by Jason Fry
“We’re playing this by the book, though,” Yana said. “I’m not dying because some accountant panics at his ship being boarded. We all want payback, but today that means taking a Saturnian cargo and ship and turning them into livres to spend in Port Town. You hear me?”
“Three cheers for Mistress Yana!” yelled Dobbs, the Comet’s pale master-at-arms, his ever-present cheroot dangling from his lips. The other crewers took up the cheer as Yana checked the power levels on her musketoons.
“We’re ready, Captain,” Yana said into her headset.
“So are we,” Diocletia replied. “You are green for boarding.”
Yana nodded at Grigsby, who stepped forward with Dobbs and a crewer named Cartier, weapons raised. Klaxons wailed as the Comet’s inner airlock door opened. Through a window in the outer door Yana could see the Lampos’s own outer door was shut. A docking ring of tough but flexible rubber connected the two ships, sealing them against the vacuum of space.
Carbine raised, Grigsby thumbed the control that opened the Comet’s outer hatch. The temperature plummeted and gooseflesh rose on Yana’s forearms. The moisture in the docking ring froze into crazy zigzags of rime on the surface of the Lampos’s hatch.
“Open her up, Mr. Grigsby,” Yana said, thumbing her musketoons’ safeties off.
The Lampos’s outer hatch screeched open, revealing the inner airlock door still shut. The Comets muttered angrily.
“This here captain’s a right hard horse,” Grigsby said.
“Tycho, patch me through to the caravel,” Yana said, shivering in the chilly lock while her brother opened the communications channel. “Captain? Are you going to open the starboard airlock, or are we going to burn through it?”
The inner hatch grumbled upward, wind rippling the clothes of the Comets as the air in the two ships mingled. No one was waiting on the other side of the lock—ahead of them, a passageway led deeper into the caravel.
They were halfway down the passageway when the first Lamposes appeared. They were big men in dark-blue coveralls, their belts crowded with tools. The Comets met them at the caravel’s belowdecks junction, where a ladderwell led upward. Yana peered down each passageway, then up the ladderwell. It should lead to the bridge, she thought, trying to remember the ship’s schematic. She wished she’d taken more time to study it.
“Hands up, you lot,” Grigsby growled at the caravel’s crewers, waving his carbine emphatically.
The freighter’s crewers obeyed—slowly, smiling in an effort to be reassuring. Yana looked around, wondering why she felt nervous.
It felt like there were too many Lamposes all of a sudden. Where had they all come from?
It’s an early-morning intercept and a green freighter crew, that’s all. Still, you’d think they’d have enough sense to hold still and keep their hands up.
There were Lamposes behind them now too, Yana realized. She felt a trickle of sweat run down between her shoulder blades.
“Take me to the captain,” she said to the crewer who looked least confused. “Right now.”
“He’s on his way down, miss,” the man said, the accent Saturnian. He smiled broadly. There was something strange about his face. The cheeks and forehead were tan, but the upper lip, jaw, and chin were pale.
Yana shot him.
Then she fired at the man behind him as the two ships’ crewers came together, cursing and screaming. The boom of the guns was startlingly loud in the narrow passageway.
“Back to the Comet!” Yana yelled, squeezing off another barrage of shots. Grigsby kicked free of a Lampos crewer’s arms, his carbines roaring. The air was thick with smoke, pierced with deadly lines of laser fire.
“There’s another ship coming in!” Tycho said in her earpiece. “Looks like a cruiser at intercept speed. But what’s that noise?”
Yana didn’t reply. Cartier stumbled and then was propelled backward, knocking her onto her behind as a laser blast zipped through the space where her head had been a split second before. The crewer behind her screeched in agony. Yana scrambled free of Cartier and grabbed his arm, dragging him backward. He felt strangely light.
“Leave him!” Grigsby barked. “He’s gone!”
Yana looked down at Cartier and winced. She let go of the dead man’s arm and stumbled backward as Dobbs and Grigsby filled the corridor with blaster fire. She tripped over a fallen Lampos, dropping one of her musketoons, and had to crawl over a gasping spacer to retrieve it.
They were still ten meters from the Comet’s airlock.
“Yana, what’s happening?” Tycho demanded.
“Ambush!” Yana yelled, scrambling to her feet again. “They’re Ice Wolves! We’re almost back to the lock—get ready to cast off!”
She felt the impact before she saw the laser beam—it spun her halfway around and knocked her down again, the brilliance of the light leaving gray spots in her vision. She picked up the musketoon, annoyed that she kept dropping it. Closing her fingers around the gun sent pain shooting through her shoulder. Then Grigsby had grabbed a fistful of her jumpsuit and was propelling her down the passageway toward the Comet.
“Let go,” she protested, but Grigsby kept hauling her along. She stumbled over the uneven decking in the docking ring, then cried out in pain as Grigsby grabbed her injured shoulder. Dobbs was kneeling in the Comet’s outer lock, firing past them. His cheroot glowed red in his teeth. There were Lampos bodies on the deck around him.
“That’s everybody,” Grigsby said, ducking as a beam of light zipped past them, deeper into the dim red confines of the Comet. Yana saw a bright white spark in the gloom and realized it was her grandfather’s artificial eye. Huff was stomping toward the airlock, the flesh-and-blood half of his face dark with rage.
The Comet shuddered, and a deep groan echoed through the ship. Yana tried to shove a body over the threshold of the inner lock so it could close. She could barely move her arm.
“Yana?” Tycho asked. “We’re taking fire from that cruiser. She’s flying Saturnian colors.”
“We’re back in the lock!” Yana yelled. “Disengage, Tyke! Do it now!”
Klaxons blared inside the airlock.
“Get out of the way!” Grigsby yelled at Dobbs, bending to yank at the legs of a dead Lampos lying in the path of the Comet’s inner hatch. The frigate shook again under the impact of cannon fire.
Huff reached for Yana, but she waved him away, pushing the body blocking the outer hatch, then had to duck as a laser blast from inside the Lampos struck near her head.
Then the Comet disengaged from the Saturnian ship.
Both airlock doors descended instantly but caught on the bodies of the Lampos crewers. Motors groaned and a hurricane of air roared out through the gaps, whisking a pair of dropped carbines into the void. The suction slammed Yana against the outer door face-first and pinned her there.
“Airlock malfunction,” Vesuvia warned.
“Tyke!” Yana screamed, spitting out blood as she struggled to reach one of the handholds used during extravehicular maneuvers. “Manual override! Open the inner hatch!”
Grigsby was trying to brace himself against the wind as he pulled on the legs of the body blocking the inner hatch. Through the outer hatch Yana could see the hull of the Lampos, perhaps twenty meters away. Several of the caravel’s crewers were floating in space outside the airlock, kicking feebly.
“The inner door!” she yelled, praying that Tycho could hear her. If he opened the outer door by mistake, she and Grigsby would die.
The inner door rose and the tide of escaping air yanked the dead crewer free of its path and slammed Grigsby against the outer hatch next to Yana. She tried to tell Tycho that the lock was clear, but her brother must have been watching on the security camera, because the inner door immediately slammed shut.
The remaining air in the lock vanished into space and the suction disappeared. A puff of breath froze onto Yana’s nose and mouth and her eyes stung as their moisture boiled into vapor.
Grigs
by grabbed her by her upper arm, near where the blaster bolt had struck. She yelled but it made no sound. The belowdecks boss pulled her body against his, his other hand closing around one of the handholds. Then he nodded up at the camera.
The outer hatch rose, leaving Yana staring over Grigsby’s shoulder into space. Beyond the Lampos she could see a bright dot moving against the darkness of the void. It flashed—once, twice, three times. It was the cruiser, she realized—and it was firing at them.
Grigsby was kicking at something, chrome teeth bared in a grimace. She dragged her eyes away from the cruiser and saw the body blocking the outer door’s path. It was almost impossible to concentrate—her chest felt like it was trying to cave in on itself, and her vision was going gray.
She forced herself to move slowly and ignore the agony in her shoulder. She got her foot under the dead crewer’s side and pushed. The crewer’s heavy body moved a bit. Then the Comet rolled to port and the body slipped out into space.
The outer hatch slammed shut. Grigsby let go of the handhold, and he and Yana slumped to the deck inside the airless lock. Yana’s eyes turned to the inner hatch. Her vision was hazy and the door seemed kilometers away.
It opened. Yana gasped, drawing in greedy lungfuls of air, then began to cough. She fumbled with her headset as Huff rushed to her side.
“I’m fine, Grandfather,” she managed. “Trap—it was a trap! All port guns fire on the caravel!”
“Belay that,” her mother said calmly. “Carlo, take evasive action. Mr. Grigsby, if you can hear me, please get my daughter to the surgeon.”
Yana hissed in pain as she climbed slowly up the ladderwell from belowdecks. She found Huff in his usual spot by the ladderwell, his magnetic feet locked to the deck between her station and Tycho’s. Her twin brother’s eyes jumped to the thick bandage on her shoulder.
“You all right?”
Yana nodded, picking irritably at the crust of dried blood ringing her nostrils. Diocletia turned in the captain’s chair.
“What did Mr. Leffingwell say?”
Yana waved dismissively, wincing when the motion sent a bolt of pain down her arm.
“I’m fine. It’s a bad burn is all. A session of tissue regeneration on Callisto should restore full mobility.”
Carlo turned from his station to listen. The Comet had evaded the Ice Wolves’ cruiser, reached her long-range tanks, and was speeding away from her near-disastrous encounter with the Lampos. Mavry was in the fire room, running diagnostics on the damage inflicted by the Saturnian cruiser’s cannons during her getaway.
“And are you fit to resume duty?” Diocletia asked.
“Of course I am,” Yana said, then dissolved into a coughing fit. She held her breath, trying to force her body to obey her.
“Good,” Diocletia said. “Now, I countermanded your order to fire on the Lampos because—”
“Perhaps we should discuss this in the cuddy,” Yana said.
“We’ll discuss it here.”
“And if I don’t want to discuss it here?”
“You’ll discuss it where the captain of the ship tells you to. Yana, think. When I agree a conversation should be held in private, that’s when you should worry. We’re discussing this on the quarterdeck because your brothers need to hear it, too. Now sit down.”
Yana settled into her chair, working her arm into the sling Leffingwell had given her.
“You started a firefight on the Lampos before Tycho told you about the inbound cruiser,” Diocletia said. “That means you saw something. What was it?”
“Beards. The crewers aboard the Lampos had shaved off their beards—the lower halves of their faces were still pale. They were Ice Wolves. They stalled for time while the cruiser came to intercept us, and tried to trap our boarding party so we couldn’t disengage.”
“Arrr, the caravel was bait, an’ the cruiser were the hook,” Huff growled.
“And they almost landed us,” Tycho said.
“Almost,” Diocletia said. “You had your eyes open and kept your head fighting your way clear. We lost three Comets, but we could have lost everything.”
“And then you let the Lampos go,” Yana said, coughing again.
Mavry emerged from the aft passageway leading to the fire room, wiping his hands on his jumpsuit.
“Gosh, kid,” he said. “You look terrible.”
“Nice to see you too, Dad.”
“Our first priority was to get to safety,” Diocletia said. “We don’t have the firepower to slug it out with a cruiser. And remember, we’re missing the dozen hands we sent off as Mr. Richards’s prize crew. If that cruiser had been carrying pinnaces, we’d be space dust now.”
“Which is what that caravel should be,” Yana said. “Then the next Saturnian captain would think twice about helping the Ice Wolves.”
“And you’re sure the captain of the Lampos was helping them willingly? Did you inspect the bridge? What if the Ice Wolves captured the Lampos and forced her crew to cooperate?”
Yana looked away unhappily.
“We’re not pirates, Yana,” her mother said. “And we’re not in the vengeance business. You were right that there were Ice Wolves on that ship. But if you’d been wrong about the rest, you could have been hanged.”
The thought hung over the quarterdeck for a moment.
“Arrr, every pirate’s life ends with the carbine or the gibbet,” Huff said.
“Like Mom just said, we’re not pirates, Grandfather—we’re privateers,” Tycho said.
Diocletia nodded. “And remember, there are powerful people who would like to put us out of business, not just on Earth but also on Ganymede. Any mistake we make helps them make their case.”
“Can we not talk about gibbets and carbines?” Carlo asked. “Personally, I’m planning to die in bed, at a very old age.”
“Me too,” Mavry said. “Preferably after overindulging on plum duff and some good Ganymedan brandy.”
“There’s summat to what yeh say, Mavry my lad,” Huff said. “’Tis a tad less heroic, but p’raps an excess of grog ain’t a bad alternative to the hangman.”
Tycho found his sister drinking a jump-pop in the cuddy.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
Tycho rolled his eyes. “Sorry to offend you. I just wanted to see if you’re okay.”
“I’m fine. Just been a busy day.”
“How’s the shoulder?” he asked, sitting across from her.
“It hurts,” Yana said, coughing again. “Mr. Leffingwell explained it to me—the laser superheated the water in the tissue around the point of impact. Cooked it, basically.”
“Yuck, boiled sister. And what about the rest of you?”
Yana’s fingers explored her puffy face.
“I’ll live. Broken nose and a mild concussion. Mr. Leffingwell says the swelling is from decompression, and it’ll go down in a couple of days. The annoying thing is this stupid cough—bits of ice irritated the respiratory passages. Anyway, it could have been a lot worse.”
“Thank God it wasn’t,” Tycho said, reaching over to squeeze her hand. Yana squeezed back.
“Still, it was bad enough. Grigsby had to carry me out of the Lampos like a little kid. And you heard Mom—she didn’t agree with anything I did back there. Now I’ll get written up in the Log.”
The captaincy of the Comet had been handed down from one Hashoone to the next for as long as the ship had existed. Diocletia had taken over from Huff fifteen years earlier, and one day she would name either Tycho, Yana, or Carlo to succeed her. She watched every decision her children made, recording their successes and failures in a protected part of the Log.
“Mom didn’t seem mad,” Tycho said. “It was more like she was afraid.”
“Mom’s never been afraid in her life.”
“You know better than that.”
Yana waved that away, then grimaced. “What would you have done back there, Tyke?”
Tycho’s teeth worried at his lip.
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“It’s weird these days,” he said. “There are all these rumors about Earth warships conducting operations in the asteroid belt. And nobody can figure out what’s happening with the Ice Wolves—”
“I can help you with that part—they just tried to kill us.”
“I know, but before that we hadn’t run across them in months. After the Battle of Saturn they had a perfect chance to put pressure on us, and squeeze us between them and Earth, but they mostly haven’t.”
“All very interesting, but I didn’t have time to convene a meeting of the Diplomatic Corps. I had to do something. So I did. And it was the right thing.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“No, but you were thinking it. I could tell.” Yana sighed and shook her head. “I guess if Mom thinks I was wrong and you think I was wrong, it doesn’t matter what I think.”
Tycho cocked his head at his sister, curious.
“Oh, don’t play dumb,” Yana said. “You’re the one who found the Iris cache, and Carlo’s the self-proclaimed best pilot in the Jovian Union. Which leaves me, the bad pirate daughter. The one who’s always wrong and never listens.”
“You’re being way too hard on yourself,” Tycho said. “Well, except for the never listens part.”
Yana winced at the pain in her shoulder. “Whatever. As soon as Mom picks one of you to be the new captain, I’m getting my own ship.”
Tycho shook his head.
“You know that’s impossible. The Jovian Union won’t allow it, and family tradition—”
“I don’t care about either of those things anymore. There’s no way I’m spending the rest of my life forgotten on Callisto, Tyke. I’d rather die than live as a nobody.”
3
THE PRIZE CREW’S TALE
The Jovian cruiser Sparrowhawk lurked above Callisto, bristling with weapons and surrounded by pinnaces. A hard-eyed lieutenant ordered the Comet to hold her position for half an hour while he pored over the frigate’s recent navigational records. The sound of fifes and horns bounced up the ladderwells to the quarterdeck, accompanying spacer songs that sounded more enthusiastic than melodic. Free of their duties, the Comets were turning the last hours of the cruise into a shindy.
