Stolen Earth, page 2
What choice—what real choice—did he have? He wasn’t going to choose to live on an airless rock with minimal gravity and nothing but hard labor and privation to look forward to. “The navy,” he said. He forced some enthusiasm into his voice.
“Excellent choice, Mr. Lynch. The orders have been issued. Report to Docking Bay 6 at 06:00 tomorrow morning. The freighter Hope Springs will be departing at 06:30. It will take you to the SolCommNav training center on Luna and from there you will be in the hands of SolCommNav rather than Education and Assessment. Welcome to adulthood, Mr. Lynch.”
* * *
“The navy? That’s fantastic! Congratulations, son!”
His father’s rough embrace surprised Gray. He’d never been one for physical affection and Gray found it simultaneously comforting and awkward. He returned the embrace for a moment and then they both stepped back.
“But do you really have to leave so soon?” his mother asked, a catch of worry in her voice.
“I’m afraid so,” Gray replied. “I don’t think I want to find out what happens if I’m late reporting to Luna.”
“The navy,” his father said again, wistfulness in his voice. “I hear officers are allowed to have more than one kid.”
Gray blinked at that. He knew that the sole reason he had no brothers or sisters was because of the regulations that SolComm instituted on every station and most of the colonies. Contracted couples were allowed one child. Anything more required approval from station control and proof of means to provide for the additional calories and oxygen. But he’d never really considered it one way or another for himself. Fatherhood, contracting—it seemed so far away.
“Well, if we only have tonight, then we should make the most of it,” his mother said. “I think we can afford to go hungry for a couple of days to have a bit of a feast and make sure we send you off right.”
“That sounds like a fantastic idea,” Gray’s father said. “And I’ve been saving up alcohol rations for months. I’ll pop out to the commissary and pick us up a few things.”
“Gray, why don’t you comm some of your friends?” His mother surveyed the living compartment. “If we move the furniture around a bit, we can fit two or three more in here. And if your father is willing to convert some of those saved alcohol rations to calories, we’ll have plenty of food.”
“Yes, Mother.” Gray felt a strange blend of joy and sadness. It had cost his parents dear to save those rations and their willingness to use them to give him a memorable last evening on Odyssey filled him with a mix of pride and gratitude and love. But in all his years, he had never seen a SolCommNav vessel put in at Odyssey. He had only the vaguest idea of how naval leave might work, but he suspected that it would be a long time, a very long time, before he saw his parents in the flesh again.
GRAY
“Three minutes to sensor range.”
“Acknowledged,” Gray replied.
“Weapons are hot,” Leo added from his station.
Between the big mercenary on the guns, Rajani Hayer at the comm, and Gray himself in the pilot’s chair, the little bridge of the Arcus felt crowded. Not that that was a new feeling for any of them. The people who had fled the war that consumed Old Earth had had no choice but to adjust to the idea of living cheek by jowl with their fellows. For all the vast emptiness of space, the realities of living in it belied the name.
“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” Gray added. He keyed the comm, opening a channel to the rest of the ship. “Three minutes until sensor range,” he repeated.
“Roger that, Cap,” Bishop’s voice came back at once. He could hear the smile in the mechanic’s voice. They were low on calories, low on fuel, and, despite Federov’s assurance that the weapons were ready, they didn’t have nearly enough ammunition left to fight even a modest engagement. Still, nothing seemed to break Bishop’s irrepressible happiness. It was a rare thing, out among the stars. From what Gray could tell, optimists had been in short supply even before the End. Since SolComm abandoned Old Earth to its self-inflicted fate, they’d been a breed on the brink of extinction. “Power’s holding steady, and this old rust bucket’s still got enough fuel in the tanks to get us there and back again. Just like that time off Callisto.”
Callisto had been the first real job the Arcus had undertaken, nearly five years ago. It had been Gray and Bishop alone on that run, and while they had—just—made it back to port for refueling, the ship had drifted into dock on vapors and they’d both waited impatiently in the airlock for the blast of station-fed oxygen that purged the fouled air of the ship. It wasn’t really an experience he cared to repeat. But they had made it back. “Understood, Bishop. You ready, Morales?”
“Ready,” came the terse reply from the station security specialist.
Gray heard the tension there, but now wasn’t the time to deal with it. If the interception went smoothly, they wouldn’t have to fire a shot, and Bishop and Federov would be able to join Morales before making contact with any of the freighter’s crew while he and Hayer stayed at their stations ready to get them all out of dodge if things went sideways. He gave a mental snort as his own internal phrasing. They weren’t intercepting anything. That was a legacy from his time in the navy. SolCommNav did interceptions. What the Arcus was about to do was piracy.
Laurel Morales would be the first aboard their target vessel and she would have to establish command and control with the minimum level of violence necessary to get the job done. Her background in station security helped with that; she was used to asserting dominance and gaining compliance. It was still a daunting task, and the most dangerous moment in the mission. Gray trusted Morales, but that didn’t stop him from worrying.
Despite the months she’d been with them, Gray was still figuring their security specialist out; she hadn’t integrated fully with the rest of the crew, and that bothered him. She spent most of her time in her quarters, rarely joining them for meals and while she was quick with a smile and affable greeting, she hadn’t opened up to any of the others. She’d been standoffish enough that the rest of the crew no longer made the effort to invite her to a card game or to watch the trids or any of the other things they did to pass the hours in the long days spent in deep space. One of his many duties as captain was to forge a disparate group of people into a single, effective entity—a family, after a fashion. Morales hadn’t gotten there, yet. She was effective, efficient, and did everything asked of her and then some. But she rebuffed the rest of the crew enough that they had stopped reaching out.
That was a problem.
But, Gray thought, it was a problem for another time. He needed to be concentrating on the issue before them. That issue, now entering sensor range, was a Comet-class light freighter operated by Kiteva-Shao Consolidated. KSC wasn’t one of the really big boys, but they had the credits to pay off the right people to get the valuable contracts and were “politically active” enough to provide them with a measure of protection based more on fear of reprisals than strength of arms. They were also small enough to be more responsive to market forces than the larger mega-corps. Taken together, that meant they ended up with some of the most lucrative cargoes around.
Cargo that Gray intended to liberate.
“They’ve seen us,” Hayer said from her station.
“Begin your attack,” Gray replied.
“It’s not an attack,” Hayer muttered under her breath, even as she started tapping at the console before her. Gray ignored that; whatever Hayer might think, the electronic assault she was launching was absolutely an attack. One that, when he was a captain of a naval warship instead of an “independent freighter” like the Arcus, he would have responded to with a barrage of missile and beam weaponry fire.
Unless, of course, it had been a SolComm-sanctioned vessel launching the attack. The Commonwealth operated on a “do as I say” model seasoned with a hearty sprinkle of alles verboten. It had taken years for Gray to fully grasp just how far the corruption went; by the time he had, he’d been in so deep that to get out, he’d had to walk away from every comfort and relationship he had built over a twenty-year career.
He had no regrets.
“Done,” Hayer said with satisfaction. “Their comms are disabled, their sensors scrambled, and I’ve got them locked out of their weapons. They weren’t even using military-grade encryption.” She shook her head. “It’s like they’re asking for trouble.”
“Who in their right mind would try to hijack a SolComm-sanctioned cargo this far from the Fringe?” Gray replied, throwing a grin over his shoulder. “They probably didn’t think heightened security was necessary.”
“Stupid,” Federov said succinctly. “If weapons are locked down, I go help Morales.”
“Go,” Gray agreed. “If we have to shoot them at this point, I can do it from here.” They had been running silent, keeping their emissions signature to a minimum, allowing the KSC vessel to get close enough that they wouldn’t have to chase it. The ambush had been carefully planned, leveraging the shipping routes that Hayer had “acquired” from the KSC databanks and cross-referenced against all the available traffic patterns in the area. Space was tough to live in, but it was still pretty damn big. If everything went according to plan, they’d have a nice long window without having to worry about inconveniences like witnesses or SolCommNav ships stumbling onto their act of piracy.
Gray brought everything to full power, a rising crescendo of electromagnetic emissions that would be impossible to miss. Even with its sensors scrambled, the target vessel would know they were there, but it shouldn’t be able to get a clean read on the ship. If Hayer had done her job right—and Gray had no doubt that the academic-turned-outlaw had—the Arcus could have been any class of ship in the solar system as far as the KSV freighter was concerned. He keyed the comm again, this time hailing their target.
“KSC vessel,” he said in his best officious SolCommNav voice, “this is the SolComm Customs cutter Challenge. We have received information that you are carrying contraband cargo. You will be boarded and searched. Depower your engines and maintain a constant relative velocity. Resistance will be seen as an admission of guilt and your vessel—and your lives—will be forfeit.”
The script wasn’t perfect. Gray had worked some interdiction duty in SolCommNav, but the naval version varied from the commercial trade version. It didn’t matter, though; he was confident it was close enough to get the point across. The fact that customs and the navy both could and would destroy a vessel for failure to comply was all the motivation most corporate captains needed. Cooperate or perish. It was practically the unofficial Commonwealth motto.
“Understood, Challenge.” The reply came back after only a few heartbeats, long enough for Gray to line up the Arcus with an intersect vector and throttle up the engines. There was little sense of motion as the ship accelerated; the Arcus inertial dampeners compensated for the thrust.
“We assure you that our cargo is all properly documented and accounted for. This must be some sort of misunderstanding,” the KSC comm officer continued.
“That is for us to determine.” Gray abruptly cut the channel.
“That wasn’t very nice,” Hayer said. “You’re going to cause a panic over there.”
Gray shrugged. “Maybe. But I’d rather have them panicking to prepare for an inspection than to repel boarders. When SolComm comes knocking, people tend to go to great efforts to hide things like weapons. Makes it a lot harder to defend the ship if you just stuffed all your guns in your sock locker.”
Hayer just shook her head.
It took only a few minutes for the rapidly accelerating Arcus to catch up to the KSC vessel. Gray laid his ship alongside the target without difficulty, matching velocities so that the two vessels were stationary relative to one another despite continuing to rocket through objective space.
Gray finagled the controls, moving the ship closer to the extended docking tube until he felt the barely perceptible bump of contact. He waited a moment for the indicator lights on his pressure and atmosphere monitors to show green, then keyed the internal comm.
“All green up here, Morales. Execute when ready.”
LAUREL
Laurel Morales was not a fan of the plan.
Piracy went against everything she’d been brought up to believe in; she came from a strict law-and-order background and the simple act of taking something that didn’t belong to her was anathema to her being. The idea that people—innocent people—could get hurt in the process just made it all the worse. To say nothing of the fact that she was about to partake in the kind of activity that she had been trained by the best in the business to put a stop to. For her entire professional career, her job had been putting criminals away; now she found herself working side by side with them.
And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. At this point, the best she could manage was to try to make sure that nobody got hurt.
But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
“Relax, Morales,” Federov said. “Will be cake. These corporate types do not understand real violence. They have too many ties with bureaucracy; they think they’re untouchable. We show them otherwise, hey?” He offered a grin, lending a jovial caste to his normally dour visage.
Laurel sighed. Federov was exactly the kind of criminal that annoyed her the most. He was violence for hire, a man who earned his living by virtue of his fists or his guns. And yet, he claimed that it was the evils of “the system” that drove him to the life. Which, conveniently enough, gave him all the permission he needed for the moral gymnastics that let him take whatever he wanted, so long as it was from “the man.” The evil, faceless SolComm system—as if the entity that had formed when millions of refuges were rescued from Old Earth during the End and absorbed into the existing networks of colonies, deep space stations, and nomadic space caravans were actually some malicious conspiracy out to subjugate humankind. It was well documented that the life of every spacer had gotten worse when the refugees from Old Earth had been absorbed; already limited resources had been stretched to the breaking point. But that didn’t stop the fledgling proto-SolComm from taking in every last person they possibly could and saving countless lives. How could a system that produced that be bad?
Not, she admitted, that SolComm was perfect. She wouldn’t be out on the Fringe if it were. The system—like every system—had its flaws. But if there was something amiss in the ship you were aboard, you didn’t blow it out from under you. You worked to fix the problem, while trying to keep everything else functioning and stable. Anything else was suicide.
Or, in the cases of people like Federov, maybe it was more akin to murder. But she had a job to do, and that meant keeping Lynch, Federov, and the rest of the crew of the Arcus happy. She just needed a way to do it without anyone getting hurt.
“No violence unless absolutely necessary,” she said. “We need this to be quick and clean.” Federov gave her a vague wave that could have indicated agreement or dismissal and she ground her teeth in frustration. She was about to speak again, but she heard the slap of feet on the ship’s deck and looked up in time to see the ship’s mechanic, Bishop, sprinting to join them.
She nodded to Bishop as he skidded to a halt, slightly out of breath from his run from the engineering section of the ship. Like her and Federov, he wore an unadorned ship suit, the one-piece garment that served as both uniform and extra-vehicular activity suit aboard most vessels. He also carried a boarding shotgun, holding it with a degree of confidence that at least suggested competence.
“Whew,” he panted. “Didn’t think I was going to make it in time. Engineering’s buttoned up and Cap’s got everything handled on the bridge.” He offered a broad grin that somehow managed to be contagious despite the job they were about to do. “Guess he saved all the hard work for his most talented folks.”
“Smartest and prettiest ones, too,” Federov added, tossing his head as if to send flowing locks of hair cascading over his shoulders. It looked ridiculous, given the near-shaven coif that he preferred.
“Ain’t it the truth, though,” Bishop grinned, adjusting the set of his shotgun.
“We’ve got a job to do, so let’s get to it,” Laurel interjected, cutting off their antics. She couldn’t help but smile slightly at Bishop. Most of the engineers she’d met in her years in SolComm had been humorless analytical types. Bishop hadn’t come up through the formal channels within the Commonwealth, though. He’d cut his teeth on his family’s mining trade. Maybe it was the education process in SolComm that left so many of the engineers she’d met in the past cold and dour.
Ship suits came standard with retractable helmets, and now she depressed a button on her wrist to deploy hers. It blossomed out from its storage compartment at the back of her neck and slid over her head and down her face. She set the face shield to opaque, masking her features from any would-be observers. Not that they were her features, at least not the ones she’d been issued at birth, but she had to keep playing the game.
Federov and Bishop followed suit, their helmets sliding from the respective receptacles to cover their faces. Federov did a quick weapons check. Like Bishop, he was armed with a boarding shotgun, the comparatively low-velocity, high-energy slugs running a lower risk of over-penetrating and punching through the hull of a station or ship. Laurel was content with her sidearm. Their unadorned ship suits and weapons loadout might have passed the most cursory of glances, but Laurel had no illusions that their disguises would hold up to more than a few seconds of scrutiny. Which meant that once the airlock opened, they had to act fast.
