Rookie Privateer

by McFarlane, Jamie

  Tabby doesn't cry. Period. Sure, maybe when she was three or four years old, but I guarantee never since then. I cried more than Tabby, not that I would ever admit it to her.

  My mouth was so dry that I couldn't squeak out a question. I felt sore everywhere and had a giant throbbing pain just below my left knee. I reached toward it with my free hand but a stronger hand held my shoulder back. I had absolutely no capability to resist so I swiveled to look over at Big Pete Hoffen. He had a strained I don't want to break him look on his face. I don't know if Tabby's tears or my dad's face freaked me out more, but if I hadn't been so drugged up I would have probably figured things out right then. As it was, I just faded back into the pillow.

  I felt gentle stroking on my right hand and opened my eyes. I was considerably less foggy than the last time. The throbbing in my leg was a significantly sharper and localized to just above my foot.

  "My leg is killing me," I said, turning to Tabby. She squeezed my hand tightly and fresh tears all but squirted from her eyes.

  "Liam …" she started and then stopped, looking across the room.

  Peripherally, I saw a figure stand up and my mom's soft cool hand grabbed my left hand. I turned to her, Big Pete sat on the edge of the his chair. Mom's nose was bright red and her eyes were also puffy.

  "You guys are freaking me out," I said, but right then I had a moment of perfect clarity. Big Pete wouldn't be here if it wasn't something big.

  "Liam ..." Mom started and then paused, her eyes searching my face for how to break it to me.

  I put a hand up to stop her and turned to Big Pete. "How bad is it?" I was going to be strong for my family, they were suffering. It would be easier for Dad to deliver bad news and he wouldn't mince words.

  "Liam, you lost your left foot just above the ankle. The damage was too much and there was no saving the foot. If not for Tabitha and Nick, you would have bled out in vacuum." His voice was strained.

  I pulled up to almost sitting in the bed. I flashed back to the moment just before the explosion where I felt a slug tear into my leg. I turned to Tabby, concern lined her face. "Are you okay, Tabs?"

  "I am so sorry, Liam."

  "Tell me. Are you hurt?" I pushed. Tabby would lose her chance at the Naval Academy if she was hurt and couldn't leave on the M-Cor freighter.

  "I'm fine," she said.

  "Hardly." Nick joined in, unable to let her tough it out.

  "The Academy?" I looked at Nick. He nodded positively.

  I lay back, loss and relief spinning through my mind. The assault was my plan and if I had ruined Tabby's future, it would have crushed me. But what would my future be like without full use of my leg?

  I was on some heavy pain killers, so leaning back, I dozed off again. When I came to the next time. Tabby was dozing in the chair next to me and Nick was sleeping on another chair. Mom saw me come awake and gave my hand a squeeze.

  "Pete had to get back to the claim. The pirates took all of the platinum and most of the copper. M-Cor will be here in a week." It was another crushing blow. I had never seen my dad as happy as he had been when we hit that pocket of minerals. M-Cor wouldn't be back for months and we needed that big haul.

  Big Pete would work himself around the clock until M-Cor showed up, to attempt to recover his loss. It was a testament to how critically I was injured that he had been here when I woke up last time.

  "How much time do we have?" I asked.

  "Five days," she replied.

  "You should go Mom. He needs you."

  We argued about it but she knew I was right. Our family was on the financial edge already. I was stable but couldn't help. She finally agreed and I fell asleep again. When next I awoke, Nick and Tabby were chatting quietly next to my bed.

  "Hey, it's sleeping beauty." Tabby's face was no longer splotchy red.

  A nurse came in to work on my leg.

  "I want to see it." I pulled myself upright. Sure enough, just above where my foot used to be was a molded white cup with tubes and wires running into it. The throbbing had reduced considerably. With modern medicine, I was surprised that they were still drugging me. The nano-bots do a pretty good job of healing things quickly.

  The nurse addressed me. "The doctor will be in this afternoon to talk to you. We have been overwhelmed since the attack."

  "When can I get up?" I asked.

  "Soon. We have been pumping you with sleepy drugs and those will stop today. This afternoon the doctor will fit your permanent cuff. You have some helpers here, so I expect you to be up on crutches this afternoon before the doc stops in. I wish I could stay and help more, but we are slammed. Tell your AI if you need anything." He didn't wait for my response, spun on his heel, pushed open a seam in the fabric wall and was gone.

  I looked at Tabby and Nick with a bewildered look and we all started laughing.

  "Fill me in on what I missed. I'm guessing our gambit worked."

  Nick gave it the first shot. "After Tabby tossed me out of the door, I realized that I could open the bottles with the cutter by just hitting them through the control room wall. Once I hit it, the foam exploded into the room and trapped the three of them. You'll never believe it, but one of them was a deputy. It took an entire day to cut them out of the foam, but they all lived through it. Tabby pulled you out of the gondola and your foot was already gone and you were spewing blood like a fountain. It was disgusting, but she didn't waste a second and plastered it with suit sealer and then tied it off with a tourniquet."

  "What about the refinery?" I asked.

  "Well, once you were stable, we pinged Big Pete. Without their attack ship and the perimeter defenses, the pirates had to take off in the freighter quick. Most of them were able to get away, though Big Pete actually brought one down with his bare hands. They only got away with half of what they could have. They had loaded all of the platinum, gold, rhodium and were working on the copper when they decided to leave. They had to leave all of the iron and nickel behind."

  "How bad was your yard shot up?" I was worried about the damage we had seen.

  "Not completely sure, but Jack did a survey. We definitely had some losses, but we'll recover."

  "I am sorry for dragging you guys into that. If I had lost either of you I would never have been able to forgive myself."

  "Sack up Hoffen," Tabby said, clearly not wanting to go down any more emotional conversational paths.

  "Roger that. Last we'll speak of it."

  "So I've been doing some research and I have a crazy idea." Nick started.

  Tabby and I turned to him, wondering what he could be on about.

  Nick continued, "I did a serial search on that attack ship. You know, to see if it was stolen. There is no record of the ship one way or another. It's never been registered."

  Nick looked at us meaningfully, but Tabby and I returned blank stares.

  "Well, if it was stolen then it would go back to the original owner. If it belonged to a police force or the Navy, then it would go back to them. A ship that has no registered owner could be considered salvage. If the inhabitants don't claim it, we can make a rightful salvage claim under the Mars Privateer Act, which says that a ship forfeited during an illegal act of aggression could be salvaged by the defending force."

  "Wouldn't that be the colony?" Tabby asked skeptically.

  "Well, maybe. But I have been talking with Mr. Ordena, the lawyer we use for the shop and he thinks we have real shot at this. He will take it on for 30% contingency if you guys agree. What do you think?"

  "Why not?" I looked at Tabby.

  "Sure, I'm in," she said.

  That afternoon the doctor stopped by and talked to me briefly about my injury. It wasn't an unusual injury on a mining colony and while a basic prosthetic foot was a bit expensive they weren't hard to come by. The cap already on the stump was nearly finished knitting my flesh back together, but I wouldn't be able to fit a prosthetic for at least a week. The rapid healing brought on by the cuff would allow me to be released in a
couple of days. All I needed to do was learn to walk with crutches. Just like the nurse, he was gone in less than ten minutes.

  I spent the next couple of days working with a physical therapist AI. I had thought it would be a person, but it turned out that people were in high demand. I arranged to stay with Nick on the station so I could make daily visits with the hospital staff. It was frustrating, spending hours at the hospital waiting for a five minute visit only to be told that things were progressing well.

  On the day that M-Cor was scheduled to arrive, I got into my ore sled and headed out to O-92 where Big Pete and Mom were working to get everything loaded. Working around the clock for the last five days, they had loaded five containers. The yield was almost entirely iron with just a bit of nickel and copper. Nothing close to the big payload we'd lost to the pirates. With the ingots at the refinery already and this load of iron, Big Pete would be able to keep the operation going, pay for repairs, and retire some of his debt. Any chance of getting ahead had disappeared with that pirate freighter.

  "It means a lot you coming out here, Liam." Now I knew Big Pete was tired. It was his second sentimental comment in as many weeks.

  "I came out so I could run loads back to P-1. M-Cor is twelve hours out," I informed them.

  "Liam, I need to be able to trust your answer. Shoot me straight on this. Can you make a run or would it be touch and go?" Big Pete wanted a look into my soul. He wasn't interested in me playing games of bravery, he wanted straight talk.

  "Fact is, flying an ore sled is about the only thing I can do and I gotta do something. Let me do this." I knew I had to lay it out plain, nothing extra.

  "Silver hasn't slept for over thirty hours," he replied. He didn't often use Mom's first name. It was all he was going to say on the matter, but he would accept my help.

  We attached the containers to my sled and I filled them in on my recovery. Mom had a lot of questions, but wasn't tracking my answers very well. She repeated several of them to the point that I was certain of her exhaustion. I arranged to have Jack meet me at P-1 to help unload the containers.

  I saw with satisfaction that as I took off for the refinery they had loaded into the other sled and were headed back to our habitat. It felt great to know that they trusted me with this responsibility.

  Jack and I finished off-loading the containers an hour before M-Cor's arrival. The refinery would turn our raw ore into ingots over the next twelve hours, which was in plenty of time to be sold to M-Cor. Pride welled up in my chest thinking about how my parents had risen to this challenge. I checked in with the habitat to assure myself that they were safe and snoozing at home. It was also a relief to have not been thinking about my leg and doing something else for a bit.

  Nick chirped my comm. "Heya, Liam, want to come over and check out the Control Center? It’s crazy."

  I met him next to the attack ship we had taken out. My mind flashed back to the stress of that evening and my leg throbbed sympathetically. I noticed with satisfaction that the ship's entry door had to be cut off and Nick's welds were still very evident. Nick told me that sheriff deputies cut the door off to extract the pirates who were trapped. They had given up pretty easily, having lived in their ship suits in vacuum for better than a day before anyone got to them.

  My eyes followed the tether up. A new platform was lashed to the gondola and control room. Workers were working on the security control center at the top of the tether.

  "Want to go up?" Nick offered.

  "Think they will let us?" I asked skeptically.

  "Hah. You haven't been out and about much. Liam, people are treating us like heroes. We're being given credit for stopping the attack, because who knows what they would have done once they finished with the refinery."

  "Huh. Guess I didn't think about it that way."

  The gondola met us at the bottom of the tether. Deputy Stella Bound stepped off and offered her hand. Fortunately I was balanced on my left crutch and I wobbled a bit when I reached to shake it. I mentally noted that I would need to be more careful about that.

  Deputy Bound said, "Sorry 'bout your leg there. It’s just, well, it’s a real honor and I wanted to shake your hand. You kids did good work here, although you might not hear that from the guys upstairs. I don't think they're real happy about cleaning the station foam out of all of the equipment."

  I didn't know what to say, so I just nodded.

  "Load up. Let’s get you a first class tour." She seemed to be in a good mood. "Never saw it coming ..." She let it hang there without specifying what it might be.

  Nick finally gave in. "Saw what?"

  "Sheriff Xid and Andy just didn't seem like bad guys. You know they were the inside guys, right? Andy shut down the perimeter defense and Xid held down the refinery staff with an automatic, ended up killing ten people. I wouldn't have thought either of them was capable of that, never in a million years." Deputy Stella Bound shook her head remorsefully. "Even worse is that Xid got away."

  "How's that?" I turned to her.

  "He was one of them all this time. Once you all shut down the guns from the perimeter defense, he loaded up into the freighter with the rest of them and took off."

  "Any ideas on where they went?" I couldn't believe he had gotten away.

  "Nah. They say it was Red Houzi, so I bet they ran off to some hideout. That ship is long gone," she replied.

  The gondola arrived at its destination and Deputy Bound jumped off. A temporary work platform had been constructed next to the gondola and was filled with parts from the security control tower's one room. Two workers in suits were pulling the last pieces out. They couldn't pressurize the room until they removed all of the equipment. They were confident they could get things fixed in a couple of days and actually bore neither Nick or me any ill will. They even wanted to shake our hands.

  A chirp notified me that a priority message was waiting. The M-Cor freighter had arrived. It would be docking mid station. Track M-Cor, I instructed and followed my heads up display. At thirty kilometers away it was still pretty small. It would take them the better part of two hours to dock up with the refinery.

  For the next three days the activity around Colony 40 would go into overdrive. We were the second to last stop on the way back to Mars for the M-Cor ship and as a result it had grown to well over a kilometer in length. The freighter's design was similar to my ore sled. The front of the ship was dedicated to the flight deck and passenger quarters. The segments that trailed the passenger section were individual bundles of tightly packed containers. Each segment was joined with a coupling and could extend indefinitely.

  The ship I was looking at was stacked using a 12 by 12 by 6 container cube format coming out to 864 containers per segment. I counted 14 segments with a small container trailing along. Between each segment was a tractor unit that provided thrust for nearly 120 degrees vertically and could rotate freely for 360 degrees horizontally. It was definitely a big one. The tractor jets burned brightly in deceleration mode. I couldn't imagine how much the cost of the fuel was.

  There were two ways to ship with M-Cor. You could pay for the trip by mass or simply sell directly to the corporation. If you had good contacts at both ends, it was possible to come out ahead by shipping the materials and selling them to the market, but Colony 40 had a deal with M-Cor and we weren't allowed that option. We were free to ship other materials that way, just not ore or ingots. Dad explained that it would be hard to get M-Cor to make regular stops if they couldn't count on a good cut. As it was with the recent pirate action, M-Cor would not be at all pleased to have lost so much material. If they hadn't been so close already, they might have skipped us entirely.

  GOODBYES

  I was thankful for all of the activity that took my mind off my missing foot. I didn't feel any pain at all and had even inspected the stump without the medical cap on it. It looked like any other part of my leg. The doctor showed me a replacement prosthetic I would be able to wear. The least expensive technology could be manuf
actured on one of the station's replicators. It spent a considerable portion of my savings to buy the pattern. I knew my folks would want to pay for it but with their recent losses, I couldn't let that happen. I was a free EMC and didn't want to lean on my parents. Yup, I did just say that.

  The break-in period for a prosthetic takes several weeks. This basic unit would interface with my AI and had the ability to mimic fairly realistic ankle and foot movement. I would never dance with it, but I would eventually be able to walk without crutches. Trying it on for the first time took me nearly two hours. It probably would have been easier if I had taken the doctor's advice and waited for a human physical therapist to help me learn how, but I was done with all that. My AI and I could get through this on our own.

  Nick and Jack were at the shop with their mom, Wendy. Between M-Cor's arrival, new equipment coming in, and miners scrambling to make their final load, they were run ragged. Nick offered to let me use his apartment for the maiden voyage with my new leg.

  I wasn't supposed to wear the prosthetic for three more days, but I wanted to see Tabby off to the Academy standing on my own two feet. The idea of her thinking of me as a cripple drove me like nothing else could.

  I soon discovered the feedback you receive from an inexpensive prosthetic leg is extremely limited. For the first couple of seconds, I thought I had it down cold, only to discover I was leaning past the point of no return. At .6 gravity, the apartment floor showed me pretty quickly who was boss. Gravity was a bitch.

  By the end of the afternoon my leg was unbelievably sore. It chafed where the cuff attached and hurt like crazy where the stub rested on the prosthetic foot. I hoped it wouldn't always be like this. I thought about taking some of the pain meds the doctor had prescribed, but I didn't like doing that. I would rather be sore than foggy. I removed the prosthetic (I couldn't refer to it as my foot yet) and headed over to the Gravel Pit, another diner/bar much like Millie's, using crutches.

  It was hard to get through the crowd at the Pit. People stopped me to ask how I was doing, shake my hand and whack me on the back. All of these things play havoc with my balance and I was getting annoyed. Fortunately, Tabby saw me and knifed her way through the crowd. I was surprised by her new haircut. Her long copper hair had been cut off. She now boasted a flat-top with shaved sides. I wasn’t sure what to think about that.