The Voyage Home

by D. J. Holmes

  “Ok then,” Divar said, looking relieved. “Be safe.”

  “I will,” Sarah said.

  After leaving the bridge, Sarah made her way to the shuttle bay. Alexandra already had one of Destiny’s shuttles prepped and ready to go. As she walked up its loading ramp, Sarah saw it was stuffed full of combat drones. It looked like Alexandra had brought all they had. Alexandra had designed them to augment Sarah’s combat abilities. Sarah was able to interface with them in the same way she did with Alexandra. After what had happened to her and Divar on Elaijar, she had decided they needed more back up when they went on off ship missions.

  “Send a message to Ranack’s ship,” Sarah thought to Alexandra. “Tell them I’m coming for Ranack, if anyone tries to stop me, I won’t hesitate to kill them.”

  “Sent,” Alexandra responded.

  “Let’s go then,” Sarah said as she connected to the shuttle’s interface helmet. She took off and guided the shuttle out the open shuttle bay door. Ranack’s ship was just three thousand kilometers away from Destiny so Sarah closed the distance quickly. When she got close, she did a sweep around the stricken pirate ship to make sure it really was subdued. Then she moved in cautiously.

  Destiny’s more powerful scanners had already mapped out the ship’s internal structure. Using her limited knowledge of space ship design, Sarah guessed where the bridge was and moved in. Gently, she attached her shuttle to the pirate ship’s hull, then set the plasma torches to work. They cut an access hatch in no time. Stepping away from the pilot’s seat. Sarah moved over to the seal in the center of the shuttle’s floor. With the touch of a button, it peeled back to reveal Ranack’s ship. Already her shuttle had extended an umbilical cord to form a passage for her to enter her target. The first things she sent down the umbilical cord were fifty nano drones. They quickly spread throughout the ship, carrying out a more detailed survey of its innards. When a drone came across a sentient being, it attached itself to the person so they could be tracked in real time.

  When one of the drones alerted her that it had attached to another human, Sarah sent six of her combat drones into the pirate ship. Then she followed. The combat drones walked on three legs and loosely resembled Sarah in that they had a torso and two appendices. Without the need for a head, they looked unnerving.

  Once on board Ranack’s ship, Sarah moved towards where it looked like he was hiding. Though she had practiced working with the combat drones often, it still took all her concentration to walk and control the drones. A part of her mind was focused on what her eyes were telling her. The rest was processing the sensor feeds from the ten combat drones arrayed around her. Each had a simplistic CPU with inbuilt combat protocols. Nevertheless, without her command and control, they weren’t much better than stationary turrets. With her control, they were somewhat deadlier.

  With most of her combat drones moving ahead of her, Sarah quickly made her way towards Ranack. Her nano drones gave her a heads up when four pirates moved to block her advance. She ordered her first two combat drones to fire grenades around a corner in the corridor where the pirates had set up a defensive position. As soon as they went off, four combat drones charged, firing as they went. All four pirates were dead by the time Sarah stepped over them.

  Soon, Sarah detected ten more pirates moving up. They were trying to surround her. She sent one combat drone to intercept two of the pirates. Then she left two behind where the first battle had taken place. Three more of the pirates would have to fight their way past them to get to her. That left five pirates ahead of her. They took up defensive positions in a section of corridor that widened into what seemed like a central communal area. Sarah could bypass them if she moved quickly. Yet if she did they would just chase her and give trouble later.

  She had five drones left so she sent three ahead on the course the pirates seemed to expect her to take. Breaking into a sprint, she led the final two around the pirate’s location. Through her link with her combat drones she saw they had already engaged the pirates behind her. Ignoring them, she focused on the pirates preventing her from getting to Ranack.

  When she got into position, she sent the three combat drones into the communal area. Again, they fired grenades before they advanced. This time the pirates were prepared. As soon as the drones appeared, laser beams and projectile rounds slammed into them. One was destroyed instantly, the other two managed to get to some cover, their armor allowing them to absorb a number of hits. Once they were behind cover, they opened fire on the pirates.

  Sarah counted to ten and then charged. The corridor she had chosen to attack down led into the rear of the communal area. As she broke into the wide corridor it was clear she had taken the pirates by surprise. They all had their backs to her. Quickly, she split the pirates into three groups and assigned one to each of the two drones with her. Then she opened fire on her own group. She killed two pirates before the others responded. As soon as fire started coming her way, she ducked behind some cover. At the same time, she ordered the two drones that had begun the assault to advance. Caught in a crossfire, the remaining pirates were quickly dispatched.

  After a quick check to make sure the combat drones she had left behind were still holding up the rest of the pirates, Sarah moved off again. When she came to the compartment Ranack was hiding in, she wasn’t surprised to find it sealed. Stepping up to the access hatch she attached a small device Alexandra had given her. The device extended two wires and connected itself to the access hatch.

  “I’m in,” Alexandra said moments later. “Opening the hatch.”

  As the hatch lifted open Sarah sent in two drones with weapons raised. She watched Ranack swing around in surprise and saw his eyes widen when he saw the drones.

  “Surrender,” Sarah ordered as she raised her laser rifle and levelled it at Ranack’s chest.

  “Kill her,” Ranack shouted.

  Sarah gave the drones the go ahead. There were three other pirates in the room. All three were dead before they could even reach for their weapons.

  “You’re not going to kill me,” Ranack said as he began to pull his pistol out of it holster.

  Sarah didn’t waste time responding. Instead, she shot him in the shoulder. As the laser beam burnt into his flesh Ranack screamed. His pistol dropped out of his hand to clang on the floor. Sarah ordered one of her combat drones to pick up Ranack. As it came to her side carrying the pirate, Sarah recalled her other combat drones and then began to move back to her shuttle.

  “Shut down all the access hatches in the ship but the ones directly in our path,” she ordered Alexandra.

  “Done,” Alexandra replied.

  There were still three pirates who could try and stop her. However, none of them moved to intercept her. It seemed they had decided to let her take their Captain.

  “I don’t know anything,” Ranack groaned as they neared Sarah’s shuttle. “I was just leading you on.”

  “We’ll see,” Sarah said as she stepped into her shuttle. Within a minute, she was flying back towards Destiny.

  Chapter 26

  “Give them back control of their ship,” Sarah ordered Alexandra as soon as she was back on Destiny. “Tell them to dump all their gold and then get out of here. Then collect the gold and put us into orbit around the black colony.”

  “Sending the message now,” Alexandra said. “I wonder what the colony is thinking. They must be assuming we are about to bombard them out of existence.”

  “No doubt,” Sarah replied. “I’m sure they’ll be pleased when we leave.”

  “Indeed,” Alexandra said.

  Happy that Alexandra could handle the pirate ship, Sarah contacted Divar and asked him to meet her in the room they had set up. As soon as she got there, she ordered the drone carrying Ranack to dump him in the interrogation chair.

  “Can’t you give me something for the pain?” Ranack pleaded after letting out a grunt from hitting the chair.

  “Of course,” Sarah said as she picked up an auto-injector an
d pressed it into Ranack’s neck. He led out a sigh of relief. “Now hold still,” Sarah followed up. She ordered the interrogation helmet to lower onto Ranack’s head.

  “What are you doing?” Ranack said in a worried voice.

  “You were right,” Sarah responded as the helmet slowly descended. “We’re not going to kill you. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways to get the information we want. This is an Elder ship after all. As you can imagine. They have some very effective interrogation techniques.”

  “Stop, stop,” Ranack pleaded as the helmet covered his head.

  “It’s far too late for that,” Sarah said. “You tried to kill us.”

  As the interface helmet closed over Ranack’s head, his screams were drowned out. For several seconds, he thrashed and shouted at her. When nothing happened, he began to quieten down.

  “I have completed an initial scan of his brain physiology,” Alexandra said. “We are ready to proceed.”

  “Ok,” Sarah said. “There are two ways this can go. The device around your head can read your brain waves. If you lie to me, I will know about it. It can also directly interface with your memories and extract the information I want from your brain. However, the chances are that doing so will leave you permanently brain damaged. So, you have a choice. Either you tell me what I want to know willingly, or I will take it by force.”

  “I will tell you, I will tell you,” Ranack said. “Though you are not going to like what I have to say. What will you do with me afterwards?”

  “If you tell the truth, I will let you go free to the colony we are currently orbiting,” Sarah answered. “If you don’t, there won’t be much of you left to do anything with.”

  “I see we have a new guest,” Divar said as he strode into the interrogation room. “It’s good to see you again Ranack.”

  Ranack couldn’t see Divar but he obviously recognized the voice for he let out a growl.

  “I presume Sarah has explained your options to you by now,” Divar continued, ignoring the growl. “Suffice to say I voted for going straight to extracting what we want by force. This Elder technology is quite effective. I don’t know why, but Sarah wants to give you one more chance. She is too soft.”

  “I’m sorry Sarah,” Ranack said. “It wasn’t personal. It was just business. I will tell you what you want.”

  “It wasn’t business to me,” Sarah said. “It was personal. You are the only other human I have ever met. I trusted you. Now if you don’t tell me everything I want to know, I will make sure you understand just how personal your betrayal was to me. Let’s start with your attack on 10045x. What happened after you left us to fight the two Elder frigates alone?”

  “Why do you want to know that?” Ranack asked.

  “Just answer her questions,” Divar half shouted. He reached over and pressed his finger into Ranack’s burnt shoulder. Ranack let out a muffled scream.

  Sarah shot Divar a look. Alexandra needed a baseline of truthful statements from Ranack before she could detect a lie. Yet if Ranack was under too much stress, Alexandra’s results wouldn’t be accurate.

  “I won’t ask again,” Sarah said once Ranack had stopped moaning. “Tell me about your attack.”

  “We didn’t know what would happen when you fought the two Elder ships,” Ranack began. “We thought you would try to turn and run out of the system. We were waiting on the edge of the system’s mass shadow in real space. The plan was to wait and see if you could escape. If you made it to subspace we believed the Elder frigates would try and pursue you. When they left 10045x, we were going to jump into the system and carry off as much gold as we could. We didn’t expect you to turn and take on the Elder ships.

  “Right there and then we started taking bets on how long you would last. You lost me a lot of money. I can’t believe you destroyed one frigate and managed to burst past the other. No one expected that. It gave us the perfect opportunity though. We waited until you lured the other frigate to the far side of the system then slowly made our way towards the mining world. We stayed in stealth for as long as possible. Then we launched an attack on the two orbital stations. Neither of them put up much of a fight. With them destroyed and the remaining Elder frigate hours away, we had time to land all our shuttles and take over the ground storage facilities. There were about one hundred Elders on the planet. After we killed a few of them, the rest ran away. They were not nearly as fierce as we thought they would be.

  “Once we secured their ground storage facilities, we began lifting the gold up to orbit. There was way more gold there than we could fit into all our ships. Nevertheless, we kept loading until we spotted the Elder frigate coming back towards us. As soon as we did, we hightailed it out of there.”

  “And how did you escape from the Elder frigate when you got to subspace, didn’t it pursue you?” Sarah asked.

  “Didn’t you see?” Ranack said. “Didn’t you follow us to this system. How else did you get here?”

  “We put a tracking device on your ship when we met at the rendezvous coordinates,” Sarah lied. “I thought it would be a safe precaution. Turns out I was right.”

  “Oh,” Ranack said. “So, you didn’t even have to wait to follow us from 10045x.”

  “No,” Sarah said. “Now, my question.”

  “Right,” Ranack said. “Well it was one of my subordinates’ ideas. We were planning the attack on 10045x for months, long before you came along. We knew getting away would be the hardest thing to pull off. Assuming we survived that long. So, for the last three months we have been buying up large shuttles. My engineer fitted them with sub space emitters and engines. When my flotilla jumped into subspace we launched our shuttles on diverging trajectories. The idea was to present the Elder frigates with too many targets to follow. We knew they would likely catch one or two of us, but the rest of us would escape. It was a risk we knew we were going to face. When you destroyed one of the Elder frigates our odds of survival went way up. Even better, when the Elder frigate jumped into subspace after us, it saw all the subspace contacts we had created and gave up. It just jumped out of subspace back to 10045x. We made it away without any losses.”

  Sarah took a moment to gather her thoughts. Hearing Ranack speak so openly of betraying her hurt. He sounded totally different to the man she had met on Ankara. Though she knew it had all been fake, actually seeing the real Ranack made it feel more poignant.

  “He has been telling the truth,” Alexandra said to Sarah through Sarah’s neural implant. “At least his story matches with the sensor data we got of their attack on the mining world. The more readings I can get on him the better though. Ask him something that is more focused on his emotions.”

  “Why?” Sarah thought.

  “Discussing the raid on 10045x has all been rational. If he tries to lie to us it will be an emotional decision as much as a rational one. I need data on that too,” Alexandra explained.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” Sarah asked out loud. “Do you really remember the slave markets of Kashal or was that just a lie to win me over?”

  “No, it was the truth,” Ranack said. “I grew up there. I think I was born there.”

  “Was that the truth?” Sarah asked Alexandra.

  “I think so,” she answered.

  “Go on,” Sarah said to Ranack.

  “My mother was a slave,” Ranack said. “I don’t remember her really. I was bred to be sold as a slave. I was taken from her when I was six and trained to be a servant. When I was twelve, I was sold to someone from another planet and taken away from Kashal. After that, what I told you before was true. I killed my master to get free. I’ve been living as a fugitive ever since.”

  “And just what activities have you been up to since then?” Sarah asked. “Was all of your talk of helping others just a ruse? I know the Elders considered you a pirate and a smuggler.”

  “It was partly true,” Ranack said.

  “He’s lying,” Alexandra said. “I’m almost sure of it.” Sara
h mentally acknowledged Alexandra but let Ranack go on.

  “When I got my own ship, I started smuggling people out of Elder colonies,” Ranack said. “That is why I was branded a smuggler. Like you, the Elders are my enemy. I was just trying to help people.”

  “His last sentence was a lie,” Alexandra said. “He’s holding something back.”

  “You’re lying,” Sarah said. “Don’t forget where you are. What did you do with the people you smuggled out of the Elder colonies?” she asked on a hunch, she had heard horror stories.

  At first Ranack didn’t answer. “Tell her,” Divar said, raising his voice. “Or you know what will happen.”

  “Fine,” Ranack shouted back. “I spaced them. Is that what you want to hear? I took their money and spaced them. It was easier and cheaper than taking them to where they wanted to go. Some wanted to go to other Elder worlds. Others to black colonies that were too far away. They knew the risks they were taking by dealing with a smuggler.”