“We need to judge the situation for ourselves.” Max donned a combat suit and Harry prepared to accompany him.
Thelma watched them do a final equipment check just inside the entrance hatch to the Lonesome. She was in a lifesuit, as per protocol since they were engaging a spaceship that had been through a bandit attack, but she had no illusions that she’d play any role in the action. The situation brought home to her that Max truly didn’t need a deputy. She was merely someone he and the two AIs babysat.
That would have to change.
She returned to the bridge. Lon could have fed her the information via the viewscreen in the lounge, but that would have been unprofessional. Besides it would be impossible to relax on the sofa until she knew exactly what had transpired on the Rapture. Better yet, she’d relax after Max and Harry returned safely.
Max’s combat suit had propulsion jets for short space hops, but he didn’t activate them. Harry transported them both across to the Rapture and in through the damaged cargo hold hatch. Once in there, they released drones to help sweep the trampship in case bandits remained. Lon ran the scans.
“All clear,” he reported.
Thelma nodded. She sat in the navigator’s chair on the bridge. The screen in front of her showed the video feed from Max’s helmet camera. He’d arrived at the bridge on the Rapture.
The patriarch for the group of Pilgrims aboard the trampship cut an unimpressive figure. His hands shook and he gulped as if he fought sickness. Over four days had passed since the bandits attacked, yet his fear was as immediate as if they still threatened the spaceship.
Or perhaps his fear was of Harry who stood in scary mech mode to Max’s left, securing their exit and preventing anyone else from entering the bridge.
Max addressed the captain. “Casualties?”
“No deaths,” Captain Jones responded. He had the appearance people expected of spacers: not too tall, lanky and, just now, clad in a worn lifesuit with the helmet retracted. With his face visible, his exhaustion was obvious. “Injuries from maneuvering trying to evade the bandits. Not that this pile of scrap can maneuver. We were a sitting duck. Two would-be heroes are badly cut up. They’re in the infirmary. They tried to take on the bandits when they came over to collect their loot.”
“They took our supplies. All of them,” the patriarch found his voice, and it was an unattractive wail.
“Did they take any people?” Max asked Captain Jones.
The man’s reddish face, indicative of high blood pressure, paled alarmingly.
“Hostages?” Max pushed. “Slaves?”
The patriarch vomited.
Some splashed onto the captain’s boot. He didn’t seem to notice. “No, they took no one. Only things. Do you really think…?”
“They’re escalating,” Max said curtly. “If the Pilgrims persist in playing bait, the bandits will get worse.”
“This is my last time. Never again,” Captain Jones vowed. “They offered me…never mind.”
Max didn’t care about the captain’s decision or his reasons. “Have you contacted Levanter? They’re the closest settlement to you. Are they sending help?”
“We contacted them. They refused to send help.” Captain Jones’s face reddened once more. His rage at the Pilgrim colony’s lack of assistance was obvious. “We can limp on to Levanter. Once we’re there…I’ll have to wait for another ship and work my passage back to civilization. At least this heap of scrap isn’t mine.”
Max switched off his external microphone and addressed Lon. “Can you hack the Rapture’s systems?”
“Already done.”
“Will they make it to Levanter?”
“Barring another bandit attack or similar disaster, yes.”
Max turned. “Harry, we’re moving out.”
The mech waited for Max to pass so that he could protect his back.
“Where are you going?” the patriarch asked.
The captain had belatedly noticed the vomit on his boots. He scowled at the smaller man.
“I’m going after the bandits,” Max said.
Chapter 7
“Bandits espied!” Lon said cheerfully. He’d tracked them easily. They had a cutter and a yacht, neither spaceship anywhere new nor, judging by their slow speed, well-maintained. They likely existed on prey that was even more rundown, like the Rapture. Now that they had some ill-gained spoils, their route was direct to the Badstars. Intercepting them was an easy matter. “The cutter is the Yardbird and the yacht is the Mirage. They’ve modified the yacht to include two missile launchers.”
“Anyone else near us?” Max double-checked.
“Nope. I’m hacking their…I’ve got control of their systems. Their firewalls were decades out of date. Weapons systems locked.”
Thelma sat quiet and observant in the navigator’s chair on the bridge.
Harry leaned in the doorway.
Max transmitted his orders to the bandits’ two ships. “This is Sheriff Max Smith on the Lonesome. I have control of your systems. I have missiles targeted at you. Surrender, now.”
“Go to hell,” someone with more bravado than commonsense snarled from the Yardbird.
“You are all under arrest for piracy, specifically for the attack on the Rapture four days ago. Those of you aboard the Yardbird, enter its shuttle and approach to lock with the Lonesome. You will be transported to Zephyr for trial.”
“No way are we handing ourselves over like tame kazzworms.”
Harry straightened. His mobile face lost all expression. Once more he was the terrifying mech.
Max addressed the bandits. “You have ten minutes to get in the shuttle, then get your asses over here. Otherwise, you’ll meet in person the mech you are now seeing onscreen. It will extract you from whatever hole you try to hide in. Given the charges of piracy you are facing, I’m authorized to use lethal force.”
“We surrender.” The panicky voice came from the yacht, Mirage. “Don’t send your mech. We’ll follow your instructions. There are only two of us.”
“Confirmed by bio-scan,” Lon said. “Eleven aboard the Yardbird.”
The man, presumably the captain, transmitting from the cutter growled loudly. “Pissants. You shame—hey! Where are you going?”
“We’re not fighting a mech.” The woman who answered him raised her voice to be heard clearly over the comms. “Sheriff Smith, we surrender. We’re heading for the shuttle, now. Don’t send your mech.”
“I’m never invited to the party,” Harry grumbled. He grinned, indicating that the camera was off him, and by his casualness, that this pattern of orders and intimidation was familiar to the Lonesome trio.
The captain of the Yardbird cursed for a full minute before surrendering with yet more curses.
“Eleven bio-signatures entered the shuttle,” Lon reported.
“I’ll get ready to receive them.” Max already wore his combat suit. Now, he snapped the helmet shut.
Harry ambled after him.
“What do I do?” Thelma asked, left alone with Lon.
“Paperwork,” Lon said succinctly. “I usually handle it, with Max checking it before signing off. But now that he has a deputy…I’ve heard that paperwork is a deputy sort of job. It’ll help you to learn the system and the profile most bandits fit into.”
So she filled in paperwork, matching Lon’s scans of the pirates as they were herded into their cells with the Galactic Justice database records. Some of the pirates, including the captain of the Yardbird, had extensive criminal records, and in the latter case, a warrant out for his arrest on a multiple homicide.
“According to the case file, he finished by killing his partner during an argument over dividing what they stole in a jewelry store hold up on Paris.”
“Unpleasant fellow,” Lon concurred. “And with the manners of a pig! He just spat on my nice clean floor.”
Thelma jolted, reminded that Lon was monitoring events and doing a whole lot more than chatting with her as she handled pap
erwork in her narrow office.
“Max is on his way up,” Lon said. “The last two bandits, the ones from the yacht, are safely stowed in a separate cell. I don’t trust the cutter captain with them.”
Max halted in the doorway to her office. He’d retracted the faceplate on his helmet, but was otherwise still fully outfitted for combat. It made him appear formidable, even more than normal. However, the lines at the corner of his eyes hinted at ordinary, human exhaustion.
Soul sickness, Thelma diagnosed. Dealing with criminals like the bandits undoubtedly had consequences. Perhaps it explained why Max was so private. People disappointed him. She glanced at the clock. It was near enough to the dinner hour for her to ask, “Do you want ‘goop’ for dinner or should I cook something?”
He smiled faintly. “I was thinking of goop. It’s certainly what our prisoners are getting.”
“I think the sheriff deserves better than that. How about a quick curry? There will be vegetables in it,” she added in mock threat.
“Sounds good. I’ll shower, then I can help, if you like?” He’d never offered assistance in the kitchen before.
“You can be in charge of pickle-making. I’m sure Lon can find an easy recipe. Something to go with a coconut curry.”
Max tapped the doorframe once, presumably in agreement, and walked off.
It was strange to share the Lonesome’s kitchen with an actual human. Thelma had to bite her lip a couple of times to keep from laughing at Lon’s antics as he instructed Max on preparing a papaya pickle, and criticized the former Star Marine’s knife handling skills. Where Lon magicked the green papaya from, Thelma couldn’t even begin to guess, but when she snatched some of the shredded slices from Max’s bowl, they were yummy.
“I’m sure you’re not meant to steal from the chef,” Max chided her.
Harry chuckled. “You’re her sous chef. She has total taste testing rights.”
“So there.” She snatched some more papaya shreds to celebrate her victory.
“These are pretty good,” Max agreed, licking a couple of stray shreds off his fingers.
Lon was pleased. “It’s the fresh lime juice.”
It seemed they all needed the downtime to decompress, even if two of them didn’t eat.
Overnight, Lon scanned the two bandit ships via robots, checking for traps, finding five, and disabling them. “We’re set to go,” he informed Max in the morning.
“For Zephyr?” Thelma confirmed.
Max shook his head. “The Yardbird has the Pilgrims’ supplies onboard. Technically, the supplies are evidence of the crimes the bandits committed, but the people on Levanter need them, especially the medical stuff. We’ll tow the Yardbird and Mirage to Levanter, unload the supplies, then continue on to Zephyr.” He hesitated. “On the frontier, things aren’t always cut and dried…”
“Harry and Lon trust your judgement,” Thelma said. “So do I.”
“Thanks for the reassurance,” he said drily.
Evidently, she’d guessed wrongly regarding the reason for his hesitation. He didn’t need her approval for his actions.
Max continued. “I just meant that plans change. New information comes in and you have to adapt to it. I intend for us to go to the Pilgrim colony, unload the cutter, and continue on, but things likely won’t go that smoothly.”
“Levanter is difficult,” Lon said. “As an interstellar sheriff, Max has no jurisdiction on the planet.”
“And the elder for the colony is as crooked as any bandit,” Harry contributed. Of the trio, he was the one who tended to cut to the heart of the matter and to heck with political correctness. “Elder Jakob is a weasel. He’ll try to exploit Max’s compassion in delivering the supplies to Levanter rather than simply saying thanks.”
“What will he do?” Thelma asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
There was a lot of waiting and seeing over the next week and a half until they reached Levanter. The Lonesome didn’t actually tow the two bandit ships. Instead, Lon kept them close and remotely controlled them. That was good enough till they neared the planet. However, they didn’t want anyone on Levanter learning of the AI’s existence.
“If I wasn’t here, what would you have done?” Thelma asked as Max confirmed that her lifesuit was correctly fastened. He was being paranoid. She had checked it, and Lon had observed the entire procedure.
“I’d have deputized Wild Blaster Bill.” Max gave a final yank to the seal of the suit at her left ankle. The seal held. “He could have piloted the Yardbird in.”
Probably better than me, she conceded privately. She had a valid pilot’s license. Her dad had insisted that all of his children be capable of piloting the various vessels used in asteroid mining, and she’d built on her early training so that she was legally allowed to pilot a cutter like the Yardbird.
“If you’re having doubts—”
She cut him off. “I’m fine. Harry has already gone across to the Yardbird a couple of times and confirmed it’s safe. You’ve been across. I’m okay with this. I like it. I feel as if I’m contributing.”
“That’s what Lon said,” Max muttered.
Thelma made a mental note that she owed the Lonesome’s AI. Left to his own instincts, Max would keep her wrapped up in cotton wool on the spaceship for her whole first year in the Saloon Sector. And longer, possibly.
Harry intervened. “Ready?”
“Yes.”
Max frowned at Harry. “Remember, your first priority is Thelma.”
“I know,” Harry said casually. “If you lose your deputy, Galactic Justice won’t give you another one.”
She snorted a laugh inside her lifesuit.
Neither Max nor Lon joined in.
“Thelma is not replaceable. Be careful with our girl,” Lon said.
Max just glared.
Thelma patted Harry’s arm. “I appreciate your humor.”
They took the Yardbird’s shuttle across to the cutter. Once aboard, Thelma surveyed the messy, ill-maintained nature of her surroundings, and kept her lifesuit helmet sealed as she followed Harry to the bridge. In truth, while she’d be visible to the cameras on the bridge, he’d pilot the cutter on the final leg of its journey to Levanter. The yacht attached to the Yardbird was a complication her limited piloting experience would struggle to handle. One errant engine blast could send the yacht into a spin and destabilize the larger Yardbird.
Her role was to speak with Levanter’s control tower and to meet the cargo handlers who’d shuttle up from the planet to retrieve the Rapture’s stolen supplies.
It shocked her that they were within an hour’s travel—and the Yardbird didn’t travel fast—of Levanter before its control tower hailed them. Did the remote colony have so little threat detection? Not that they were a threat, in this case, but still.
Max responded to the control tower, including Thelma in the exchange, and introducing her as his deputy in charge of the Yardbird. “Has the Rapture reached Levanter?”
“Patriarch Yusef is in contact with us. We expect our newest Pilgrims within the day.”
“Patriarchs ranking higher than captains,” Thelma commented to Harry.
He nodded seriously. “Levanter is a strange place. Their attitude to women is offensive, but I will stand guard at the cargo hold, so you won’t have to deal with them. As much as possible, stay silent and let Max respond. Even if you know the answers to their questions or their behavior crosses the line into what you might slap them down for in the core worlds, stay mum.”
Her eyes widened at that.
“It’s important, Thelma.”
“All right.”
She had never encountered an inhabited planet without a spacedock. Thanks to her Rock Sector childhood, she was familiar with shuttle transfer procedures, but that was between asteroids and trampships. To be aboard a cutter and have to lock into orbit rather than dock was primitive.
“Are resources really so tight on Levanter that they can’t
afford a spacedock?” Guidelines on expansion put a spacedock near the top of the list for construction. It made everything easier in a situation where a new colony remained dependent on external resources.
According to Max, the colony needed the supplies retrieved from the bandits, but the Pilgrims planetside showed no urgency to collect them. Lon was monitoring the planet, and reported the absence of shuttles launching.
“I guess it takes a while for them to prepare for a launch, if they’re focused on ground matters.” Thelma wanted to return to the Lonesome. The dirty state of the bandits’ cutter made her skin crawl, even with her lifesuit on. Plus, she admitted, if only to herself, to suffering a sense of emotional isolation. The Yardbird wasn’t home.
“A nice, naïve notion,” Harry said.
She straightened from her slouch, warily alert. “What did I miss?”
“The Pilgrims aren’t rushing to collect their much-needed supplies from this ship because they want the whole ship.”
“What?! But that’s crazy. It’s the bandits’ spaceship and it’s impounded as part of the charges against our prisoners. I filled in screens of paperwork regarding it.”
He grinned at her, as if she was too cute for words.
Impatiently, she retracted her helmet to glare at him, then coughed at the stench. Even with the air scrubbers having worked for days with no one aboard, the atmosphere still stunk of old socks. Hastily, she replaced her helmet.
Harry didn’t tease her any further. “It was as we explained earlier. By returning the Rapture’s supplies to the Pilgrims of Levanter, Max showed compassion. For Elder Jakob, compassion is weakness.”
“Really? But he’s a religious leader.”
“No. He’s a cult leader.” Harry pushed aside empty food and drink containers and perched his butt against the control panel, bringing himself nearer to her height and reinforcing his human mannerisms. “The Pilgrimage is undertaken by people who believe that the galaxy is about to end. Yet, contradictorily, they accept Elder Jakob’s assurance that the godly will survive if they’re together, but separate from the vast majority of Federation citizens, who are evil.”
Space Deputy Page 7
