SHUTTLE OATHKEEPER-32, SOL (4,700 LS)
POV: Eupprio, Malgeir (Executive)
“Hey Eupprio, wake up. Wakey wake.”
Eupprio’s eyes fluttered open, greeted by Fleguipu’s persistent nudges. Her body, still cloaked in the remnants of sleep, rebelled against the intrusion. She blinked away the grogginess and asked with a hoarse voice, “What’s going on?”
“We’re passing that ringed planet you said you wanted to look at,” Fleguipu said, pointing a claw at the image of Saturn on the full color external camera display mounted on the hull wall.
Eupprio took in its rings for a minute. The labyrinthine tapestry of shimmering ice and rock, stretching for thousands of kilometers in every direction. The rings appeared like a river of stardust, its particles ranging from tiny pieces of granulated ice to boulders the size of houses, the uneven distribution a result of cosmic collisions and gravitational dances that birthed it eons ago. Amidst them, the Cassini Division stood out as a dark ribbon of emptiness contrasting the luminous ice around it.
“Not bad, eh?” Aida called out across from her. “You have one of these in your Federation?”
“A few,” Eupprio said, not taking her eyes off the spectacle on the screen. “None in Malgeiru though.”
“Yeah, the most famous one in Malgeir space is occupied: Uidquu-8,” Fleguipu added with a hint of sadness. “Maybe we’ll get it back one day.”
As they sailed closer, they noticed that several sections in the rings were dotted with signs of Terran civilization.
Stretched out along the B-ring were a series of mining and habitation stations, like a string of pearls, each one teeming with exterior activity. Their metal surfaces reflected light from the planet, giving them an ethereal glow amidst the natural brilliance of the ring.
Amid the drifting ice and rock, ships darted like gleaming fish in a cosmic pond. Some were lumbering transport vessels, slowly shuttling people and goods between neighboring ring settlements. Others were more rugged, built for the rigors of interplanetary travel, their hull silhouettes followed by the characteristic blooms of their constant acceleration drives.
“Are we going to do a close fly-by?” Eupprio asked curiously.
“Somewhat. It’ll only boost our speed a little for our journey to Mars, but… it saves on fuel.”
Fleguipu’s brow creased in concern. “Isn’t this area supposed to be dangerous? Pirates? Terrorists?”
“Danger is a relative concept,” Aida responded with nonchalance. “We’re going pretty fast, and the smart ones usually don’t mess with our ships. We should be fine.”
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She was proven wrong about an hour later.
Abe’s voice broke through the intercom, “LT, there are a couple of bogeys burning to intercept. Zero decimal four two light seconds. Likely pirates.”
“Damn it,” Aida cursed under her breath as she looked at her alien charges. “Now that’s just embarrassing. Pilot, what transponder codes are they squawking?”
“No codes yet. They’re not that close: we have twenty minutes before we’d have to make a decision. After that, they’ll get close enough for it to get dicey. I’m on the lookout for other traps, but nothing so far. I think it’s just these guys. Should we go evasive?” Abe’s voice crackled through the speaker.
“Nah, save the fuel,” Aida decided swiftly. “Call our guys in the Navy. Free target practice for them.”
Eupprio asked nervously, “Everything alright, Aida?”
“A couple pirates are headed our way. You were briefed on decompression procedures, right?”
“Decompression?!” Eupprio’s voice climbed an octave. “Don’t we have weapons on the shuttle?”
“Only point defense. But don’t worry. I’m handling it.”
Abe’s voice returned, tinged with a hint of urgency. “Navy’s busy right now. They can have a patrol transit through the area in about six hours. Should we ask them to drop by?”
Aida shook her head. “That’s too long. They’re too far away. What are the bogeys mounting?”
“No foxes. Two gunpods each.”
She whistled at the brazenness. “These guys must be new. Fresh outta Titan.”
“Should I start burning now?” Abe asked.
“Not yet, I don’t want an extra deceleration burn,” Aida insisted. “Call them on the radio.”
The cargo bay fell into a tense silence, broken only by the sound of Abe’s attempts to establish contact with the approaching ships.
A gruff, distorted voice eventually crackled through the intercom. “You know the drill, yea? Let’s save us all some time.”
“This is Lieutenant Aida Naser, flying with Black Hole Sun. Who am I speaking to?”
“None of your damn business, merc!” They could hear the pirate spitting into his microphone.
“All due respect, but you made it my business when you started burning your ships towards me on an intercept course. Now, I don’t negotiate with strangers I don’t know the names of.”
“Fine! The name is Greer. Greer Thatch. Of uh… Thatch Enterprises. That’s who you’re dealing with!”
Aida looked around the cargo bay at the other troopers. There were a lot of shrugs and questioning looks in the exchanged glances.
Aida rejoined the conversation with politeness. “Sorry, how do you spell that? Is that two E’s or e-a-r? I can’t find you in our database—”
“Shut up! You know what we’re here for, yea?”
“Please, spell it out for me, Greer. I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding between us when… everything goes down.”
Greer seemed to hesitate and waver at her confidence, but he continued, “We’re going to board you and take your cargo. I suggest you cut engine thrust and comply with our demands.”
The cargo bay filled with laughter, some of the Terran contractors slapping each other on the backs in amusement. A couple did perfunctory checks on their weapons. Aida silenced them all with an impatient wave of her hand.
“That’s cute,” Aida retorted. “But before you try that, you should check our public registration and manifest. The only cargo we have is eighteen direct action troopers coming home from an extrasolar deployment, so unless you have a whole company of boarding specialists hiding in your skiffs, I’d suggest you come up with an alternate retirement plan, Greer.”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
A tense silence stretched on the call. “You’re lying!”
Aida remained silent.
After a minute, Greer’s voice returned, tinged with frustration. “Man, that’s some bullshit… But we’re not going home empty. We won’t board you, but we can still blow up your shuttle! Dump your fancy centerline fuel pods or we’ll put a hole in your reactor!”
Aida sighed, her voice dripping with theatrical exasperation. “But what use are our fuel pods to you when our missiles find you?”
“You aren’t carrying anti-ship missiles on that tiny shuttle, no way!” There was a noticeable crack in the pirate’s voice.
“Not on this shuttle,” Aida conceded freely. “But check your charts, we’re within the coverage zones of at least six Black Hole Sun long-range missile batteries in the Red Zone. They’re not just going to let you go after you open fire on us. The only reason they haven’t fired on you yet is because… ah, two reasons actually: one, missiles are expensive, and two, it might make the company look bad on the evening news in Titan. Now, if you had a Charlie-rated or higher constant acceleration drive, you could probably outrun a couple of those missiles…”
Judging by the ensuing lack of reply from the other end, that was clearly not the case.
Aida continued steadily, “In any case, you’re on our radar now. Maybe we’ll just pass your registration on to the Navy, and they’ll come use you for target practice. Now… I know you did your orbital calculations… and you figure the Navy won’t show up within an hour or so. And you’d probably be right about that. But I bet their schedule clears up real quick once those guns of yours go off. And their missiles can get here a lot faster than their ships can too: I hear they aren’t as stingy with their munitions budget as we are.”
More silence.
“Or maybe we don’t call the Reps at all; instead, we pay a few people… find out where you live… Now I won’t get to decide which one of those it’ll be, because I’ll be dead, but in all likelihood, so will you—”
Obvious panic tinged the pirate’s voice now. “No— no wait. Let’s talk this through.”
“I’m listening.”
“First, no funny merc business. And no Navy reports!”
“What do we get in return?” Aida asked nonchalantly.
“We uh— we’ll clear out.”
“Not good enough. That ship has sailed, boys. I’ve already had to call in a couple contacts. This has cost me time and resources, so it’s going to cost you. And the closer you get to us, the more it’s going to cost both of us.”
“Wait, no, we’ll back off!” The sound of hurried movements crackled through the line before the microphone went dead.
From the cockpit, Abe relayed the update. “Looks like they’re cutting their acceleration. They’re no longer on an intercept course.”
The amateur pirate’s voice came through again, desperation clear. “We’ve stopped! We’ve stopped.”
“Good, now let’s talk about conditions.”
“What— What else do you want, merc? We can dump our cargo.”
“What would I want your cargo for,” Aida snorted in derision. “It’ll cost me more in time just to slow down to retrieve them. Nah, I think we’ll just pass the word to the Navy. Have a good afternoon or morning or whenever it is wherever you come from—”
“Wait, no, please! Don’t hang up! We’re just trying to make a living out here! Please, tell us how we can make it up to you!”
“Hm…” Aida pretended to think for a moment. “I guess I can take your dinky boarding skiffs. Might come in handy one day. Here’s what you’re going to do: burn straight back to Pandora Station, dock in ports Charlie-two and Charlie-three, leave the keys in the ignition, and I’ll give you a week to find your own way off the station before I call the cops.”
A strangled, frustrated cry echoed through the line. “But it took us forever to buy and fix up these ships! This is so unfair!”
“Sweetie, you should have thought of that before you got into this line of work.” Aida replied, her voice a blend of sternness… and sympathy, “Tell you what, I’m feeling extra generous today. You can keep one of your ships… your pick of which one. But both your crews better be on that ship and out of Pandora by the end of the business day.”
There must have been some disagreement between the two ships about which one of them was going to lose their spacecraft, but whatever it was, they resolved it in record time.
“Deal! No funny business as we leave, merc!”
“No funny business,” Aida promised. “You know our reputation; we don’t screw around like that. But don’t think you’ll get away with sabotaging my future ship if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ll be billing you for any damage I find when I get to Pandora.”
“We took good care of our ships!” the pirate replied wistfully.
“Aww. Come now, don’t be so melodramatic. Think of it as me doing you a personal favor: I really don’t think this whole piracy thing was going to work out for you anyway. If I were you, I’d suggest something in the tourism industry. Lots of potential for growth… Anyway, good doing business with you, and I hope for your sake we never see you again. Buh bye!”
She severed the connection.
Eupprio regarded Aida with curiosity. “You’re still going to report them to your Navy, aren’t you?”
Aida shrugged nonchalantly. “Nah. Probably not.”
“No?” Eupprio asked, surprised.
“Yeah, in the Red Zone, even now that it’s stabilized, you’re good as your word. People live and die by their reputation out here. I get these guys killed; that’ll probably get some of our other guys killed somewhere else.”
“I guess… that makes sense. Just too bad for some other traders coming by, right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. You have to understand, these guys probably won’t ever get to do it again. They’re bankrupt: the people they owe money to are not the kind where you can just shuffle assets and declare bankruptcy. And it’s not just this crew. Most pirates are constantly a couple bad hauls away from financial disaster because it’s fundamentally not that great a business model, even if you don’t count the risk to their lives.”
“It’s not?! Seemed like an easy way to make some quick money!”
Aida shook her head, a wry smile on her lips. “Oh yeah, that’s what many of them thought too before their first haul. Nah, the returns are terrible. There’s some glamor if you’re one of the big fish, yes, but fighting in space… it’s expensive. Flying anywhere burns money, and chasing ships?” Aida shook her head. “So many credits. You can see most of them coming, and truckers usually run just because they know it’s too expensive for pirates to chase them; they figure if they’re going to lose money, better to waste it getting to their destination quicker than let the pirates get their stuff. And the weapons… oh God, the munition cost! When we first started in space like a century ago, weapons were literally anything you can bolt onto a ship frame. But after decades of fighting here, effective weapons have gotten increasingly expensive.”
“That makes sense,” Eupprio said, nodding in understanding. “More sophisticated weapons cost more.”
“Yup, as an average cargo pirate now, if you have to fire a missile out here, you’ve already lost… Financially ruined, even if you’re not getting hunted by the Navy. I’m not joking: the big pirate gangs literally buy and sell legit insurance products that pay out for when you fire missiles out here. Gunpods work, but you have to hope they don’t run and let you get in real close, which is rare. I think small-time hostage takers can still make a living… that’s if you don’t get on the radar of those Republic counter-terrorism operators itching for training opportunities, but everything else sucks.”
“Why do they do it then?” Eupprio asked. “If it’s such a raw deal for the average pirate as you say.”
“Nobody gets into this life hoping to be the average cargo pirate,” Aida explained. “There are two types of people out here bucking the long arm of the Republic. First, you have the ones out here for credits. There’s piracy and there’s smuggling—”
“Is smuggling generally unprofitable too?” Eupprio asked, once again recalling the security briefing she’d gotten before the trip.
“Oh no, smuggling is a whole different beast. Smuggling… now, that’s a lucrative business if you want to make some real money in the Red Zone. But you need to have contacts and you need to know the right people. Need some starting capital for deposits, to cover insurance, to pay off the gangs to leave you alone. Need lots of security so people don’t think you’re a pushover or they can screw you over just because you don’t have a lot of legal options.”
Fleguipu looked up sharply at her. “Sounds like you uh… know a lot about the business.”
Aida grinned shamelessly. “Heh yeah. If I hadn’t joined Black Hole Sun after my time in the Marines was up… Anyway, smugglers and pirates, most of them are small-time operations; a few get bigger. The big ones march over to the transport corporations and demand protection fees. They’re not supposed to, but some of these companies pay.”
“You said there were two types of criminals out here.”
“The true believers. Or as they call themselves, the Resistance,” Aida’s face turned dark. “The pirates who are here for money and excitement — they kick up a ruckus from time to time, but they don’t hold a candle to the psychos out here who actually believe every word they say. The ones who are willing to blow up stations and colonies full of innocent people simply because they have a problem with authority and want the Republic gone so they can run things around here. Nothing is off the table for the terrorists.”
“Didn’t your people say those groups are mostly extinct?” Eupprio asked nervously.
“That’s what the tourism brochure says,” Aida smiled thinly at her. She looked out the window at the retreating image of Saturn. “But we all know they’re still out there. Plenty of rocks to hide in the Red Zone. They have their own ships, their own bases. Thousands of their cells, just running cold and hiding in the dark, maybe more. Sure, they haven’t really done anything in years after the last Navy sanitation campaign, but we all know it’s a matter of time before they strike again.”