The Jupiter Pirates

by Jason Fry

  Next came piloting, which had never felt natural to Tycho. He envied Carlo’s confident touch at the controls—for his brother, the yoke was like an extension of his own hands, while Tycho could never stop remembering that the Comet was a gigantic machine he was trying to push through space with a tiny lever. He found himself sweating even before Vesuvia started simulating sluggish rudders, engines stuck on full ignition, and other potentially fatal malfunctions.

  They ate a quick lunch at their consoles and then got back to work, with a single short break at the midpoint of the afternoon watch. Tycho was exhausted by the time their screens went black and Mavry told them it was time for the Deepspace Margolis simulation. The only bright spot, he thought, was that Yana and Carlo looked tired and unhappy too. He wondered if what Vesuvia had engineered to torment his brother and sister had been as hard as what he’d had to deal with.

  “So who was smart enough to look up the Battle of Deepspace Margolis during the break?” Mavry asked.

  Yana’s hand shot up, and Mavry nodded at his daughter.

  “It was in 2649, after the Second Trans-Jovian War,” she said. “A task force of fifteen Earth ships ambushed a mixed force of seven Jovian destroyers, allied pirate ships, and freighters.”

  “That’s right,” Mavry said. “And who were the commanders?”

  Tycho’s hand was up. “Admiral Byson for Earth, while Captains Trantolier and Livesey were the ranking Jovian commanders.”

  “Correct,” Mavry said. “And who was at the helm of the Kuiper Centurion?”

  Carlo didn’t even raise his hand. “Martin Luther Hashoone,” he said. “Our seventh-great-grandfather.”

  Diocletia descended the ladderwell and nodded at Mavry.

  “That’s right,” she said. “And what happened to him?”

  “He died,” Yana said as seven bells sounded.

  “Correct,” Diocletia said. “The stern of the Comet includes three armor plates salvaged from the Centurion. Everything else was vaporized. Martin Luther didn’t fare too well at Deepspace Margolis. Let’s see how you do.”

  The three young Hashoones put their goggles and headsets back on. Tycho gripped his control yoke as Vesuvia began loading data for each of their simulations. First he saw a starfield and a scattering of asteroids. Then Vesuvia populated the simulation with Earth warships—but there were only nine, not fifteen, and two of them were heavily damaged and listing to starboard. Tycho nodded, understanding what he was seeing: his parents and Vesuvia had chosen to begin the simulation sometime after the beginning of the battle. He waited for Vesuvia to add the other Jovian ships.

  And waited.

  There were no other ships, Tycho realized. He had command of a simulated Kuiper Centurion, but that was it. All the other Jovian vessels had been destroyed.

  Tycho raised his goggles to sneak a quick look at Yana, whose mouth was set in a grim line. Then the yoke wiggled in his hands, telling him that the simulation was beginning.

  Tycho survived for fourteen minutes and fifty-three seconds. When his goggles went black, Vesuvia brought up the lights on the quarterdeck. Diocletia and Mavry were sitting at their own stations, where they’d been monitoring the simulations, and turned to regard their children.

  “All right,” Mavry said. “You all faced the same simulation. Tycho, you made it the longest—nearly fifteen minutes. Tell us what your strategy was.”

  “I immediately looped back toward the Jovian base on 153 Hilda, angling the Centurion to keep my guns aimed at the Earth task force,” Tycho said.

  “And?” asked Diocletia.

  Tycho shook his head.

  “And nothing,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t win outgunned nine to one, so I was playing for time. My hope was that 153 Hilda would send reinforcements.”

  “Did you check your history?” Mavry asked. “There were no reinforcements at 153 Hilda—Trantolier and Livesey were forced to commit every spaceworthy ship they had.”

  “I know that,” Tycho said. “But I also know that the Centurion was the fourth ship destroyed at Deepspace Margolis, not the last. So I was hoping you’d changed something else in the scenario.”

  Diocletia nodded. “Very good, Tycho. The strategy didn’t work, but it was good thinking.”

  Mavry turned his attention to Carlo.

  “You lasted for four and a half minutes,” he said. “Strategy?”

  “There was a gap between the center of the Earth formation and the right flank, covered only by one damaged destroyer,” Carlo said. “I angled the keel to put as much armor as I could between me and them and tried to shoot the gap.”

  “And what happened?” Diocletia asked.

  “The Earth commander sniffed it out and was able to plug the hole before I could get through,” Carlo said. “But I almost made it.”

  “Almost,” Mavry said.

  “Almost isn’t bad in an unfair test,” Carlo said.

  Diocletia’s eyebrows leaped upward.

  “And why was it an unfair test?” she asked.

  “There was no way to win,” Carlo said.

  “And that can’t happen in real life?” Diocletia asked, holding her son’s gaze until he looked away. Then she turned to Yana.

  “Yana, you lasted—”

  “Ninety-eight seconds,” Yana said, arms folded.

  “And your strategy?” Diocletia asked.

  “Aimed all guns forward and headed full throttle into the center of Byson’s line,” Yana said.

  “Where you were destroyed,” Diocletia said.

  “I destroyed two enemy warships,” Yana said. “Neither Tycho nor Carlo had even one kill.”

  “You destroyed two enemies, yes—but at the cost of your life and your ship,” Diocletia said.

  Yana shrugged. “Sometimes you’re gonna die.”

  8

  DARKLANDS

  Tycho didn’t figure out what was bothering him until two days after the Comet returned to Callisto: his old room didn’t feel like his anymore, just like the Hashoone complex no longer felt like home. It was just a place—familiar, but not special beyond that.

  Tycho was lying in his old bed, having given up on homework for the moment. The ceiling showed a view from a camera outside—a black sky littered with stars. Callisto didn’t rotate—one side of the moon always pointed at Jupiter, while the other faced away from the planet. The Hashoones and all the other Callistan settlers lived on the dark side, using the moon as a shield against the radiation generated by Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

  Tycho reached over to his nightstand and flipped a control, changing the ceiling to the bright blue sky of a sunny day on Earth. He’d never seen Earth’s skies, but the light and the colors comforted him anyway. Humans had evolved in those conditions, and a few hundred years of living under very different skies weren’t enough to change what felt natural.

  But today, the blue sky just made him more aware of the illusion, reminding him that he was looking at an image projected on a stone ceiling, above which were twenty meters of rock and dirt and then the hostile, frozen surface of the moon.

  Tycho decided that looking at the ceiling was a waste of time, so he heaved himself off the bed and left his room, leaning against the railing to stare down into the well of the Hashoones’ home. Known as Darklands, it had been built around a mine shaft drilled more than four centuries ago, when the family first came to Callisto as settlers from Earth. The mine had once been rich, yielding enough minerals and pockets of frozen gases to make the Hashoones wealthy, so they could afford a homestead of their own instead of living in the crowded squalor of a settlement like Port Town.

  Tycho walked down the ramp that corkscrewed around the outer wall of the old mineshaft, connecting old equipment lockers and storerooms that had been converted long ago to bedrooms and offices. Slabs of rock sealed off the old tunnels. Tycho let his hand trail along the rough rock wall, listening to the echo of his footsteps. He tried to imagine what it had been like in Gregorius Hashoone’s
day, when the shaft had been filled with the hammering of robotic drills and the shouts of miners in armored suits.

  Now it was silent except for the low hum of air scrubbers and the burbling of water pumps. The mine had been exhausted within a century of the Hashoones’ arrival, and soon after that, Gregorius’s great-grandson Lodovico Hashoone had taken a desperate gamble. He’d armed the family’s old ore boats with converted laser drills and promised the family’s miners wealth and adventure if they’d bring their carbines and knives and sign on as space pirates. Somehow, Lodovico’s plan had worked. The Hashoones’ mining days were over.

  On the lower level, couches, a table and chairs, and a simple kitchen shared space with a giant steel water tank and filtration equipment. Beneath the tank, Tycho knew, meter-wide pipes descended for nearly two hundred kilometers, tapping into a salty ocean of water and ammonia far below Callisto’s crust. Tycho had never liked thinking of that pitch-black ocean somewhere beneath his feet.

  Tycho heard a polite cough. He looked up and saw Parsons, who kept Darklands in working condition, standing nearby.

  “Do you require anything, Master Hashoone?” the gray-haired man asked, polite and dignified as always.

  “No, thank you,” Tycho said. “Are Mom and Dad and Aunt Carina back yet?”

  “They are still at their meeting at Callisto Station,” Parsons said.

  Tycho sighed. “It’s taking forever. Where’s everybody else?”

  “Your sister is in the simulation room, working on a piloting exercise,” Parsons said. “Master Carlo took the grav-sled on an errand to Port Town. And I believe your grandfather is sitting in the crypt.”

  “Thank you, Parsons,” Tycho said. The man bowed slightly and glided away as Tycho sank onto the couch and drummed his fingers on the metal surface of an end table. He wished he’d known Carlo was going to Port Town. It was a dull huddle of pressure domes and converted mines, not nearly as exciting as Ceres, but it was something.

  Tycho looked around, frowning. If he were honest with himself, he had to admit that the complex had never felt like home. He and Yana had spent the first eight years of their lives here, but they’d always known they belonged in space—that learning their lessons and working hard enough to satisfy their aunt Carina was the way to become midshipmen aboard the Comet, as Carlo had done. Childhood at Darklands was about waiting until it was your turn to leave.

  The quiet unnerved Tycho all of a sudden. The familiar living room somehow felt lonely. Carina had kept only an occasional eye on Carlo, Yana, and Tycho, leaving their raising to a series of governesses, along with invalid pirates too badly injured to return to space. The governesses had long since gone back to Ganymede, the pirates had retired to Port Town, and now there were no Hashoone children left to get in trouble for jumping on the furniture.

  Tycho decided not to bother his sister. She’d just be annoyed with him, and the last thing he wanted to think about right now was flight simulations. That left his grandfather, down in the crypt. Tycho had rarely been down there; as a child, he had been frightened by the gloomy chamber.

  He hesitated, then carefully descended the stairs to the crypt, softly illuminated by a bluish light. He caught sight of a green square and a white dot in the gloom.

  “Hullo, Tyke,” Huff said, the white light of his artificial eye turning toward his grandson.

  “Would you rather be alone, Grandfather?” Tycho asked.

  “No harm in company,” Huff said. “Just payin’ respects to the departed. Do it whenever we return.”

  Tycho came and stood next to Huff, who was looking up at a shimmering hologram of a bald man with a sharp nose and a slightly mocking grin.

  “That’s my father—yer great-grandfather—Johannes Hashoone,” Huff said. “Taught me everythin’ I know about the pirate trade. Arrr, what a man he was.”

  “Is he buried here?” Tycho asked.

  “Father?” Huff looked surprised, maybe even a bit offended. “No . . . jettisoned into space, as was his wish. We’re not for buryin’, Tyke. Awful thought for a pirate, spendin’ eternity under dirt. When you hear me death rattle, lad, just shove whatever’s left of me out into space.”

  Huff reached for the panel that controlled the hologram, then stopped, grimacing and flexing his hand.

  “Tyke, do your ol’ granddad a favor and get one of those pills out of my bandolier,” he asked.

  Tycho did as he was asked, and Huff placed the pill under his tongue gratefully, still flexing his hand.

  “Arthritis,” Huff explained. “Don’t get old, Tyke.”

  “I hear it’s better than the alternative, Grandfather,” Tycho said.

  Huff rumbled with laughter. “Aye, that it is.” He stabbed at the buttons and Johannes’s image disappeared, replaced by that of a regal-looking man in old-fashioned clothes.

  “That there is old Martin Luther Hashoone,” Huff said. “I gather you made his acquaintance, back on the Comet.”

  Tycho winced. “You know about the test, then.”

  “Aye,” Huff said. “Was watchin’ on my viewscreen, even.”

  “So whose strategy did you think was best?” Tycho asked.

  “Yer sister’s,” Huff said at once. “Betcha knew that already. She’s got all the instincts to be a fine pirate one day.”

  “Privateer, Grandfather,” Tycho said. “And what about me and Carlo?”

  “Your plan weren’t bad, lad,” Huff said. “When you’re dealt a bad hand, sometimes it’s best to lay back and play for a better card. As for Carlo . . . arr. That one needs to learn that flyin’ ain’t everything. And captain’s summat yeh earn, not summat what gets handed to yeh. A pirate never makes assumptions, Tyke—they’ll be the death of yeh.”

  “I know,” Tycho said. He hesitated, then plunged ahead, into dangerous territory: “Anything can happen. Like it did with Mom and Aunt Carina.”

  Huff was silent for a long moment, and Tycho wondered if he’d gone too far.

  “You know I don’t talk about that, lad,” Huff said at last, staring up at the flickering image of Martin Luther Hashoone. But then he continued anyway—perhaps the presence of his ancestors made more-recent history less painful to confront. “We lost good pirates on that dark day, Tyke. Some of our bravest and boldest. And the reputation of some worthy pirates wound up just as dead.”

  “The ones who betrayed us,” Tycho said.

  “Arrr, the very ones,” Huff said. “Thoadbone Mox. And Oshima Yakata.”

  “What happened to them?” Tycho asked.

  “Thoadbone ran and hid somewhere around Saturn, tryin’ to stay a step ahead of the Securitat’s agents—stay ahead of them and any Jupiter pirate he happened to run across,” Huff said. “Heard he met his maker a few years back—shot full of holes over Mars. And good riddance.”

  “And the other one? Osh . . . Oshima?”

  “Sold her ship and retired to Io,” Huff said. “Ain’t seen her since. Don’t care to, neither.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, beneath the gaze of Martin Luther Hashoone.

  “Grandfather, do you believe what they say—that the Jovian Union betrayed us too?” Tycho asked hesitantly.

  Huff looked at his grandson, then turned to contemplate the shimmering image of their ancestor—a man whose last sight, Tycho realized, might have been the bow of an onrushing warship from Earth.

  “Y’know about the jammers, then,” Huff said, still staring up at Martin Luther’s ghostly form.

  “I’ve heard stories,” Tycho said.

  “Oh? And what ’ave yeh heard?”

  Tycho swallowed.

  “That . . . that the Martian convoy was carrying experimental jammers, and the Securitat gave all of you software programs to protect against them,” he said. “Except when our ships activated the program, all their systems went haywire and shut down. They were left defenseless.”

  “Aye, that’s it, more or less, lad,” Huff said. “The Securitat said agents from Earth had i
nfiltrated their code works and set a trap for us all.”

  “Do you believe that?” Tycho asked.

  Huff looked away into the darkness of the crypt, shoulders slumped. For a moment he seemed shrunken and old.

  “’Tis an evil thing to believe, lad. The universe is a hard enough place without doubtin’ yer own countrymen,” Huff muttered into the gloom. “But then, these are hard times.”

  He straightened up again and turned back to Tycho.

  “Them pirates what met their maker that day, they’d tell yeh dead’s dead, an’ it don’t much matter how they got that way,” Huff said. “What matters, laddie, is what us folks left behind do with our time. That and what we believe in—family, an’ our way of life.”

  Tycho nodded.

  “Remember the old pirate saying, Tyke—the family is the captain,” Huff said. “And the captain is the ship.”

  “And the ship is the family,” Tycho said.

  “That’s right, lad,” Huff said, wiping at his living eye with the back of his flesh-and-blood hand. “That’s right.”

  He sighed and reached over to the console, fiddling with it until Johannes Hashoone reappeared.

  “What brings yeh down here anyways?” Huff asked. “Yer a mite young for talkin’ to ghosts.”

  Tycho started to object that he was old enough to appreciate their shared family history, then stopped, sensing that his grandfather was really talking about himself.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was up in my room, and it didn’t feel like my room anymore.”

  Huff glanced over at him, his artificial eye a pinprick of bright light.

  “I miss my cabin, back on the ship,” Tycho said. “That’s my room, and the Comet’s my home—not this place, not anymore. Does that make sense?”

  Huff grinned and clapped Tycho on the back, hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs.

  “It sure does, lad!” he said. “Means yer gettin’ fuel in your blood! We ain’t for sleepin’ soft and eatin’ dainty, not us! And there ain’t no horizon big enough to compete with deep space, Tyke—least not in the eyes of a pirate.”