Spacer, Smuggler, Pirate, Spy Box Set

by J. A. Sutherland

  That the vacsuit was likely the oldest, rankest, most-repaired, and, so near as Dansby could make out from the stains and seams of those repairs, frequently died-in aboard and the work he was set to the hardest, dirtiest, and hottest — the better to bring out lingering odors from said vacsuit — was only to be expected, he supposed.

  Still, it was a happy ship, with the endless cries of, “Passin’ the word for that Dansby — bosun’s mate Tart’s wantin’ a word with that Dansby!” bringing much delight and laughter to the crew.

  Dansby’d been raised aboard ships — merchantmen, not Navy, but the spacers were the same — and he took the never-ending stream of scutwork with as much good humor as he could muster. Fighting would do no good and only get him pummeled — or, worse, sent to Captain’s Mast and put in for a round dozen lashes from the bosun’s cat if it were seen by an officer.

  Of the big Swede, Sven, he had no word. Those who’d been returned to Tyche by the Station Patrol simply said that he’d still been in the cell when Dansby was dragged out.

  Some might have approached the ship’s officers and explained their situation. He was a ship’s master, after all, and exempt from the Press by virtue of that, along with his whole crew thanks to the documents from Eades, but Dansby was not so foolish. He’d likely hear nothing but, “Well, lad, we’ll be sure to check into that — when next we’re in-system.”

  And they might, even, but Tyche would move on long before their message could reach Elizabeth and longer before a reply could return. It might eventually be worked out — and that only assuming that the officers didn’t simply ignore him — but Dansby had no wish to spend months waiting for such an unlikely event.

  Instead he bent his back to the work like any newly pressed man reconciled to his fate, all the while looking for opportunities to get his own message off to Kaycie and Elizabeth.

  “Jordan.”

  Dansby set a square tray before the named man, juggling the three others he held. The gundeck was laid out for their meal, with hanging tables strung from above to cover the guns and short stools to either side for the men. It was Dansby’s turn to go to the window behind which the cook worked and collect the trays for his mess and Kel’s turn to say which man got which tray, the better that it be seen as fair. The space was far too crowded and the time to eat far too short for everyone to get their own. Dansby took the next tray in hand so there’d be no accusations that he’d chosen it after Kel spoke.

  “Prat,” Kel said.

  Dansby set the next tray in front of his unfortunately-named messmate and grasped the next.

  “I’ll take that one,” Kel said.

  Dansby set it before him, the last in his own place, and Kel turned around, then they all set about their food in the time they had.

  The better to get it down without tasting, Dansby thought to himself as he scooped up a bit of … Well, it’s white and mushy, so we’ll go with potatoes — rehydrated with ship’s water, far too many times through the recyclers, and that leaves a taint no matter what they may say about distilling leaving everything else behind.

  The potatoes tasted like the water, which virtually everything rehydrated aboard Tyche did, so the variety was more the color than any sort of flavor. The sad pile of vegetables — possibly green beans — were shriveled up themselves and black in spots from either too long in the freezer or more than one trip in and out. They were boiled, thus also tasted of the water run through both recycler and men far too many times. The blob of squiggly, squirmy beef was …

  Sweet Dark, he thought at the taste, grasping for his cup to wash the foulness from his mouth. What has the purser cut the nutrients in the vats with? Does he have a line straight from the bog?

  Even after two full weeks aboard, he wasn’t used to it. The crew’s food aboard Elizabeth was no fine stuff, but this dreck was beyond the pale.

  “So, lad,” Kel said, “do you suppose you’ll get off on Collingworth?”

  “Every third hatch on Collingworth is a House, Kel,” Prat said. “Of course he’ll —”

  Kel cuffed the other man’s shoulder. “Meant off the ship, prat,” he said.

  Prat glared at him, but with his name as it was, there was always a tossup to tell if the man calling him by it had capitalized it or not. Dansby prepared to help Jordan separate the two if it came to blows, as the whole mess would be punished for any fighting.

  “Easy,” Jordan said. “You two can beat one another on Collingworth all you like, but save it for there.”

  The two settled back and resumed eating, but Prat shot Kel dark looks with every bite.

  “It seems not,” Dansby said, answering Kel’s original question. “I’ve asked the bosun, but, coming aboard as I did —” He shrugged.

  He’d known in the asking that the answer would be “no”. No Naval ship would let a pressed hand loose in the first port after he’d come aboard — pay in arrearage or no, that was simply asking for a runner. Not that Dansby planned to run — not yet, anyway. He first needed to get a message to Kaycie and Elizabeth so that they could be in port as well and he’d have somewhere to go. The thought of dodging the Patrol, the bosun’s search parties, and the men of the Impressment Service itself on some dingy colony world with no way to get a’space was not one that appealed to him.

  So, he’d have to wait, work diligently, convince the bosun and officers that he’d resigned himself to his lot aboard Tyche, and hope to set foot off the ship one day in the future.

  Or he could ask one of his mates to send a message, which could either work, or backfire if they told the bosun.

  He chewed a mouthful of the potatoes, necessary due to the gumminess, and pondered which of his new messmates might be a reliable fellow for such a task.

  “All hands! Port watch t’the sails!” Tart, the bosun’s mate, called out from the forward hatchway. “All hands! Starboard t’clear for action! Lively now, lads!”

  Six

  All thoughts of food, and the food itself, were swept aside by the order to clear for action.

  Dansby, having brought the mess’s food from the cook, swept it up again, along with his mates’ trays.

  While he returned that to the cook, they were busy replacing their mess table and benches in the overhead, revealing the heavy gun beneath.

  Vacsuits came out of chests, stored along the centerline bulkhead where the men berthed in foldaway bunks, then those chests were struck below into the hold as the vacsuit owners struggled into the bulky suits.

  Half the men, those on the port watch, had their suits on first and headed forward to Tyche’s sail locker, then to the hull to work the sails.

  The other half, Dansby included in the starboard watch, continued to clear the ship’s gundeck for action.

  Hatches fore and aft were sealed, vacsuits checked and double-checked by each man’s messmates, and the deck scoured for any bit of shininess that might reflect and splinter the laser shot from an enemy’s guns into more deadly beams.

  Jordan was the gun captain for their mess and went over their gun, scrawled with the name Bright Bastard, carefully. First getting his face close to the crystalline barrel and scanning its length, looking for any cracks or imperfections, wear from previous actions, that might cause it to burst when fired, then opening the breech and checking the connections where the shot would send its beam of coherent light down that barrel to pummel an enemy into submission. He pulled a bit of cleaner from a vacsuit pocket and scrubbed at a patch of barely visible carbon where the shot’s energy had struck something.

  “Kel! I told you to clean the breech better last time!” he yelled. “You’ll kill us all if the Bastard here bursts!”

  Dansby didn’t hear Kel’s reply, as his task was running shot and he was already aft at the gundeck’s hatch, taking up a nine-pound shot through the revolving passthrough to the companionway that led down to Tyche’s magazine.

  The purple and ivory cylinder took on that color from the gallenium that protected its electro
nic insides from the radiations of darkspace that would soon fill the gundeck, and was measured in some archaic bit of nonsense New London’s founders had insisted upon and the Royal Navy had perpetuated. It was the weight of the capacitor that powered the attached lasing tube and represented the power of each of Tyche’s guns, save the six-pound chasers fore and aft.

  “Is it fresh?” Jordan asked at his return.

  Dansby shrugged. They’d not seen an action since he’d been impressed, nor had Captain Stansfield truly drilled them at the guns in that time, so he’d not had a chance to learn what his guncaptain’s expectations were.

  “I want fresh for the first shot — make it count!” Jordan said. “Go get another and tell the runner to unplug it from the chargers himself!”

  Dansby handed the shot to Kel, who rolled his eyes before setting it against the center bulkhead with the few kept there permanently for surprise actions where they’d not have time to prepare and stock, then he rushed back to the aft hatch.

  “I need —”

  “Yeah, yeah,” a runner said. “Fresh shot for Jordan, as though the caps’ll lose a charge from sitting.” The transfer cylinder rotated to expose another nine-pound shot. “There — fresh off the bloody chargers for the superstitious prat.”

  Dansby took the cylinder and headed back to the gun, finding Jordan wasn’t the only guncaptain who might be a superstitious prat, as others were eyeing shot cylinders to see if the lasing tubes were straight enough for their first go, or even rolling the cylinders themselves on the decking, as though some deformation might set off their aim a bit.

  “Fresh from the chargers,” Dansby said, handing the shot to Jordan.

  The other man grunted, hefted the shot in his hands as though the electrical charge had some real weight he could judge, then grunted again and slid it home in the Bright Bastard’s breech.

  Dansby, along with one man from every gun, headed back to the aft bulkhead for another shot. The rest of the guncrews were busy rigging netting over the ports — purple-white, like the shot, from the gallenium that coated the fine mesh. They’d keep the worst of the darkspace radiations at bay, at least until they were shot away by the enemy’s guns, and let some electronics work unshielded on the gundeck.

  “Prepare for vacuum!” the voice of Tyche’s second lieutenant, Morefield, sounded in Danby’s helmet, and he, like all the others on the gundeck, hurriedly closed his helmet’s face plate and sealed it.

  Seemingly before he’d even managed that, he felt his suit expand a bit as the air was sucked out of the sealed gundeck so as not to be lost to darkspace when the gunports were opened.

  A moment after that, Morefield’s voice sounded again, “Starboard guns! Open ports, out your guns!”

  The order was repeated with hand signals by a midshipman near the aft hatch, though their radios were still working. A member of each guncrew grasped a lever and pulled hard, swinging the ports before each gun out to lay along the hull — it provided a bit more protection there from incoming shot, but opened the port itself to darkspace with nothing but the thin netting between that harsh place and the gundeck.

  Dansby’s suit radio cracked and hissed for a moment as dark energy seeped in and interfered with its signal, then it adjusted and went silent again.

  Once the shooting started and the nets or even the hull itself was shot through, he’d have to turn that off or the sounds of the radio trying to interpret the dark energy as some sort of transmission might deafen him — before enough of the stuff came inboard that the thing stopped working altogether.

  Dansby set the shot he was carrying on the waiting stack and threw his shoulder to the task along with his mates. The gun rolled easily on its casters, but there was still a great deal of mass in the two-meter-long barrel, along with the base to keep that steady.

  While Dansby and the others pushed, Jordan held a slit down the middle of the gallenium netting open to ease the barrel through.

  Once the gun was in place, Dansby pressed his head close to the netting along with his mates to see if he could get a view of their foe.

  Tyche was far from the active fighting in the current conflict with New London’s long-time enemy, the Republic of Hanover, so it was unlikely a warship. Possibly a pirate, but more likely it was only some poor merchantman ordered to heave-to and be inspected by Captain Stansfield.

  Tyche was coming about, laying the guns on Dansby’s side on the other ship, which swung slowly into view.

  It was a topsail schooner, pointed up into the dark energy winds and sails doused to hang dim and dark, with only her hull lights to illuminate her in the vast black of darkspace. Even without the sails lit and with her flashing those lights on hull and mast to signal her name as Wilted Rose, Dansby knew her at a glance — the rake of her masts, the extra bit of rigging he’d had run to stabilize the foremast where it had a tendency to work itself against the lower hinge, her rudder and planes a bit oversized for a ship of her burthen, but able to dig into the dark matter that permeated darkspace and turn the ship far quicker than one might expect.

  “Elizabeth.”

  Seven

  “Thank you, Captain Stansfield,” Kaycie said. “Your wine cabinet is quite fine.”

  “If I do say so myself,” Stansfield agreed, nodding Kaycie toward the airlock and back to Elizabeth.

  Dansby listened from his place a bit farther down the corridor, catching Kaycie’s eye only briefly and receiving only a curt nod and squint in return. She’d been speaking with Captain Stansfield in his cabin for more than an hour since Tyche’s crew had completed their inspection of Elizabeth, concluded that there was no contraband aboard, nor that she was involved in piracy, and Stansfield had invited Elizabeth’s master — for the moment, apparently, Kaycie — aboard for a drink and exchange of any news not included in the automated feeds between ships.

  While she’d been sipping Stansfield’s wine, Dansby and the rest of Tyche’s crew had been set to putting the ship back to rights from quarters and eating their own, now cold, meal.

  That Detheridge and — something Dansby found more than a bit outrageous — the big Swede Sven had joined Kaycie and Stansfield for wine while he was forcing down a slice of vat-grown beef turned cold and, more than usually, gelatinous by the wait was the first layer of his frustration, rather like a tall cake made on a foundation of shite. More layers were added with each passing minute that Kaycie was closeted with Stansfield and he wasn’t called in to be sent home to Elizabeth with a profuse apology. The final layer was put on with his realization that Kaycie was returning to Elizabeth without him, apparently not having told Stansfield that he had Dansby, a ship’s master and exempt from the Press, aboard as a common spacer.

  And, while Kaycie’s ignoring him with barely a glance to …

  “And thank you for allowing Elizabeth to follow along with you,” Kaycie said, reaching out to lay fingertips on Stansfield’s arm in a shocking breach of protocol that the stern Naval captain seemed not mind one whit. “Darkspace is so very empty and dangerous, especially here in the Fringe — it will set my mind at ease no end to know there’ll be no trouble from pirates or stray Hanoverese while you and your Tyche are about.”

  Is she flirting with him?

  Dansby’s eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared.

  Well, that was the final layer on his shite-cake, sure. She must have some plan to get him loose, else why come after him like this, but he couldn’t help but feel she was also rubbing his nose in it with her attitude.

  “You know them two?” Jordan asked him in a whisper and with an elbow nudge to his side.

  Dansby followed the guncaptain’s gaze to Detheridge and Sven, both of whom were openly staring at Dansby with wide grins.

  “No,” he whispered back.

  Whatever plan there was to get him loose from Tyche apparently didn’t include simply telling Captain Stansfield who he was. Which, when Dansby thought about it, made a certain sense in light of how the Press itself had tre
ated that information back on Penduli.

  What little Dansby knew of naval law seemed to tell him that Stansfield’s most likely reaction would be to tell Dansby to file a complaint at their next stop — if he were allowed off ship and if he could get his case heard before Tyche sailed again. If not, then, well, there was always the next port to try again. The Navy was not known for easily giving a man up once he was signed aboard.

  “Well,” Jordan whispered, “they seem to know you — or fancy you, one. Ain’t took their eyes off you since they come out of Stansfield’s cabin and grinning fair to lop the top of their heads clean off.”

  Dansby grunted.

  “The woman’s handsome enough — you’d do worse than to make her acquaintance if you’re off ship next port …” Jordan paused and frowned. “Take care with the big one, if you go that way. You’re a game lad, but I don’t think you could take it and survive.”

  Tyche sailed on with Elizabeth , making each day aboard far more miserable for Dansby than even his first after being pressed.

  With every watch he was sent outside the ship’s hull to work the sails his misery grew, as he could see his ship, with Kaycie and his own crew aboard, off Tyche’s port quarter. The longing to simply throw himself off the Navy ship’s stern and drift toward Elizabeth was nearly enough to overcome his spacer’s fear of being away from a ship’s gallenium shielded hull in darkspace and having all that dark matter pressing in around him until even his thoughts slowed to a halt.

  He thought, once, that might even be Kaycie’s plan — for him to throw himself off Tyche and await her picking him up — but he dismissed it. Tyche’s crew was too vigilant and their own fears of going off and having to watch their ship recede in the distance, leaving them to their fate, too great. There were always eyes watching for an accident like that, ready to signal the quarterdeck that a man was lost and must be recovered.

  Hard as it might be, he’d have to wait until they were in a system and the crew allowed leave. More, a system where he was allowed leave, despite having been pressed, and that would mean gaining the trust of Tyche’s officers — none of whom wanted to have to mark a man Run in the ship’s books.