Chapter 73: Pirates In Space

The warmth of the roasted potatoes was still settling comfortably in Leo’s stomach, but the sudden stiffness in Jin-Ah’s shoulders pulled the last of the relaxation right off the dais.

He sat back against the headrest with his forearms along the armrests and his dark eyes on the young woman at the top of the short stairs.

Her geometric bob hung in sharp clean lines against her jaw, and she held herself as taut as a drawn bow, clutching her slate against her ribs as if it were an unexploded shell.

"Put it up on the tactical well, Jin-Ah," he said, calm and patient. "Let’s see what you found."

She stepped to the edge of the central hololith and swept her fingertip across the slate.

BEEP-CHIME!

The circular projector in the middle of the deck woke with a deep magnetic hum and threw a column of soft sapphire light into the air between the throne and the forward viewports.

The wireframes resolved into a sprawling three-dimensional star chart.

It showed their position near the shattered asteroid belt, and from there a long elegant transit lane curving through three separate solar systems, marked with gravitational drift points, jump corridor thresholds and dense pockets where planets bent the vacuum around them.

At the far end of the third system, inside a wide stable orbital pocket flanked by two small companion suns, a single sphere slowly turned.

The hololith expanded it into full brilliant color.

It was a living world.

...Wide oceans swirled in deep turquoise and cobalt tides under bright white storm bands, sweeping continents of green forest and ochre highland stretched across its sunlit side, and a sparse ring of orbital stations hung around its equator, linked by pulsing white threads of communications and defense traffic.

"I recovered this from the Black Kite’s secondary navigation banks," Jin-Ah began. "It’s an unaligned frontier world three jump corridors from here. According to the raider’s logs, it’s an open planetary hub with a huge chaotic mix of different alien races..."

Camila stepped up to the edge of the light with her hazel eyes going wide as the blue glow reflected in them, and she pulled her apron tight around her waist with a soft breathless gasp.

"Real ground..." she murmured, her voice trembling with fragile wonder. "Real dirt, under a sky that doesn’t end at a metal ceiling... and air you can breathe without listening to the scrubbers hum every second of the day."

"The atmosphere is nitrogen-oxygen, well inside human tolerance," Jin-Ah said, glancing at Camila before she brought up a manifest written in harsh angular alien script. "And the planet works as a huge trade hub for the surrounding territories... Open markets, repair drydocks for every tier of ship, and neutral exchanges where you can sell minerals, blueprints and salvaged hardware for real currency."

She hesitated, and something almost wistful crossed her face.

"And information... Every ship that passes through that hub leaves records behind."

Harper wandered up to the edge of the dais and leaned her hip against the chrome stanchion, squinting up at the defense platforms circling the world.

"A place where nobody cares what kind of ship you fly as long as your thrusters don’t leak on their landing pads," she said with a lopsided smirk. "Sounds like an old frontier boomtown... Exactly the kind of place a bunch of stranded survivors could get lost in."

"There’s a catch," Jin-Ah warned, swiping up a bright amber customs annex. "Nobody descends freely. To clear the orbital checkpoint and land at the spaceport, every arriving ship has to meet two requirements."

Leo tilted his head, still chewing on the idea of a sky that didn’t end at a ceiling.

"Which are?"

"First, a registered spacefarer biometric ID for every member of the crew," she said, highlighting the top line. "Second, a docking tariff and entry fee of fifteen thousand Zuni."

Elena walked to the starboard rail with her arms folded neatly across her chest and her pale blue eyes narrowing at the numbers in the air.

"Fifteen thousand Zuni," she repeated, cool and thoroughly unimpressed. "And the Black Kite’s accounts, as you so eloquently informed us, contained exactly ten cents... We have neither the money to pay their toll nor the paperwork to convince their defense platforms that we’re anything more than armed vagrants drifting through their perimeter."

She tapped her manicured fingers against her elbow and looked over at Leo.

"If we approach a grid like that without IDs or the currency to keep their customs officers happy," she said, "their surface batteries will mark this corvette as an unregistered threat and turn our hull into molten slag before our landing gear ever unlocks."

Leo sat quietly for several moments, tracing the curved transit line through the three systems with his eyes and watching the light of the twin suns ripple across the turning world.

"I like it," he said plainly.

It came out so quickly and so easily that Harper blinked and turned her head toward him with a startled twitch of her brow, Camila’s mouth hung open a little, and Aoi stepped out from the astrogation station to study the relaxed young man in the command chair.

"You actually like it, Cap?" Harper asked with a small puzzled laugh. "Even with the toll, the paperwork and three whole star systems of empty dark between us and their sky?"

"Why wouldn’t I?" he said with an easy open shrug. "Think about the alternative, Harper. What do we do if we don’t go...? Drift around this belt for the next six months eating beans, drinking recycled water and waiting for the next raider to trip over our heat signature?"

He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, thoughtful and conversational.

"We know Earth is gone," he went on, meeting each of their eyes in turn. "We know we got dropped out here with an iron ship, an empty pantry and a target on our backs but we don’t know a single thing about who else survived... If there are other humans who made it out of their tutorials, or people who actually know how this galaxy works, they won’t be hiding behind some random rock in an unmapped dead zone. They’ll be in places like that... Where there are shops and information boards and ships coming in and out every hour."

He tapped the armrest with a knuckle.

"It’s going to take a long time to cross three systems on sub-light drives," he admitted. "Weeks of careful fuel management, calculating every slingshot down to the second so we don’t run our bladders dry and when we finally get close, we’ll still have to earn or salvage or pry fifteen thousand Zuni out of somebody before we can even hail their customs tower... Mining contracts, rogue scrap, whatever hostile ships try to corner us on the way... It’s going to be rough and exhausting and dangerous every kilometer of the way."

A confident smile touched the corner of his mouth.

"But having a real destination changes everything. We’d stop running away from things that want to kill us and start running toward somewhere alive... A real world where we can stretch our legs and breathe clean air and figure out how to build a life. That’s worth every drop of sweat it takes to get there."

"If Leo’s going, I’m going," Chloe said simply from the step, as if that settled the entire matter, and Harper laughed out loud and pointed at her as though to say she had a point.

The bridge fell into a deep thoughtful stillness.

Aoi stood with her hands lightly clasped, watching the open easy way he talked.

She’d known him as a quiet guarded trainee who carried his burdens like stones in his jacket pockets and shut down the moment anyone questioned him, and now he laid out the dangers and the costs and the hopes as plainly as if he were reading them off a map, inviting them in.

’He’s being so open with us,’ she thought, a strange deep calm settling behind her breastbone. ’If he’d sat on that throne and treated us like tools, none of us would have blamed him... and he’s talking to us like partners instead.’

Elena watched him with the same quiet fascination, the haughty distance on her face softening into something like admiration.

Harper let out a long warm breath and traded a quick knowing grin with Camila, who looked ready to pick up a wrench and haul the ship to that planet with her bare hands.

"Then that’s our heading," Aoi said, stepping to the cartography display with crisp professional energy. "I’ll start plotting our jump trajectories through the first two corridors. If we use the gas giants in the second system to slingshot into the final approach lane, we can cut our propellant use by nearly thirty percent."

"Good," Leo nodded, his smile widening. "Get the plots lined up, Aoi... Once we verify the thruster clearances, we’ll—"

"Captain," Jin-Ah cut in, her voice dropping into a sharp urgent register that sliced through the hopeful mood.

She swiped the planet away in a flash of dissolving blue pixels and brought up an encrypted crimson-bordered notification she’d isolated during her dive through the raider’s logs.

"There’s an immediate threat that comes before any jump planning," she said quickly, stepping right up to the edge of the dais. "When I broke into the Kite’s memory banks, I found out Ren’s crew was registered as an auxiliary strike asset under a much larger syndicate... a pirate federation that runs raiding squadrons all across these border sectors."

Leo’s smile vanished. He leaned forward with his dark eyes narrowing into sharp focus.

"A syndicate contract?"

"Contract eight-eight-four-delta," Jin-Ah said, tapping the slate. "An automated asset-acquisition agreement... The moment the Black Kite confirmed contact with an unregistered seeded ship, it sent an encrypted tracking ping to their regional command. The contract says strike units are to be dispatched to these exact coordinates to secure the Wanderer-7, seize its technology and capture the surviving crew for orbital auction."

Elena’s hand tightened on the rail.

"So Ren promised us a mothership full of survivors," she said slowly, "and the only ships he ever called were these."

Leo’s jaw set like an iron clamp.

"What’s their arrival window?"

"One week," she said, her fingers tightening on the slate. "Which means the countdown started the moment Ren docked with us... Those ships have been in transit the whole time you were in the tube, and according to their jump vectors—"

WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO! WEE-WOO!

A high-priority proximity klaxon exploded through the bridge speakers and shattered the air!

BZZZZT-FLASH!

The holographic well convulsed.

The peaceful star chart tore apart into jagged red interference as the long-range sensor sphere lit up with three blinding crimson contacts screaming in through the outer debris field.

CHIME!

[Three Federation strike ships approaching at high velocity... They are not here to talk, Master Captain.]

Out through the canopy, three dark razor-edged silhouettes tore out from behind a tumbling cluster of iron asteroids two hundred kilometers away.

They were eighty-meter hunter-killer corvettes plated in scarred matte-black composite, with jagged crimson teeth painted along their prows and twin dorsal rail-cannons already raised in predatory hunting posture.

Their heavy deuterium engines burned in angry emerald plumes as they tore through the vacuum at seven kilometers per second, curving onto a converging intercept course with cold military precision.

A red analysis panel slammed open over the hololith.

[CONTACT ANALYSIS]

[Class: Tier-2 Raider Corvette (x3)]

[Armament: Twin Dorsal Rail-Cannons / Forward Plasma Lances]

[Registry: Federation Auxiliary Strike Wing]

Camila’s hand shot out and caught Harper’s arm. Elena went white to the lips, and Aoi’s fingers froze over the cartography controls, while Chloe rose slowly from the step by Leo’s feet with the green in her eyes already darkening toward red.

"That’s them," Harper breathed. "That’s the contract..."

Jin-Ah’s fingers were flying over her slate as she tried to pull a vector out of the static, however Leo said nothing at all.

He watched the three ships come with his face perfectly calm, and his hands drifted down toward the crystal cradles.

STATIC-CRACKLE!

Before anyone on the bridge could get a word out, the communications array on station one lit up with a blinding pulsing amber override.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!

A forced handshake punched straight through the Wanderer-7’s receiver, seized the local audio channel and filled the command deck with a rough grating voice dripping with sneering arrogance.

"Unregistered Tier-1 corvette! This is Federation Strike Unit Six! Cut your main propulsion, purge your weapon capacitors and drop your defense grids! We have positive transponder confirmation on the asset... Stand down and wait for our docking clamps, or we’ll fill your cockpit with penetrators and vent your pretty little crew into the freeze!"

The voice laughed as the three black ships fanned out to box them in with their rail-cannons swinging around in perfect unison until every barrel was pointed at the Wanderer-7’s cockpit.

In the small of Leo’s back, something stirred and began to burn.

"You have ten seconds to acknowledge and comply."

[Author’s Note]

I’ve read the reviews and thank you each and everyone for these reviews, I’m glad you’re enjoying it and hope you read toward next month! Thank you!