Mathias stood still as he could next to his uncle. He had earned the right to come on the bridge today and watch by avoiding any trouble for a month. He was not going to make any now. Although it was quiet except for the murmuring of technicians, his thoughts were filling his mind with noise. Someday he would work on the bridge and be captain of a great vessel!
“Captain!” One of the men, a new guy from Cambridge shouted. “A vessel transmitting an Outcast ID just entered the system!”
“Well, he didn’t shoot at us Woodcock, calm down. Keep an eye out for it and let us know if it pops up on short range.”
“We should send the boy away Cap’n Sterlin’.” Mathias looked at the man who spoke. Mr. Sweeny was older than his uncle and always seemed to disapprove of the boy. He looked back to his uncle, afraid he would agree with Sweeny. He did not speak though, knowing he could only hurt his chances of staying by protesting.
“We’ll let him stay for now Mr Sweeny, the boy might learn something.”
The bridge returned to its low hum as the few men managed their individual departments. Ore extraction and processing were the ones that mattered the most. Mathias could see the large rocks outside the viewports being smashed and ‘eaten’ by the vessel. He always enjoyed watching that part. He was lost in thought when Woodcock’s panicked voice shouted above the hum again.
“Captain, they’re here!”
“What do you mean “they” bridgeman?”
“There are three vessels captain!”
“Get a hold of yourself woodcock or I will have to relieve you.”
“Yes sir.”
“Can you tell me the configurations comsman?”
“Yes sir, coming into range now. Captain, it’s a Tridente and two Dromedaries, they’re hailing us.”
“Put them through on audio only Hitachi.”
“I repeat, captain of IMG mining vessel Siam Star, this is commander Reynosa of the Maltese warship Espirito de Mars. Acknowledge receipt of this transmission.”
His uncle turned to Sweeny with an odd look on his face and said “Open the channel Hitachi.”
“Maltese commander, this is George Sterling captain of the Siam Star we are at your service.”
“I am glad to hear that Captain. Your vessel can be ‘of service’ to us by giving us enough ore to fill these vessels and then you will need to pay us our mining fee for operating in our space.”
“Of course commander, we do our best to comply with all authorities who allow us to operate in their space. We request to know the exact amount of product we should eject from our hold and the amount of the fee.”
Mathias was amazed at how calm and friendly his uncle sounded.
“The specifications are being transmitted to you now Captain.”
The pirates were disappearing into space. Mathias could not hold his tongue any longer. “Why did you let them rob us uncle?”
“So that we all may live to mine another day my boy. Now you broke the rules, do you know which one?”
“Yes sir, Captain.”
“Now, you know our agreement was you couldn’t break any rules while on the bridge.”
“Yes” with head hung low Mathias began to turn away.
“Stop, Mathias, you may stay, I say we all were a little nervous there. We will allow your outburst. See that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Thank you un-Captain Sterling!”
Mathias stood still and quiet again for the rest of the shift as he observed the business of the men operating the ship. He would be a captain some day!
Sweeny was angry. This operation was too big to slip under the radar. There were two Molly destroyers out there and the captain was on one of them. They had been filling pirate transports of various configurations for a whole week and the cover story was so thin it made him sick to think of saying it. Captain held as hostage until the Mollys had all the gold they wanted. Sweeny’s worries were about to be realized.
“Mr Sweeny… I hear something…” It was Hitachi the comsman.
“Don’t be cryptic man! What do you mean?” Sweeny’s agitation was raised by the man’s statement. A dreadful realization was forming in his mind.
“It’s a sound I haven’t heard before sir, it coming across all the channels. Like static but it has a definite pattern.”
“Bloody…” The word hissed out of his mouth. “Open a channel, unencrypted to that ship the captain is on!”
“Yes sir… it’s open”
Sweeny stated the coded alert: “Captain of pirate warship, our captain has been your hostage for a week now when can we get him back?”
Time seemed to stretch on forever as Sweeny waited for a reply. In reality only a few seconds passed before he was rewarded with some response.
The two transports and the one small mining craft activated their cruise engines. A few seconds later Sweeny’s fear was realized as a Bretonian carrier began to materialize in front of his bridge windows.
“Captain Sweeny. There are multiple ships appearing all around us.” Sweeny was surprised at how calmly Woodcock spoke, he had come a long way since they picked him up six years ago.
The navsman Stephens asked what his orders were. “Hold here man, if we run we look like we were willing participants. Besides this bloody thing would get stuck on every rock between here and whatever jump hole we ran for.”
The Molly captains realized they were overpowered and were cruising away already when the fighters began launching from the carrier. They began a pursuit that would eventually prove fruitless. Sweeny’s warning had given the captains of the other vessels time to get away. The crew of “Siam Star” was not so fortunate.
The authorities did not accept the cover story. Woodcock, the sensors chief had actually been a deep cover military operative and had been compiling evidence against George Sterling for supporting subversives. One of the persons who had some small culpability was Mathias, George’s nephew. He would spend the next two years in prison, much of it under interrogation despite his lack of specific knowledge about his uncle’s whereabouts. When released, his respect for the authorities and his uncle would be diminished, but not his desire to ply the starways, that would only grow.
He swore quietly. The occasional shock each time he touched the console housing was starting to piss him off. Mathias had managed to get life support going at about ten percent, which would have been too little if not for the fact most of the others had died in the attack on the transport. As it was there were only three people alive on a ship that could hold hundreds.
Engines and artgrav on the other hand…
He couldn’t get sensors up to even figure out where they were. The military had taken them all out of prison and put him in the engineering corps. He had finished his two years but they weren’t keen on releasing him. With no legitimate family to claim him, who would notice?
His Bretonian heritage had led him to some loyalty in the war with Kusar and then the Gallics but this treatment had jaded him. And now here he was trying to keep a dying ship alive with no way to get a distress signal off. He was hoping the radiation leaking from the drive would attract some attention, but from who? Whoever might come they needed to come soon, the dead were stinking up the whole ship.
Suddenly the ship moved under him violently, the wall to his right came towards him quickly and it hit him hard sending him across the room to the other wall. Grasping for anything to stabilize himself he got hold of the console. The shock was annoying but cursing loudly this time he held on tight out of fear.
The movement had stopped so he made his way to an undamaged section with a viewport. A larger vessel had grasped the Transport with two mechanical arms and was cutting into his living space with a lazer.
Junkers!
Moving as fast as possible he made his way to the rashpoint turret he had got working. He had rigged it so he could discharge it a few times before the capacitor would blow, he hoped. He had to manually turn the thing towards the ship which exhausted him but his life was at stake so he found the will. Mathias shoved the switch he had rigged and pushed himself to cover. The turret discharged about a dozen times before fizzling out with no fireworks.
He made his way back to the observation port. Would they care if someone was alive inside? Junkers were unpredictable…
After years as a prisoner then a military slave, seeing friends die at the hands of Gallic and Kusari invaders, Mathias was eager to get away from the war. Even his own people, the Bretonian military and the IMG, held little love in his heart when those junkers found him in his floating tomb.
The junkers were the perfect clan for him to fall in with. He understood engineering, mining and criminals and knew enough about his uncle’s old contacts to make himself valuable to his new captors. What was best about the junkers was he wasn’t considered less than them. Unlike his fellow Bretonians they didn’t consider him useless to their society because of his crimes, in fact he represented many of the things they valued most.
So he rose up through the ranks from slave to ship’s engineer to captain – of one vessel after another – until he finally had a salvager, the cash cow of the wealthiest junkers. This apparently had not gone unnoticed by people who knew him from his past…
THE MEETING
Freeport ten, if it would have to happen anywhere it would be here, he thought. Mathias could not believe the man was sitting in front him. Twenty years, Twenty years!
“I wanted to meet up with you because I heard about you making trips out to T44. People say you get the job done and you aren’t afraid to go into dangerous situations.”
Mathias didn’t say anything, he was having a hard time deciding whether to pull his blaster, hug his uncle or get up and walk away.
Finally he said: “Why would I work with you?”
With a grim smile his uncle replied: “The money I mentioned and… you get to stick it to the Gauls, hard. Also, there’s a bonus, you wouldn’t have to use false ID’s in Bretonian space anymore, My group includes some former military – privateers who have enough government connections to clean up your records. Maybe even erase you completely if you want.”
He didn’t want to work with this man but the price was tempting. “I’ll have to think about it. I’m heading back to Liberty space with a load of ore from Ft Siloso for now.”
“The offer will stand. They need all the help they can get, the wars have not gone well for them, they’re desperate – just drop my name to the station engineer if you come back interested, he knows how to contact me.”
