Night Raiders

by James David Victor

  “Everything, perhaps, Lieutenant,” Councilor Martravia sighed. “We Voiders have the luxury of looking at the galaxy from its edge. Perhaps that gives us a perspective that you central citizens of the Golden Throne do not have.”

  Oh really? Anders squinted at the woman.

  “Records of the Eternal Empress Helena Tri’Vi’Pathian the First, Queen of Earth, go back at least three hundred years, Lieutenant, and some historians rumor that she is nearer five hundred years old, maintained by constant attention by the Gene Seers. Who knows what sorts of plans she has? What sort of view she has on the development of humanity?”

  A fair point, Anders thought. He had never truly believed that the Eternal Empress was really that old, a couple hundred at most, maybe. But in the modern day, with Gene Seer therapies available to the highest buyer, it was a common thing for some to reach one hundred twenty, even one hundred thirty years old.

  And if the Eternal Empress really could be five hundred, Anders wondered, then she’s got to be bat-crap crazy by now.

  “So…” Anders took a deep breath as the holos of barren and demolished worlds faded in the air before them. It was hard for a man like him, used to the crimes on the streets of Hectamon 7, to think in terms of galactic tragedies, cosmic atrocities, and plots that spanned centuries.

  Anders knew that he thought better like a policeman—about the case at hand, right in front of him.

  “How do we stop this thing?” he said.

  “Ah…” Councilor Martravia shared a glance with Councilor Hernandez, before both turned to look steadily at Patch, silent beside them.

  “Oh, right…” Patch McGuire said, sliding his goggles up onto his forehead. “You know you asked about those craft that attacked you? The Night Raiders?”

  Anders nodded.

  To say that Patch looked sheepish would have been an understatement. He looked guilty. And scared.

  “Well, it seems like they managed to get their hands on something that might be able to jam the PK signal between the empress’s psychic batteries and the Archon,” he said. “And, uh, that something was a device that I designed. And lost.”

  “You lost it!” Anders said. “How could you lose it?”

  Patch managed to look even more piteous than he already did. “Well, to be fair, I know pretty much exactly where it is,” he said sheepishly. “It’s in Bonetown.”

  “Bonetown.” Anders used what he thought of his ‘MPB Officer’ voice. He had been told that it was uncompromising, edging toward the incredulous.

  “It’s the home of the Night Raiders.” Patch winced.

  “Of course it is,” Anders groaned. “Fine. Who do I have to shoot to get it back?”

  5

  Outer Debris Field I

  Sector 8 (Outer Territory)

  “Technically, it’s not really a jammer at all,” Patch was saying, and his somewhat youthful voice was even higher pitched than normal, given the circumstances.

  “Uh-huh.” Anders kept one ear on what the Voider was saying because he, like Patch, was also more worried about the current circumstances that they found themselves in.

  Anders was looking at a field of debris, slowly spinning and cavorting around each other. He could see broken bits of hull plates sedately bumping together with engine shells, bulkhead doors, and beyond that—the stark blackness of the Void.

  It looks like there was a war here, Anders thought queasily. And not one that anyone had won.

  “It was a field ansible, essentially,” Patch said as he hovered behind them in what Anders thought was an entirely impractical, unsafe flying protocol.

  “Uh-huh,” Anders said again, keeping an eye on the Nova’s proximity scanners in case any of those bits of junk took a sudden turn toward them. The clipper and her crew had left Ozymandias almost as soon as the Nova had been resupplied and repaired by the Voiders, giving Anders and Jake a chance to rest. Dalia didn’t seem to need sleep, or perhaps didn’t sleep in the same way that humans did.

  The Nova now sported strange patchwork repairs of a wavy, almost iridescent blue material over her rear and side hull plates where the Zarack imposter ships—and then the shadow-craft—had damaged her. It gave the clipper a mottled effect.

  “I designed it to be able to use background field energy, scanning far distances for radiation fluctuations much farther than any known scanner,” Patch continued.

  “Uh-huh.” Anders could tell the young man was nervous. It was Dalia, however, who understood the importance of what he was talking about.

  “So, did that mean you could scan an area before you jumped?” The Ilythian raised one perfectly-sculpted eyebrow.

  “Precisely!” Patch appeared gratified by the interest. “Imagine if you could scan a sector before you fired up the FTL engines! It’d be a life-saver.”

  Well, given Anders’s recent experiences, he had to admit that it would have certainly proved useful.

  “Anyway, the throne got wind of my research and stole it,” Patch said morosely.

  This, at least, caught Anders’s attention. “I thought you said the Night Raiders stole it. Just who are we expecting to meet out here?”

  “They stole the second,” Patch qualified, then paused. “There was something the Oracle told us, which is why, I think, I’m here at all,” he murmured.

  Oh great, here we go, Anders thought. Whatever this was, it was what had been eating him up all along.

  “She said that the throne had modified the field ansible to be able to scan and observe the Archon device, and that was when she told us about the Archon and what it meant,” Patch said.

  “Okay,” Anders growled. He wasn’t angry with the young man; he was furious with the elites of the Golden Throne. The more outside of their control that he stepped, the more he saw the powers-that-be—the empress, her heralds, and her senior staff—not as serving humanity but preying on it.

  And to an ex-policeman like Anders, that offended him deeply.

  We’re meant to look after those more vulnerable than us. We’re meant to stick up for those who have no power. That had always been his creed on the streets of Hectamon 7.

  “And so, I designed and tested a variant of the field ansible, but with the intention of disrupting the signal,” Patch said.

  “A scrambler?” Anders observed.

  “Precisely,” Patch said. “I had to scavenge for the materials. There are loads of old hulks out here on the edge of the Void,” he explained. “Ex-service stations or outdated craft that had been towed out here by the throne for centuries. It’s partly what we Voiders live on, scavenging and jury-rigging old technology, reinventing it for the future.”

  “And I take it that it was in one of these hulks that the Night Raiders found you?” Anders said grimly.

  “Yeah, exactly. I barely got out with my life. The Night Raiders are like Voiders gone…wrong.” Once again, his voice descended to a low murmur, as if scared to even talk about them.

  Too late for caution now, Anders thought as he once again checked the Nova’s large privacy shield. That was a new upgrade, fitted and activated by the Voiders. It was basically a stealth shield, one that didn’t even glitter or glow blue. Hopefully, it would stop these Night Raiders from detecting them.

  “They scavenge like we do. They are drawn to the infinite mysteries as we are,” Patch said gloomily. “But they don’t want to discover. Or if they do, they only want to discover pain.”

  “Sounds like a charming bunch of people.” Anders grimaced.

  “Out here, the night, the dark, it can send you mad if you let it. You turn into one of them.”

  And then, as if Patch had been right all along and just talking about them could summon them, Anders saw movement on the Nova’s scanners.

  Something was moving over the wreckage—no, many somethings. Anders squinted. It wasn’t anything to do with the slow, balletic dance of the field of ship parts, either. He saw the small bursts of rockets, and the rise and fall of small figures.
>
  “Moriarty? Magnify image.” Anders tapped the forward cockpit screen where the nearest image was, and the simulated intelligence tied into Anders’s node and the Nova itself complied.

  The picture immediately grew larger, and Anders saw that it was indeed a person.

  “Human female, approximately three decades old, no recognizable insignia,” Moriarty said, falling back on his old habits as an MPB evidence and tactical intelligence.

  He was correct as always, Anders saw. The figure ahead of them did appear to be a female, her face was visible through a truly ancient bubble-style helmet. She had one side of her head shaved and appeared to have a lurid red, puckered scar that ran from her temple to her jaw on one side.

  The rest of her outfit was just as bizarre as her archaic helmet, Anders thought. She wore a bulky set of shoulder greaves, and chest and back plate that was the sort worn by the Throne Marines some fifty years ago. But on her lower half were voluminous white-foil pants, like the sort that engineers might wear when working in the heavy radiation environments of a plasma field. Everything was scarred and patched and repaired, and as she jumped and turned to land on a slow-moving piece of wreckage, Anders saw that she had a large white skull painted on her back.

  She’s attached to a wire, he noticed. Just under the skull, where her backplate met her utility belt, again from an entirely different era and organization, there extended a steel-silver chain, reaching up behind her to—

  “A drone,” Anders saw. The drone that the woman was tethered to was vaguely disk-shaped, but with four ‘grab’ arms splayed out in the open vacuum like some sort of insect. A number of bright floodlights glared out from its underside.

  As Anders watched the woman, he saw her clank up the side of the wreckage on heavy magnetized boots, reaching the end and slinging a bulky rifle-looking thing from her shoulder. This, she braced and pointed at the edge of the piece of metal before a beam of burning red laser light appeared and sparks erupted at her feet.

  “A scavenger team,” Patch whispered, pointing over Anders’s shoulder to where there were other such Night Raiders tethered to their own drones and cutting up the wreckage. “Probably searching for any good metals to use.”

  “Well, let’s not disturb them, shall we?” Anders whispered. He was painfully aware that just because the Nova had a large privacy shield that should stop enemy proximity scans, he would also look like a fuzzy, blurred patch of space against the distant glowing line of the Milky Way behind them. Anyone in a ship probably wouldn’t notice it, but a person floating and jumping around space might.

  “Moriarty, fifteen-percent impulse,” Anders breathed, even though he knew that the distant figures would never be able to hear them.

  The lieutenant angled the Nova’s nose, and they gradually started to dive underneath the wreckage field.

  “Keep her slow,” Anders said as he gripped the flight handles, although he wasn’t entirely sure if he was talking to Moriarty or himself as he eased the Nova forward.

  “Fifty meters to target,” Moriarty announced. “Forty… Thirty…”

  Luckily for them, the field of debris had long since aggregated in that way that all matter does in a vacuum. It had created a wide, undulating sort of composite, with only a few outlying pieces of larger rotating metals.

  “Twenty… Ten…”

  The bright, glaring lights of the scavenger drones winked out one by one as the Nova moved to place the wreckage field in between them. Anders found his eyes rising to look at the ceiling of floating parts, scanning for any small figures jumping on their micro-rocketry.

  There were none. But as Anders looked ahead again at their trajectory, he saw what the wreckage field had been hiding: Bonetown itself.

  “Stars almighty…”

  6

  Outer Debris Field II

  Bonetown was well-named, Anders thought. The structure looked like a carcass, but of what, precisely, it was hard for him to say.

  It was vaguely triangular, like a vast pyramid with the sections of hull plating that were still intact, a dull, bronze-colored sort of gold. The image struck Anders’s eyes oddly, as if there was something about it that could have been familiar. Was there an old holo that I had seen once that showed a ship like that?

  But whatever sort of craft that the gigantic cone-pyramid had once been, now it looked gutted. Gigantic girders like ribs were clearly visible where its external hull had been removed. In at least two levels, these ribs were cracked, bent, and entire sections had been scrunched into each other as if the behemoth had suffered some insane-level decompression event.

  Decompression? Anders frowned. Although he was fully aware that was a danger for every space vehicle, the possibilities of that happening had become far less likely now that field technology was widespread.

  This hulk dates to a time before field technology, he considered. That would make it, what, late twenty-first century? Twenty-second? Almost four or five hundred years ago, which meant it was older than the entire Reach of the Golden Throne itself.

  Just like the mismatched encounter suits of the scavengers, Anders saw that the edifice of Bonetown was patchworked with different strata of metal repairs and entirely new units. Gigantic ceramic tubing burst out of one part of the ship to twist around to another part. Steel and aluminum domes and bunker-style constructions were clustered here and there like diseased warts on its side.

  And there was more movement, too. Anders suddenly realized that a patch of the Void itself was moving, and the daisy-chained external lights that dotted Bonetown scattered across the matte surface of one of their bulky shadow-craft as it came to dock. It looked only an eighth or less of the size of the pyramid structure.

  “Proximity!” Moriarty said sharply as something moved down from above them.

  Anders, Dalia, Patch, and Jake had been so caught up in the sight of Bonetown itself that they had failed to see the glow of the small scavenger drone as it emerged from the debris field that was their ceiling. It was upside-down, its lights pointing back up, and its line was tight as it assisted what must surely be on the other end of it.

  “All engines halt!” Anders hissed. “All lights off!”

  The Nova suddenly stilled and only the gentle undulating motion of the debris field itself, and the lowering scavenger drone, gave any sign of life.

  But none of that mattered. The silver chain pulled after it the clambering, leap-frogging form of the woman that Anders had first seen, still with her bulky laser cutter in hand as she dropped from underneath the debris. The drone paused, and she turned first one way, then another as the Night Raider looked for whatever valuable bits of flotsam she could find—

  The woman turned in their direction and suddenly flinched.

  “Drekk!” Anders swore.

  The Night Raider had seen them.

  Anders saw the woman crouch, and then jump back toward the hole in the wreckage. Just as the tether was about to stretch taut, she seemed to do something to decouple it with tiny bursts of steam from her back, and the scavenger drone and tether were now moving.

  “Intercept course,” Moriarty confirmed as the four-armed drone started to spin toward them faster and faster—a make-shift missile.

  “What do we do!?” Patch said, wide-eyed—as his goggles were still firmly in place atop his head. “We have to abort the mission! She’ll bring down all of Bonetown on top of us!”

  “Frack!” Anders gritted his teeth in consternation. Patch was right. If she had any kind of node or transmitter, they were doomed. Bonetown itself was vast, and if it was stuffed full of people as savage as Patch seemed to think it was, then there was no way that even the Nova could punch its way through and expect to get out alive. There was no powerful Whistle craft around to save them now.

  But we cannot allow the Eternal Empress to win. We cannot let her get her hands on the Archon! His hands flexed against the flight handles.

  “Ship impact,” Moriarty announced as the four-armed drone bur
st apart on their forward shields in a brilliant glow of orange plasma. The drone-missile was far too small to do any serious damage to the ship or even to compromise their shields, but that wasn’t the only danger it posed.

  “Well, if they haven’t seen us before, they fracking will now.” Anders gritted his teeth. There was only one option left. “Patch?” he said tersely. “Can you find this jammer thing once we’re inside?”

  Patch blinked several times, “Sure, my nodes have personal scanning software, but—”

  “Good. Okay. Moriarty?” Anders hit the release buckle for his seat’s X-harness.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You have the Nova. Keep her and Jake out of harm’s way…” Anders looked to Dalia. Neither said anything, but the Ilythian nodded quickly and rose from her seat. She understood what the lieutenant meant to do. After all, Dalia of the Sixth Family was a spy. She knew all about infiltration and extraction.

  “Suit up, Patch. You’re with us.” Anders was already pushing past him down the small ladder that led to the main hull compartment of the clipper.

  “Lieutenant Anders.” It was Jake, holding onto the wall-mounted grab-rails and looking gaunt and wide-eyed at them.

  “You’re a kid, Jake.” Anders was already shaking his head as he seized the visor-helmet from the rack. “There’s no way that I’m taking you in there—”

  “The Oracle said to bring me with you!” the ragged teenager said with such ferocity that Anders felt the wave of his emotions hit him. Determination. Anger.

  “Jake, please—” Anders tried to argue.