Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex

by Stephen Renneberg

  For a muscle-job, his timing was almost perfect.

  The dart caught me below the collar bone. I ripped it out fast, but my left shoulder and arm were already useless. Whatever the dart was loaded with, it was strong stuff – and fast acting! I glanced at the open gate leading to the Silver Lining, already certain I wouldn’t make it.

  Suddenly, my head swam and my legs turned to jelly. Genetically resequenced balance or not, I stumbled and was out before I hit the floor.

  * * * *

  I awoke in an office, lavishly decorated in an ancient nautical theme. Pictures of old sailing ships adorned the walls above intricately detailed models of Spanish galleons in transparent vacuum cases. A marlin was mounted on one wall behind a polished mahogany desk and, even though they’d been extinct for eighteen hundred years, it looked real. Most impressive of all was the wall sized mural to my right, depicting an ancient sea battle that was more a chaotic melee than a fleet action. From the way light reflected off the brush strokes, it appeared to be an actual painting rather than a projection.

  “It’s an original,” a smooth, Hispanic voice said behind me.

  Pressure fields secured my wrists and ankles to a brown leather chair, telling me this wasn’t the first time guests had been entertained in this way. “Looks stolen.”

  A well dressed man in his early fifties strolled into my line of sight. He had slick black hair, a neatly groomed triangular beard and wore a single sparkling diamond in his left ear. Even more ostentatious diamonds adorned his fingers.

  “It’s called the Battle of the Albrolhos,” he said. “The Spanish and Portuguese defeated the Dutch off the coast of Brazil in 1631. An ancestor of mine commanded a ship there.” He approached the mural, studying it closely before pointing. “I believe it was that one. Later, he become a Captain-General in the Spanish Empire.”

  “Impressive,” I said, blinking away the drumbeat in my head.

  “Not really. Phillip IV later executed him for treason.” The man shrugged. “Every great family has a black sheep.”

  He was obviously the wealthy individual Sarat had been waiting for. He looked like a cross between a synth-dealer and an aristocratic art collector. I scanned and locked him immediately, but his DNA didn’t show up on the Orion Arm’s most wanted list. My sniffer told me there were two more signatures behind me, the same two who’d tagged me outside the Silver Lining’s berth, while my threading’s listener picked up the hollow click of footsteps on deck plating outside the room.

  My host poured a dark red liquid into a wine glass. “Forgive the impolite manner in which my associates brought you to this meeting, Captain Kade, however, I wasn’t sure you’d come willingly.”

  “Next time, try asking.”

  “I would, but I so dislike being disappointed.” He sipped his drink. “And from what I’ve heard, you’re not a particularly agreeable individual.”

  “You don’t know me. I’m very agreeable, except when I’m jabbed in the neck with a sleep dart.”

  “Well, as you and I have no past disagreements, let us start as friends.”

  “This is how you treat your friends?” I glanced meaningfully at the glowing fields clamping me to the chair.

  “Acquaintances then, or are we adversaries?” When I didn’t respond, he said, “My name is Arturo Salbatore Vargis and I have the honor of being the captain of this ship, the Soberano.”

  “Never heard of you.”

  Vargis nodded understandingly. “I don’t normally come out this far. This little rock may be fertile ground for men such as yourself, but I find there are few opportunities worthy of my interest.”

  Impressive, a boast and an insult in one. “And yet, here you are, among us low life bottom feeders.”

  “Yes, and we both know why.”

  “Do we?”

  “Come Captain, I know you asked Ameen Zadim to find Sarat for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Zadim’s people have been scouring the city, asking questions, prying where they shouldn’t. Did you really think no one would notice?”

  Zadim was sneaky enough to ensure his people wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. The only way Vargis had picked up my trail was if someone working for Zadim had sold us both out.

  “What people notice isn’t my concern.”

  Vargis put his drink on the table. “Let me make this easy for you, Captain Kade. I have a proposition for you, one that does not involve Mukul Sarat.”

  “If you’re talking money, you’re talking my language.”

  “I knew we could come to an understanding,” Vargis smiled as if the deal was already done. “There is a contract waiting for you at the Exchange. Two hundred and fifty thousand credits to deliver a confidential dispatch to Zen Tau Base. No detours, no delays and you leave immediately. Oh yes, and Zadim forgets all about Sarat.”

  Ten times the going rate to carry mail to a rundown Chinese outpost over three hundred light years away at the edge of nowhere? It would take three months to get there, fully bubbled with no stops.

  Vargis leaned forward. “Once you make the delivery, keep going. You will not return to this region of space for . . . let’s say a year after you reach Zen Tau.”

  “That’s a generous offer,” I said thoughtfully, as if considering the deal, “except Zen Tau is Yiwu space and I don’t speak Chinese.” The Yiwu, the Obligation, had been the dominant Chinese organized crime syndicate since the early 45th century, and I was on less than friendly terms with them.

  “The Yiwu will leave you alone once you make the delivery – and you can learn Mandarin on the way.”

  The Yiwu would leave me alone? Seriously? If true, Vargis was more than an overdressed snake oil salesman with irritatingly well-groomed facial hair. More likely the delivery would have the opposite effect. He was sending me three hundred light years to make it easy for the Chinese mafia to ensure I never came back.

  “And if I don’t take the contract?”

  Vargis face hardened. “That would be most unfortunate. For you, for your crew, for your ship. Trust me, Captain Kade, I have only your best interests at heart.” Vargis emptied his glass, “Take the contract and leave Mukul Sarat to me.”

  I felt a now familiar sting in the back of the neck and was out before I could reply. At least this time, I was sitting down when I lost consciousness.

  * * * *

  I came to on a bench seat in the spaceport terminal. It was some time before I had the strength to stagger onto the walkway back to the Silver Lining and fumble my way through the airlock. When I stepped into the darkened pressure-suit compartment, a short barreled shrapnel gun almost took out my eye.

  “Easy!” I yelled, lurching clumsily away from the business end of Izin’s street sweeper. “It’s me!”

  It had been several thousand years since the shotgun had been invented, but looking into the business end of its descendant was as intimidating as ever. Magnetic acceleration and exploding micro munitions might have replaced gunpowder and shot, but the effect on human flesh in a cramped passageway was just as gruesome.

  “My apologies, Captain,” Izin said, lowering the shrapgun and stepping back from the inner hatch, motioning towards a twenty centimeter long polished metal object lying on the deck. It was as thick as my fist in the middle, tapered at both ends, with a single neat hole blasted through its center.

  “What is it?”

  “A minidrone. It attempted to board the ship several hours ago.” He tapped the small six millimeter shredder pistol at his hip, confirming where the tiny hole in its side had come from. With his tamph eyes and inhuman steadiness, Izin was a frighteningly deadly shot with any precision weapon.

  My DNA sniffer gave the minidrone the once over, but it was clean. “Why the artillery?” I asked, nodding at the shrapgun.

  “Hull sensors covering the pressure bridge have been deactivated. I don’t know how or by who.” Izin was a walking Earth-tech encyclopedia. If he didn’t know how it was done, it meant alie
n-tech had been used against us. “I considered it to be an attack on the ship, so I selected the optimal weapon for fighting in confined spaces.” He lifted the shrapgun meaningfully. “Only the hull sensors aspecting the pressure bridge have been disabled, so this was clearly the point of attack.”

  “Only one came through?”

  “Yes, Captain. I have a hull crawler outside inspecting the damage now.”

  My bionetic memory didn’t recognize the minidrone, so if it was Earth-tech, it was custom made. “Take it apart. Tell me anything you can about it – highest priority.”

  Izin picked up the minidrone. “Is there something I should know, Captain?”

  “I’m working on a deal and we have some unfriendly competition.”

  “Is the order prohibiting lethal force revoked?”

  Tough question. If I let Izin off the leash, I could end up with problems with the port authorities and if I didn’t, the next attempt to get inside the ship might succeed. I decided to play it safe, for now. “Not while we’re in port, unless they start shooting first.”

  “As you wish,” Izin said.

  He led the way back to engineering, setting the shrapgun and minidrone down, then took in his six screens with a glance. “The hull crawler reports five hull sensors were destroyed by a highly concentrated thermal effect with an active area of nine microns.”

  “That’s kind of small, isn’t it?”

  “Nine millionths of a meter,” Izin said. “Earth technology is incapable of producing a thermal weapon with that level of precision.”

  “Can you calculate where the weapon was fired from?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “There’s a ship called the Soberano. Find out if they could hit us.”

  Izin tapped into the spaceport’s datanet and quickly scanned the ship registry. “The Soberano is a Mammoth class super transport less than three years old, owned by Pan Core Shipping.”

  “A mammoth?” I whistled softly. “She’d make us look like an Kunarian buzzfly.”

  Mammoths were over two hundred thousand metric tons – fifty times the size of the Silver Lining – and they rarely left Core System space. No wonder Vargis’ office was so spacious.

  “The Soberano arrived a few days ago.”

  “What’s she carrying?” Ten years of supplies for Hades City?

  “Her manifest says she’s empty.”

  “No cargo?”

  “Confirmed by customs inspectors.”

  Pan Core Shipping was one of the largest shipping companies in Mapped Space. Why would they send such an expensive ship out here empty when they had thousands of smaller, faster vessels in their fleet? “What was her embarkation point?”

  “Shinagawa Station.”

  “That’s a long way to come for no trade profit.”

  The big Japanese orbital shipyard complex was over nine hundred light years away in Inner Cygnus, well inside Core System space. No wonder Vargis wanted no competition. I’d be nervous too, if I’d spent months staring at well decorated bulkheads for nothing. Whatever Sarat was up to, it had been in the planning for a long time, long enough to hook Pan Core and get them to bankroll sending one of their biggest ships to the edge of Mapped Space.

  “The Soberano’s maintenance history indicates she spent seven weeks refitting at Shinagawa before departure,” Izin said.

  “Makes sense. Give her a refit before a long haul.”

  “She’d undergone a major maintenance cycle two months before that. A second refit in such a short period of time should have been unnecessary.”

  Shinagawa Station was one of the few major shipyards outside the Solar System, used by shipping companies and Earth Navy alike. The station was famous not just for its robot dockyards, but its vast stores of equipment, including naval ordnance. Suddenly, I realized why the Soberano had docked a second time. “They put naval weapons in her cargo holds!” It would explain why she was empty – she had no room for cargo!

  Whatever Vargis was after, he intended to protect it.

  “If Earth Navy found out,” Izin said, “Pan Core would be in serious trouble.”

  “Can we see the Soberano from here?”

  “No, she’s in the southern cavern, docked across berths S-36 to S-45.”

  She was so big, she took up ten births!

  Izin called up her registry holo, displaying it on one of his six screens. She looked like two stretched spheres joined by a long oblong. The stern sphere held her twin energy plants and sixteen maneuvering engines in four rows of four, while the bow sphere held command, control and crew sections. Ten large rectangular doors were spaced along each side of the hull, marking the location of her twenty cavernous cargo holds. She was certainly large enough to have been transformed into a veritable battleship, although with her cargo doors sealed, there’d be no visible evidence of it. Whatever Sarat was selling, no pirate would ever get their hands on it, once Vargis got it aboard the Soberano.

  Neither would I.

  “How many crew?” I asked.

  “Minimum complement of twelve, life support for thirty.”

  I’d assume he had thirty aboard; crew plus more like Jawbones and Scarface. The Soberano would be slower than the Lining bubbled and would wallow like a whale in flat space, but if I was right about the refit, she’d hit like the devil.

  I started to leave, but Izin touched a control and the image of another ship appeared. “This is the only Caravel D class ship docked. Berthed at W-4.”

  I took one look at the old girl and recognized her immediately. If the Silver Lining was a tow boat, the Heureux was a barge. Her hull configuration was simple: three box-like cargo holds ahead of a lopsided superstructure mounting a single large maneuvering engine astern. Spaced along the top of the cargo holds were clamps for a dozen VRS containers, although I’d rarely seen Marie use them. Like most work boats, it was a simple, utilitarian design. The paint job was subtly different and her registry number had changed, but the modified vector housings on her well worn engine were unmistakable. No wonder Marie was nervous to see me. She knew I’d recognize the Heureux anywhere, no matter what disguise she was wearing.

  “That’s her.” The Heureux had been in Marie’s family for three generations. She was almost eighty years old, but thanks to tender care and regular maintenance, she was still a reliable, if elderly, workhorse.

  “According to the port register, that ship is the Vandray’s Promise. The Captain is Esmin Vandray.”

  “Esmin? . . . Good work, Izin.”

  I’d known Marie to pull a few reckless stunts, but I’d never seen her risk her license before. Using a fake ship registry and borrowed skipper’s tags seemed crazy, even for her. I sure hoped whatever she was up to, was worth it.

  I would have liked to figure out what that was, but knew I had to find Sarat soon, before Vargis sidelined me, permanently.

  * * * *

  I tried sleeping off the effects of being drugged twice, but after what seemed to be only minutes, I became aware of a pungent aroma. At first I thought I was dreaming, but the scent of incense grew stronger, eventually jarring me awake. My stateroom’s wall screen was set to simulate a window with the shades drawn, creating an illusion that it was more than a metal box. The feeble light penetrating the ‘shades’ illuminated a thin pall of gray smoke floating in the air. I heard a man inhale, then saw the end of a fume-stick glow revealing a swarthy face amidst the darkness.

  Ignoring the throbbing in my head, I sat up and stared into the shadows to the right of the window sim where a dark form sat. Blue smoke wafted from his slender fume-stick, slowly filling my stateroom with an intoxicating haze that would take the atmo scrubbers days to clear.

  Somehow he’d gotten inside the ship, bypassed Izin’s elaborate security system and then made himself comfortable in my stateroom without triggering my threading’s proximity sensors. Such a feat should have been impossible. I tried DNA locking him, but as far as my threading was concerned, he didn’t exist. Not eve
n a thermal trace. My olfactory analyzer told me the smoke came from an expensive Pashtun narco-leaf that heightened well being without distorting perceptual thinking. Inexplicably, it was unable to identify the physical source of the smoke, even though I was staring straight at the fume-stick.

  “Being a light sleeper is a good thing for people in your line of work, Captain Kade.”

  My visitor spoke in a cultured Republic accent, which my listener identified as coming from Kerala or Tamil Nadu in southern India – a good fit to Lena’s briefing profile.

  “Mukul Sarat, I presume?” My listener had been able to analyze his accent, which told me the entire room wasn’t suppressed, just a highly localized area around him. The EIS had been trying to produce a personal dampening field for years with no success, yet my guest was clearly protected by just such a device, leaving me in no doubt he was geared up with alien-tech.

  Sarat nodded, showing no surprise that I’d guessed his identity. He was tall and bald, with a gaunt face and dark sunken eyes. “I understand you wish to bid at my auction?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Perhaps you were unaware that this is an invitation only gathering, and frankly, a man such as yourself lacks the financial resources to participate.”

  “And yet you broke into my ship, beat my security, and are stinking up my room with that weed you’re smoking.”

  “I’m a curious man.”

  “Curious enough to destroy my hull sensors so you could sneak aboard.”

  “Consider it a demonstration,” Sarat said, “of my . . . connections.”

  “You better hope my engineer doesn’t find you aboard,” I said, “or the only thing you’ll be connected to is the wrong end of a shredder.”

  “Ah yes, I heard you had a pet tamph. I never cared for them myself – too hard to control.”

  “Only if you can’t earn their respect.”

  “I prefer fee for service. Which brings me to the reason for my visit. I’ve done some checking on you, Kade. You’re notorious for making rash decisions and acquiring enemies.”