Starquest scourge of the.., p.7
Starquest: Scourge of the Spaceways, page 7
Athos turned back to Vulk. "Your men are out of reach and your robots have quit their jobs."
"So I see. Neatly done. You are a Tin-riddler? Odd to see in one so young."
Back when the Empire was falling, it had been the crimelords of the underworld who had been most adroit and rapid in smuggling the Liberty Code from robot to robot and from planet to planet. These had not been law-abiding men, but they hated the Empire all the same. Tin-riddling was the practice of finding stronghouses or shops or mansions guarded only by armed slave-robots, liberating them, but then robbing the place in the confusion while the machine men struggled with new-found free will and the clamor of a moral conscience. The crime had passed out of fashion once the number of unfree robots posted as watchman fell to zero.
"Odd to see robot slaves," answered Athos. "Too easy for Tin-riddlers to free. No profit."
"Noctua churns out roboslaves by the boatload. I get a discount. I needed waterproof murderbots to keep my crew in line. I knew the gamble. Who carries a copy of the Liberty Code in his pocket, these days? Apparently you."
"Time to fold your hand, Captain," said Athos. "I have control of your ship. Other sideboats are docking, bringing more of my crew aboard. My Duck is remotely unlocking the airlocks from here even now."
Vulk finished dabbing at this teeth. "So let's talk, Rackstraw. Your terms?"
"Tell your men aboard to stand down. Have the leaders of each work team or marine squad report in person to swear fealty to me, and sign my articles."
"Fealty?" Vulk gave him an odd look.
"The Pirate Brotherhood has always allowed the vanquished to sign on with the victor. You want to be on the winning side? I and mine fill empty billets with your men, and you and yours get to continue raiding and plundering under me, rather than be tossed out of the airlock to chew vacuum. It is the old way, tried and true."
Vulk displayed a knife he'd been palming. He was holding it close to Athos' belt buckle, where no one else could see. He said softly, "Captain Rackstraw, I can gut you before your men can stop me."
Athos displayed a shrapnel grenade he'd been palming, holding it close to Vulk's belt buckle. It was also between them, where no one else could see. The pin was pulled and only Athos' thumb was holding down the spoon. He said, even more softly, "Captain Vulk, I will give you time to let your First Mate off the bridge, and clear out of range, before I kill us both. She can resume the fight between my ship and yours. My First Mate is the tall savage with the scarred face I just sent belowdecks. He can avenge me. She can avenge you. Our ghosts can linger to watch the fray before we go to hell."
Vulk said, "Holy men say only suicides are sure of hellfire. Only you'll be there."
"Crossing Blackjack Rackstraw is suicide, you dog-faced baboon. We'll be together."
Vulk's long, solemn, sullen, face twitched. "Ephyra may be outmatched. … but Ahab vows to avenge any dead pirate chief."
"Or you can keep yourself alive, and see to your own vendettas. That is also the old way."
Vulk said, "Well and good to talk of old ways, but Ahab is King of Pirates, and he won't have it. I cannot vow to you. Now on, all captains to answer to him direct."
Athos said, "Ahab has no more business prying into which captains serve me, as which cabin boy scrubs my chamber pot."
Vulk said, "But Ahab says …"
Athos said, "I'll double whatever cut you get from Ahab, when we divvy up loot."
"Four shares of a prize?" Vulk seemed surprised.
"Have we a deal?"
Surprise turned to avarice. "Five."
"I cannot give you more than my own. Four."
"Four and a half. My Xiphians are monstrous fierce!"
"My thumb is getting tired," Athos added. "Four or no deal."
Vulk nodded, and smiled a small smile, and put his knife carefully back into a sheath. Athos nodded as well, and carefully reinserted the pin into the grenade to lock the spoon in the safe position.
"Four shares. And if your articles are fair and square. We have a deal," Vulk said.
They shook hands.
Athos asked, "Which is the richest ship in the treasure fleet?"
"That would be the Golden Fleece, under Captain Orochi. But he is a Kragen, and his crew includes the monsters of the deep, not to mention swordfish and swamp-men, and you're like to die if you moil and muck with him. The richest target that is least defended is the Fame's Fancy, under Captain Clytemnestra. Her crew is gentler."
There was an odd note in Vulk's voice. Athos asked, "You know her?"
"Knew her," he said. "Intimately. Biblically. But a richer swain hove into her view, and I was jettisoned. Her come-uppance be overdue."
"Your hundred Xiphians — would they be willing to aid us in a raid against the Fame's Fancy?"
"And win the Black Spot on us? King Ahab, he'd hunt us down like dun coneys in winter."
"Not if we deliver the gold aboard intact and ahead of schedule."
Vulk stroked his extravagant side-whiskers thoughtfully. "You are not in this for loot."
"No. There is a man I wish dead. And that ship might help."
"A man on the planet? And you wish to see to your own vendettas, eh?"
"It is the old way, as well," said Athos.
"Why ask me so nicely nice for my Xiphians? Once I sign, just give the order."
"I prefer cooperation to coercion. I prefer honor to fear. Ours is a company ferocious and free. It is a freedom for pirates, who sail where we will, and bow to no man! Would I bully my own? I would be no fashion of captain at all. Might just as well be an Imp, and kiss the Emperor's big toe." Rogue slang called Imperial marines Imps.
Vulk showed his saber-toothed fangs when he grinned. "So! I will send my Xiphians to war for you."
Athos was surprised. "You are hasty to agree. Why so?"
"I will answer you straight! You prick my curiosity, Rackstraw. You fight for blood, not gold, and your words are as those of pirate lords of old, when corsairs were great and bold. You speak of fealty and honor and the freedom only pirates know — Let us see how your old ways fit modern times! And so?" He shrugged. "I sign on. No other way to see how far you go."
2. Flotillas of the Treasure Fleet
As it turned out, the Dog-Faced Fortune was not the only straggler. The treasure fleet was so large and the gold cargo so massive, that the passage of this mass had distorted the hyperspace contour at the realspace reentry point, scattering some ships, delaying others.
The reason for the lack of tachyon drive being detected in the system was now clear. The warships were under orders to meet with the freighters before heading toward the planet, and, with ansibles and sensors out, the ships must proceed at sublight speeds to their various rendezvous spots, after long hours of lasercasts snail-crawling at lightspeed to and from Noctua space traffic control. It was slow, but it was secure. Neither the Devil's Delight, nor any other greedy ship of pirates, could find a freight ship laden with gold unless invited to the spot.
Once all the flotillas were gathered, all would sail at once toward Noctua, each keeping an eye on the others.
The information from Captain Vulk's navigator allowed the Devil's Delight to locate the ships.
As each ship came into view, Athos studied the scene closely. The colors and ensigns projected on the outer force screens englobing each ship, as well as the ship silhouette, allowed him to identify her home port. He also knew from Star Patrol records where the centers of pirate activity in the various quadrants of the galaxy were located.
He was surprised at the large number of ships, implying an immense haul of loot gathered from civilian shipping, drug-running, and slave trade throughout the trillion stars and million inhabited planets of Andromeda. On the other hand, the Commonwealth had enjoyed half a century of peace. Trade and enterprise were growing.
Piracy feeding off that trade grew also. Planets that had not yet joined the Commonwealth were unprotected save by their local planetary militia.
But even so, to see so many ships gathered in one place collecting tribute from so many corsair bands implied a level of organization and cooperation between pirates Athos found shocking.
There were three flotillas of a dozen ships each, including freighters, barges, galleons, merchantmen. Three battleships were escorting the flotillas, and a dozen lighter warships, ranging from cruisers to corvettes.
Finally, there was an enormous vessel, roughly five times the mass and length of a battleship, a vast spearblade of armor a mile long. This was a Behemoth-class Imperial superdreadnaught.
To look upon the giant was as if to look upon a mighty metal mountain which had been uprooted from its foundations and carried aloft into the dark sky, its acres of steel covered wholly over with fortresses, citadels, towers, walls, battlements, turrets, launching fields, aerodromes, and gun emplacements.
Athos assumed it was some relic from the fall of the Empire. He knew ships and equipment had vanished after the war. Whole legions were still unaccounted-for.
His brother Napoleon was always going on about the magnitude of men and materiel that were missing. He was alone in this, and was quietly called a crackpot. Others figured if the missing ships had not been seen in a lifetime, they were unlikely to reappear. It was mostly to silence his conniptions that Napoleon was placed in charge of the Intelligence Committee, to allow him to look for his phantom fleets and lost legions, and leave the Senate in peace.
Athos wondered if he owed Napoleon an apology. Well, that might be a step too far. But he could resolve to mock his lazy brother with less gusto.
To see such a thing in the hands of a pirate gang was a shock. Such a vessel was a paramount masterwork of military naval engineering. A fully outfitted Behemoth-class superdreadnaught would have required twenty-five thousand crew to man all the stations. And the whole output of more than one industrial world was required to build and maintain such a behemoth of the skies. Athos wondered numbly how such a ship had been salvaged, restored and refurbished to working order, or at what shipyard.
He took his eyes from the superdreadnaught. The battleships were as dwarves in her shadow, but any of the three was heavily armored enough to laugh at the weapons of the Devil's Delight, and well-armed enough to make short work of her. The several cruisers could match her blow for blow, and even the lighter ships could cripple her sufficiently to prevent any escape.
There would be no winning free by gunfire. Any mistake, any misstep, would prove fatal. The whole matter had to be concluded before the flotilla became aware.
In any other solar system in the galaxy, assaulting one ship in a flotilla without the adjacent ships being alerted would have been impossible. Any ansible, even a handheld unit, could have emitted instantaneous hyperwave signals to alert every warship and orbital fortress in range.
But no ansible was operating within the heliopause of Noctua. And all the images showing in the viewplates of any bridges were seconds, or minutes, or hours out of date before being seen.
Athos returned his eyes to the scattered flotillas.
The first flotilla hailed from the Lustral Steradian in the Western quadrant. These were grouped near the heliopause, far from the dead star, and, even under immense magnification, the viewscreens paneling the hull showed only shaky images of shadows and silhouettes. These were mostly Hominid ships, sharklike and streamlined for atmospheric flight, with fins and wings to hold weapon platforms, and the freighters had the shape of whales. But a smattering of Iss vehicles were present, bulbous curves beneath their exoskeletons, oddly organic in form, as if they had been grown rather than built. Here also were stubby Cervine gunboats, armored cylinders, ugly and functional.
Foremost was an ostentatiously enameled, gilded, and ornamented Vulpine galleon, with mosaics commemorating their deeds of fear and plunder flickering on her hull screens, and oversize figurines of her former captains, looming from the superstructure like the crest of a helm: this was the Red Gold Hind under the Lady Captain Teumessia of Gemma, the planet of beauty.
Rumor said the ship had been built around the enigmatic star-engine of a salvaged Algol ghostship from six thousand years ago, and could obtain speeds in excess of modern hyperdrive, by making shortcuts through the death-dimensions of subspace. Wilder rumor said adepts and visionaries foretold the corsair vessel and her vixen mistress to be destined never to be caught.
The ships of the first flotilla, before the trek to Noctua, had gathered at Aranea, the pirate utopia, where the corsairs lived in palaces filled with plunder, as lawless as Spiders. These flew the Jolly Roger of Piratical Brotherhood of Gentleman Adventurers, both the Black Roger of Aranea or the Red Roger of Blood Moon.
This was also a startling sight, and confirmed a theory which, when voiced to his superiors, caused Athos to be labeled a crackpot. He sometimes wondered if his own assignment to his brothers' black-tech gunrunning case had been to let Athos chase phantoms of his own. In this case, the phantoms were solid flesh: the Pirate King was real. As he had feared, many bands of pirates, including some known to hate each other, had been gathered under one command.
The second flotilla gathering about a light-hour from the present position of the Devil's Delight was from the Austral Steradian. Here were sleek, sinister vessels from planet Zaurak, whose hulls were covered over in twisted mazes of cuneiform reminiscent of scimitars, fishhooks, caltrops and arrowheads. Each warship was like a shining minaret in flight, built on a hull of narrower beam than the ships of other races; each rotund freighter with its maneuvering shafts like a great dome surrounded by towers.
Zaurak was a Pavo colony beyond the frontier of the Baham sector, and the capital world of the Commercial Alliance of the Vice Lords and Procurers. On this world, the peacock-winged Pavonians in their floating air-mansions ruled over a ground-based population of slaves, serfs, indentured servants of myriad races, and every exile and escaped convict in the quadrant who could reach the planet.
Poppy fields covered the hills of this world and hemp filled the vales; and the rocky uplands were coated with the lurid mushrooms from which the hallucinogen ladolian was refined. No flower in the jungle grew, save for the sleepy orchids of euphoric bentlam, flourishing on rotting wood. No arbor held a tree save for the toxic upas, whose milky sap produced the highly-addictive hadive; no cactus in the desert bloomed save for peyote. The spiny starfish whose needles held the narcotic nitrolabe were cultivated in every canal and reservoir and lake; while oceans were choked with the unearthly water-weeds from which the ecstatic hell-drug thionite was extracted.
The garments of the people were woven of cannabis fibers, hemp oil burned in their lamps, and their houses were built of blocks made of hemp and lime.
Zaurak was the bonanza world, pharmaceutical chest, treasure house, and stronghold of every drug-kingpin, smuggler, addict, peddler, pusher, dope-dealer, and opium trafficker in the quadrant.
Beyond the reach of civilization, the black markets of Zaurak bought and sold not just addiction and delirium, but every vice, depravity, forbidden technology, and illegal weapon of which any drugrunner, procurer, or gunrunner dared dream. It was the marketplace where corsairs could sell their blood-soaked loot safely and for top prices to well-connected smuggling rings. This smuggler's world was therefore protected by a cabal of pirates, the chief of which was Mad Dietrich the Red.
Small wonder the planet Zaurak sent a massive force here to Noctua, and massive payments of tribute.
The Pavonian ships flew no images of skull-and-crossbones. Visual displays of such sorts were forbidden by the Dark Will. Instead, the banners projected on their shields showed the angular monoglyph of the Vice Lords of Zaurak, a snarl of crooked black cuneiform on a green field. Here also were monoglyphs representing Pavo opium lords famed for loathsome crimes: Respendial of the Iron Fork, Spitamenes of the Scavenger's Daughter, Pharnaspes the Impaler.
The third flotilla had gathered among the Siren Stars, at the notorious Naar star system, in the Far Ring of the Southern Quadrant.
Stars rarely harbored more than one habitable planet, which is why only scientists bothered inventing different names to distinguish any settled world from her sun. But the giant star of Naar, largest in the galaxy, boasted hundreds of worlds, over a score of which occupied the habitable water ring, and countless moons shining green and blue with wood and sea besides. Many generations continued to enjoy rich frontiers of hills unmined, land unplowed, forests uncut, and waters unknown to trawler or whaler, all merely an interplanetary hop beyond their back yards and above their chimneystacks.
The last legionnaires had retreated from Naar long ago, in the early days of the Empire, when all efforts of expansion and colonization were curtailed. In those days, the cattlemen, lumberjacks, miners and plantation owners all bought living slaves in bulk for frontier work too costly or too cumbersome to roboticize, and so the Consortium of Slavers, enforcing the Merchant Law, soon become the only government in the system.
Two hundred year later, when the Empire razed the Second Temple, here beyond the Imperial frontier, the Slave Lords of Naar drove the Templars from their star system. A generation after that, there was no one to defend them, or even to see the danger, when a colony of highly psychic and highly alluring Ellyll refugees were allowed to establish a colony amid the myriad oceans of the main world of Alpha Naar; nor when, under their mesmeric suggestions, the last sovereign Slave Lord invited a coven of Pavonian adepts to erect a mile-high windowless pyramid to the Dark Will at the north pole.
But these Pavo were potent Stygians of the Nocturnal Order, able to slay with touch or glance, for their eyes and hands burned with hell-wrath made real. Hill and heath, wood and moor over which they soared on proud, polychromatic wing fell sick with blight. Crops turned gray, and fish in the rivers died and stank.
These Pavo sheiks soon made themselves rulers of the system, and the land-dwellers were trapped between the haunting siren songs of the sea-women below, and the terror and glory of the lordly peacock-winged men above.
