but there was just so much traffic, so much news.
“What about what you told me a minute ago, Morgan?” Bill asked.
“What’s this?” Rain asked.
“The captain isn’t local,” Morgan said, still typing.
“Obviously not,” the captain agreed. “I’m reasonably good with accents, as you know, Black. I didn’t recognize his, though.”
“I did,” Morgan said simply. “I met one his countrymen a few months ago. It was on the Fate of Dawn.”
For a moment, Rain didn’t take her meaning. She could
tell when he did; he sucked in a deep breath through his teeth.
“The pirates?”
“The pirates,” Morgan echoed.
“If you’re just thinking this because of that alert bulletin…” Rain started to say, but Morgan was already shaking her head.
“He was bothering me before that came in. There is also the distress call we got earlier, from the mining scout ship that lost contact with its base ship.”
Bill was shaking his head.
“But what about what the bulletin says later? For there to be pirates there have to be pirate ships, don’t there?”
“That’s what I’m looking for now…” Morgan said, flicking through a few last reports from the news organizations. “Here we go.”
She pulled it up on the screen, the headline seeming huge with the text set big enough for the body to be legible to those standing back a bit.
“Contact lost with ship that mistakenly arrived at wrong side of system, all hands presumed lost,” Bill read aloud. He leaned a bit closer to take in the rest. “No plans to send a rescue ship, due to distances involved. A ship will be sent once the lost vessel approaches a planet, based on last observed speed and heading, to ensure it doesn’t collide with anything.”
“Can we…” Morgan slid out the side of the chair so she could stand up without bumping into either man, then raised her voice. “Navigation, can you show us where that ship would be if she headed towards the belt after contact was lost?”
As the astrogator turned to regard Morgan, she reached over and sent the relevant data from the comm terminal to him.
“How fast can it go, and what part of the belt?”
“Right,” Morgan said, squeezing back into her chair. “It arrived in-system four months before we departed Takiyama Station,” she said, pulling up another news report. That done, she turned back to the map she’d been looking at of the ship locations, marking the general middle of the farther empty cluster. “And use that as a best guess,” she said, sending the coordinated over as well.
“Tactical,” Rain said quietly, getting the attention of the mercenary manning the weapons station. “Pull this up on the main holo, please.”
A detailed representation of the system appeared above their heads, reflected also in flat versions on the screens of those who chairs meant they had their backs to most of the room.
A glowing dot represented the last known position of the ship. After a moment another dot appeared, representing where the ship had started, connected by a line. Then a cone appeared, showing the space the ship could have covered in the time. It extended far past the asteroid belt.
“Assuming the belt was the destination,” the astrogator said, as the cone on the display behind him shortened, “They’ve been out here for about six months.”
That long? And no one has noticed?
“No one noticed them, in six months?” the astrogator asked, voicing the same confusion Morgan felt.
“That’s actually the easy part to explain, if they are out there. The longer they operate unnoticed the more they can steal, and if they approach carefully and jam communications with each ship they take, the chances of no one else noticing go up drastically.”
“If I may, sir,” the communications tech said, awkwardly standing off to the side since Morgan had stolen his chair, “What good does it do, for the pirates to loot a bunch of ships in the belt? They can’t expect to sell it anywhere in the system, and they can’t really get out, can they?”
That was a point Morgan hadn’t considered. How do you get out of a system you’ve just raided? The obvious answer was there, through the gate like everyone else, but how would they get to it? Through the Navy?
Rain and Bill shared a look, and it wasn’t a confident one.
What do they know we don’t?
“Actually, they can,” Bill said with obvious reluctance. “All they have to do is get close enough to the system gate and they can leave. Probably even jump the line, just to avoid any… unpleasantness.”
“What? How can the government, either of them, allow that?” Morgan missed who asked the question, but it didn’t matter. They were all clearly thinking it. Morgan was thinking it.
“The governments don’t own the gate; they just lease it and manage it. It’s owned by the Gate Management Network, and they have absolutely iridium-clad rules about what happens in the case of hostile ships. Any fighting that strays close enough that they feel might endanger the gate itself will result in the guilty party losing access rights for six months. And that’s just for a first-time offense.”
“That’s insane,” someone else said.
“Not really. Think about it,” Bill said, rubbing his forehead with one hand. “It would be hard enough to replace a planetary gate, but we can do it. It would isolate that planet for at least a year or two until a replacement can be built, but enough ships like STEVE could go back and forth that they’d be okay. A system gate goes down, and suddenly not only is the entire system and everyone in it cut off for at least multiple years, there isn’t even a way to tell anyone outside the system that the problem exists.”
“And what if a system with a corrupt government decided to seize a gate, like, say, Hillman?” Morgan asked.
“To what end? They already keep most of the transit fees. If they stop people leaving, eventually the GMN will send warships, either their own or borrowed from neighbors who will likely be only too willing to help, especially since a lot of the stopped ships will be theirs. In the meantime, the aggressive government is risking getting cut off entirely anyway.”
Captain Rain cleared his throat.
“The politics of gates will have to wait. Is this all the evidence you have, Black? A missing foreign ship, missing local ships, a plausible timeline, and a new captain’s accent?”
When you put it like that, it doesn’t sound like much, does it? “Yes, sir.”
Rain nodded.
“Hardly conclusive. Say you are right, what do you propose?”
“Alert the Navy and leave, I suppose,” Morgan reluctantly answered. She hadn’t honestly got past the ‘are there pirates’ question to start thinking on an answer to ‘what do we do if there are?’ question.
“And if you are wrong?”
“Then we’ve abandoned a client without their vital supplies after spending six whole months to get out here,” Morgan said, even more reluctantly.
“So you would agree then, that we cannot just leave?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Alternatives?” Rain looked about at all of them. “We can’t ignore the possibility Lieutenant Black has raised, but we cannot simply leave either.”
“One other thing to consider,” the astrogator said, with just a hint of timidity. “If the captain over on the station is a pirate, what does he want?”
“Yes, why ask for someone to come in person?”
“To force us to turn over the cargo?” one crewman suggested.
“All they’d have to do for that is smile and wave. It’s why we are here in the first place,” the communications tech pointed out.
“Any other reasons?” the captain asked.
“To take the ship?” someone volunteered.
‘The ship would be a tempting prize, but how does getting some of us over there accomplish that?”
No one seemed able to answer that.
“If they want the ship, their best bet would be to wait until the cargo transfer starts, then swarm on board with every pirate they have,” Morgan said, thinking back to her own firsthand experience.
“Exactly,” Rain said. “Despite what the Navy said, I do think it likely there are pirates at work. Just the fact that there aren’t more distress calls is suspicious.”
Morgan started to say something, but he held up his hand to stop her.
“That said, I don’t think the station has been taken by pirates. If they took it, where did they come from? Where is their ship? If they took it, why are they still here? For th
e cargo? They’d just do nothing then, not act strangely.
“And,” he continued, “If there are pirates out here, us delaying in paranoia is the worst thing we could do. We can leave as soon as the cargo is transferred, and be safely back home. A home we need to return to as soon as possible in any case, to deal with our coolant problem.”
“I’ll go deal with them,” Bill said, having switched from rubbing his forehead to stroking his chin. “If they are just being rude to get a rise out of us, Jacob is not the best choice, and if the station has been taken by pirates, well, we can’t send you, sir.”
Rain didn’t seem happy about it, and in truth neither was Morgan. Oh, if it was just her overreacting and everything was all right, he was a fine choice, but if it wasn’t? Bill was one of the most gentle and thoughtful men she knew; he was no fighter. Besides that, she knew he had a family waiting for him back on the station.
Already regretting it, Morgan opened her mouth to speak before the captain could decide.
“No,” she said, drawing the word out. “No,” she repeated, more forcefully. “I need to be the one to go.”
Bill scowled, and Rain’s eyebrows rose up to the point they would have disappeared into the hair he didn’t have.
“Why is that, Lieutenant?” the captain asked.
“Because if the captain is just throwing his weight around, we don’t want to let him think he’s getting away with it,” she answered, thinking it through as she was saying it. “Sending the trainee officer is an insult of its own, a response to his rudeness, without being enough to cause any further problems.”
“And in the case of pirates?” Bill asked, stepping closer and dropping his voice so only the captain, Morgan, and maybe the communications tech could hear him. “Morgan, just hearing the same accent as those other pirates had you trembling. You aren’t up to handling that, not again.”
Morgan closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Without opening them she answered.
“It has to be me. I will deal with them, if it comes to that. I wouldn’t let the pirates that attacked the Fate win, I wouldn’t let the assassins win, and I wouldn’t let the petty tyrants of my homeworld win. How can I let potential pirates stop me, when all those others couldn’t?”
Running Black Page 18
