Date Point 3 Years 1 Week After Vancouver
Ckteth Trading Lane, Celzi Alliance Space
The Hunt was going well.
Brood Adevis had infiltrated the heavily trafficked areas of the region belonging to the prey calling themselves the Celzi Alliance, moving between their major trading routes to attack the few small vessels that currently frequented them. Extreme pirate activity was apparently the cause for the reduced numbers, but the Brood had neither seen any pirates nor did Alpha Adevis mind; too many of the prey moving through the same area would create problems, and all Hunters knew that it was easiest to hunt the stragglers.
But today they had lain their trap, a Warp Spike set upon the Ckteth Trading Lane. It was a lane that saw many vessels, and frequently even military ships, and the prospect of taking the prey from where they had their claws was exciting.
The vessel that they had seized was large, a heavy freighter full of goods and more importantly full of prey to hunt and to save for later.
Yes, the Hunt was going very well.
+<hunger; command> Boarding groups, ready! Docking action complete in three… two… one… Hunt well!+
Alpha Adevis had chosen from amongst its least skilled brood members; this was a large, but easy target and it was important that they gained the practice where they were able. Without a strong brood, there could be no hunting of truly impressive prey. Without a strong brood, they might fall prey to the humans in defiance of the natural order of things.
There was absolutely no way that Alpha Adevis would let that happen.
This prey, however, would not take long to hunt. Alpha Adevis knew from its own experience how long the hunt should go for on vessels of each type. The only factor here that could delay them would be the possibility of more intelligent prey to hide in the cargo, although they would always inevitably be found and-
The Warp Spike caught something else, disrupting its warp field and dropping it into local space.
Alpha Adevis scanned it, although even on the initial sensors it had been far to small to contain much of anything. The more details scan showed it was a small cylindrical object packed full of technology. It was green in colour but had some kind of biped painted on it.
+<surprise; query> A probe?+
Why would anybody be sending a probe through such well-charted space was an extreme curiosity to Alpha Adevis, and the only reason it could imagine was if it belonged to an as-yet unknown species making its first attempts at mapping the area.
That excited Alpha Adevis; to discover a new species and to be the first to taste its meat… that was truly a golden opportunity.
Then the probe released several smaller objects.
Smaller objects that set a trajectory for the Adevis broodship.
Smaller objects like those that had brought ruin to the Swarm as they had chased the Cursed Human, and the Adevis broodship was immobilised from having docked with the heavy freighter…
+<panic; order> All brood members brace for impact…+
The Adevis broodship shuddered violently as the objects impacted and blasted holes in it. Automated systems took over and sealed the compromised compartments, preserving what atmosphere they could and keeping the ship from becoming an airless tomb.
Alpha Adevis exhaled. It had survived, and despite damage to its ship it remained functional. They could continue their Hunt, and deal with the damage once they had moved to a better location, and Alpha Adevis would take the combat probe back to the homeworld for analysis.
Everything would still proceed in the natural way of things.
That was when the pirate cruiser dropped out of warp.
Hodgepodge, Pirate Cruiser, Ckteth Trading Lane, Celzi Alliance Space
“We’ve just confirmed that the ‘Monkey Barrel’ is dead ahead,” announced the sensor tech. “It looks like it’s only just started to give the Hunters a bad day.”
Jen didn’t remember his name, this was Chir’s crew, not hers, and she thanked him by his rank. “Nicely done, Sensor Technician. What’s the Hunter vessel’s condition right now, then?”
“Heavy damage to outer hull on a single vector,” the sensor tech replied. “Extensive atmosphere lost to adjacent sections, but vessel still functional. It’s currently locked with the Heavy Freighter.”
Jen leaned forward in her seat. “Right, what’s the likely number of Hunters on a ship of that size?”
“No more than fifty, Miss Jen,” the weapons tech advised her. “They look to be readying their coilguns to engage when we enter effective range.”
“Well, take them out with a couple of the rockets then!” Jen told him. “We don’t need to go getting holes in our fancy new cruiser, do we now?”
They’d only just recently managed to acquire the Celzi cruiser, and had stolen it from a repair dock while it was under a skeleton crew. Pirate crews had worked on getting it back into working order back in Cimbraen orbit, and Trycrur had added some of the enhancements she and Jen had been discussing. This was its maiden voyage, as well as the first deployment of the ‘monkey barrel’ device, a warp-capable probe intended to trigger Warp Spike traps laid by Hunters and fire its salvo of small rockets at any vessel emitting an unregistered Hunter transponder code. By sending it ahead of the Hodgepodge on an identical warp vector, it would cause significant damage to the unfortunate Hunter vessel only a few moments before the Hodgepodge itself could arrive and take advantage of the situation.
Today it had worked perfectly.
“As you say,” the weapons tech replied. “Locked on and released.”
Jen waited. They all waited for confirmation of impact, and they were not disappointed.
“Hunter vessel weapons systems are destroyed,” the weapons tech relayed. “We are free to proceed with boarding action.”
Jen had to hand it to the crew; they’d come a long way since she’d started recruiting in earnest, and after several sorties with the Hunters and small military vessels they were no longer afraid of boarding action.
Of course it helped that they had one more trick up their sleeve.
“Get us docked, then,” said Jen, giving the order. “Second airlock on the large freighter, we don’t want her making a run for it when the Hunters are busy with us. Don’t forget we’re sending in the Hellhounds on this one into the Hunter ship only.”
Cavaras, Corti Directorate Core World
The Coro Cavan corporation was currently experiencing what Adrian had laughingly called ‘a hostile takeover’. Right now this included less of a financial repositioning and more along the lines of everything being on fire and everybody running in screaming terror. It was admittedly a lot more exciting this way, but Adrian didn’t think he was going to get out of this without smelling like burned hair for a couple weeks.
He really enjoyed using the plasma thrower, however, but the only ones really experiencing the nasty end of it – besides the Coro Cavan headquarters itself of course – were the robo-slugs who had made a point of shooting at him. That hadn’t been these robo-slugs, of course, since those ugly fuckers had been thrown into the sun along with their arsehole of a boss, but they were hard to tell apart and were all pretty disgusting creatures. They wore mechanised armour, that was true, but it was built to resist kinetic pulse weaponry, however, not plasma; convention held that nobody sane would use plasma in a firefight and from the awful stench of Adrian’s slightly burned hair they were probably right.
Askit was following him via a small hover camera that served as his physical presence on what was essentially a battlefield. “You know, if you were just going to destroy the computer core, I don’t know why you needed me to come along in any capacity.”
Adrian grinned wickedly into the camera. “I needed you to use it to spread evidence to remote terminals, and besides, somebody else has to see me being this fucking awesome, don’t they? You’re recording it, right?”
“It’s good to see you’re enjoying yourself,” Askit replied, with a tone that more than suggested that he didn’t find it particularly good at all, “but this stunt has drawn public attention. The police will be swarming your position very shortly, at least they will once they clear the fire and wreckage.”
Adrian sighed, taking a moment to survey the devastation that he had caused. The building was well and truly on fire, it had been made an example of and while the public may never become aware of what had caused it the same could not be said for the top end of town. If they thought they could fight back in the shadows, striking at each others forces while remaining above it all, they were sadly mistaken.
The Coro Cavan corporation had been dealt a blow it may never recover from. Today its leadership group had died, its building had burned and its records were being systematically destroyed by the virus Askit had loaded onto it. This would undoubtedly raise the stakes in the game, but that just meant some players would fold.
“I hope that means they’ll be a while, because I don’t really want a shootout with the fucking cops,” Adrian said. “What’s the fastest way out of here?”
“I’ve had Gdugnir standing by since you started your rampage of arson and slaughter,” Askit replied testily. “Get to the rooftop.”
“Yeah…” Adrian drawled uncomfortably, “my problem with that plan is that the elevator has been destroyed and the upper floors are on fire, and thanks to all this hair I’m really fucking flammable.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Askit replied. “Gdugnir doesn’t want to try getting lower towards street level either, in case she attracts police attention, so there’s really only one other option.”
Adrian had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the other option. “I’ve got to tell you my Plan Bs usually fucking suck. What’s the other option?”
“How do you feel about sewers?”
“Not fucking great,” Adrian replied. “If I’m going to have to wade through shit, I prefer my chances with the fucking cops.”
“Wading… sometimes I think I’ve finally understood the depths of awfulness of your planet, Adrian,” Askit said in undisguised disgust, “and yet you always manage to surprise me.”
Despite Askit’s attitude problem, his outburst was a good sign. You didn’t normally think about it but any day you didn’t spend knee deep in in alien turds wasn’t as bad as it might get. “No wading then?”
“Sewers contain pipelines for fecal matter, but they are mainly access shafts for power, water and other services,” Askit told him. “I’m directing the camera to guide you to the buildings access point, try to keep up.”
That was no effort of course, under gravity the hover cams had a top speed equivalent to a slow jog, and that gave Adrian plenty of time to make sure that he wasn’t being followed by the police, or by anything else. Nothing managed to approach him, however, so he figured everyone else in the building must be either dead or trying to get the fuck out of it.
“What are the cops doing?” Adrian asked as he reached the access door, built into the wall of the second sublevel where he hadn’t yet spread too much destruction. He would have thought that critical infrastructure, such as the corporate servers, would be located in an easily defensible location such as this, but it didn’t seem like aliens thought along those lines. “They’re not going to be on my arse while I go underground, are they?”
“They’re a bit distracted by the fire and the terrified crowds,” Askit replied dryly. “They won’t be going in without assistance from the fire department. You should be able to get out clean.”
Good enough, Adrian thought, and forced open the access door. He had half-expected the stench of rancid sewerage, but the air was clean and cool. The worst that could be said for the place was that the spaces were cramped for a being of his size, having clearly been designed to provide comfortable space for Corti technicians and nobody else. There was a good side to that too, of course, because while Corti police could follow freely the same could not be said of the Robo-Slugs.
“I’m going to direct you to a street-level access point some distance away,” Askit told him. “You’ll have to acquire a streetcab to get back to base. The fire services have dispatched aerial fire suppressors and Gdugnir has had to pull away.”
That was good, Adrian thought; there was no way that the building would be structurally sound after the damage he’d done to it, but if they managed to contain the fire it meant that nobody who didn’t need to get involved would get involved. There wasn’t any reason that Adrian needed to step further into the realm of corporate terrorism than he already had.
“You’ll be glad to know that it’s already all over the news,” Askit told him. “There must be fifty surveillance drones in the air to record what’s happening to the building.”
“What are they saying happened?” Adrian asked. There was no helping the fact that it had clearly been an attack, but they’d done their best to obscure any information that could link it to a blue-hairy biped. The security system had been part of the central computer, and that was a pile of molten slag. They didn’t have any off-site location getting the same information, and Askit had been surprised at the very suggestion that this might be done.
“There are lots of conflicting reports,” Askit replied. “Everybody was confused by the distractions you detonated in the parking lot. Some are already making the connection to your distraction at Iridis Industries, however, and the fact that Jekal did his sun-dive so recently is not being overlooked.”
“So what does that boil down to?” Adrian asked. Despite having now lived amongst aliens for years, he had still remained a somewhat willful ignorance of their news and entertainment networks. He had always found that he had enough shit around him he didn’t understand without needing to tip the news from the galaxy in with the rest of it.
“It means they’re positing that some violent faction has emerged who has it in for corporations,” Askit told him. “Which was basically what we wanted. Nothing is coming through about any ‘blue haired biped’, but I’m seeing a fair bit about a weapon that shot fire and the laughing maniac who was shooting it.”
“They were all paying attention to the gun?” Adrian asked, a little surprised but not exactly displeased. It wasn’t unusual for humans to focus on useless things when they were put in a high-stress situation, and it sometimes took considerable training to learn how to pay attention to the right things. That they’d entirely ignored the blue-hairy beast who was holding the gun in favour of the gun itself was unusual.
“It is a terrifying weapon,” Askit replied, “so that is not surprising. Ah, news networks are predicting the end of Coro Cavan as a major corporation as a result of this attack. They seem to be suggesting that an attack of this nature must mean that Coro Cavan is involved in some very shady things.”
“They’re not wrong,” Adrian said, satisfaction of a job well done bringing half of a smile to his face. “When should we move ahead with the rest of the plan?”
“My access to the Iridis Industries servers has allowed me to upload a number of secret documents that can be leaked at any time,” Askit replied. “I just have to send a tip to the news networks and they’ll do the rest.”
“What do you think the public will make of a secret war between corporations turning into a public scene like this?” Adrian asked, now that the plan was fully underway. They had discussed it beforehand, of course, but that had just been speculation on how the news networks would run with the story. Now that they were actually reporting it, Adrian and his team would need to be careful to time their next move for maximum effect.
“I think it will proceed as discussed,” Askit replied. “Corti are predictable due to our practical natures, so it is likely that the Directorate will need to respond with a crack-down on corporate freedoms, and they’ll need to respond right away.”
“And what about Her-bird?” Adrian asked. He was still reliant upon the Corti Councilor to have him turned back into his normal human self, and didn’t relish the idea of spending the rest of his life with blue hair and getting full body waxings. They’d informed the Councilor about their plan, this time, even if they had left out the general details. Hrbrd had been terse, but had agreed to the action so long as he wasn’t implicated.
“The Councilor is already on the news denouncing the attack,” Askit replied. “Saying that ‘violence in our streets cannot be tolerated, no matter who was behind it’.”
“So in other words he’s all for it.” Adrian assessed. “Or at least he’s happy to get the leverage. There’s no way that any sane corporation will want to get this kind of treatment, and he already looks like the good guy when the corporations get the blame pinned on them.”
“Your ability to comprehend the Councilor’s plans really scares the shit out of me, Adrian,” Askit replied. “Did I ever tell you that I’m glad I’m on your side?”
“I kind of figured you might be, mate,” Adrian said, grinning from ear to ear as he finally emerged back into street level into an alleyway. “I kind of figured you might be.”
+++++
Cosmic Delight, Heavy Freighter, Ckteth Trading Lane, Celzi Alliance Space
Hunters did not enjoy being set on fire. That was a cathartic discovery, if not a surprising one, and Jen had ordered Trycrur to put a few things together to exploit this particular weakness.
The result had been small, purpose built remote-controlled tanks that spewed clouds of plasma like the modified plasma-based heavy cutters had aboard the Zhadersil. These were much smaller, of course, and couldn’t blanket such a large amount of space in superheated matter, but for boarding actions they were horrifically effective.
Combining them with Hunter-scramblers, the devices used to interfere with their communications, had been the masterstroke that made each tank capable of taking on several Hunters simultaneously.
The downside was that the place always stank of badly burned meat when they did board them, and the stench was nearly impossible to completely get rid of.
They had been named the ‘Hellhounds’ by Jen thanks to their plasma-spewing abilities and then painted red, in the same way she had named the barrel-shaped probe the ‘Monkey Barrel’ and had it painted green. Reminders of home, as well as the amusement of an in-joke that she alone was privy to.
The Hunters had been dealt with with excessive force, the only way to deal with them effectively, and now the crew dragged their corpses to a free airlock to be jettisoned into space while Jen herself sat down with the ship master of the Ardene Corda – the largest freighter vessel they’d encountered on this particular run – to go over what was expected of him. He was a Vzk’tk, and that was not a species normally found within the Alliance, especially in positions of authority. The Vzk’tk Domain was part of the Dominion, after all, and all Vzk’tk to her knowledge – with the exception of pirates – were part of the Domain.
“Your name?” she asked him, knowing already that she would be unable to pronounce it.
“Jkv’tkr,” he answered obediently. He was scared, but not as scared as he had been of the Hunters, and Jen had made no secret of who she was. Word had spread far enough, now, that everybody knew you could live if you were robbed by the Zhadersil, so long as you cooperated, even if you went away in financial ruin.
“I’m going to call you Jack,” Jen told him flatly. “You already know what we’re going to demand?”
“You’re going to take my ship, aren’t you?” Jack asked, although it wasn’t really a question.
“I’m going to take your ship,” Jen confirmed. “I’m also going to take the Hunter ship. Your crew and yourself will be disembarked in local space near an outpost world, provisioned with more than enough medical gear and food to aid you on your short journey.”
“Please, Pirate Queen…” Jack said, surprising her. It was rare for anyone to identify her personally, and even rarer for anyone to say anything with any kind of respect approaching what she had just been given. “Please… this ship is my home. It is my family’s home! We have suffered enough losses today, I beg that you do not take my ship as well!”
“What is your cargo?” Jen asked, continuing with her normal questioning. This wasn’t the first sob-story she’d heard, and it wouldn’t be the last, but if she was to start making concessions they’d soon lose their fear of her and the Zhadersil in general. That wasn’t something she could afford.
“Please, Pirate Queen…” Jack whined, clearly willing to debase himself before her with pathetic complaining.
“Listen to me!” Jen said sharply, not about to spend her time on this. Her temper had remarkably shortened in the last few months, as had her patience. “We have just given you your lives! Without us you and your family would be feeding the Hunters, and yet here you are with your surviving crew getting medical attention instead!”
Jack’s eyes were downcast at her admonishment, and his whole body seemed to sag dejectedly. It was bizarre to see a blue giraffe sag dejectedly, and strangely hilarious, but Jen managed to keep her amusement under control.
“Your cargo?” she repeated.
“We’re transporting high tech medical gear to a Class Eight world,” Jack told her. “Eight fabricators and the assembly kit for intended for the colonial lathe.”
Jen sighed. Despite being a pirate she had the reputation to maintain for not being a completely heartless bitch. If there were medical supplies intended for a colony, they’d undoubtedly need them, but she didn’t need to be so generous as to give them all of them, and although Jack was a Vzk’tk and therefore utterly hopeless at deception, she wasn’t about to accept the details of the cargo sight unseen.
“Provided you are telling the truth, we’ll be taking half of the medical gear, six of the fabricators and the assembly kit,” she told Jack. “You can keep your ship, but we’ll be going over it for any useful parts you don’t require to remain functional.”
Jack was almost too stunned for words. “Th-thank you, Pirate Queen!” he blurted out once he’d found his tongue.
“It’s the people on that colony you should be thanking,” Jen told him, although she was aware that the story of her generosity would get around soon enough. It was a practical decision more than a generous one, however – doing this sort of thing cultivated a level of goodwill amongst the Celzi worlds that other pirates had never achieved, in spite of the fact that she was still robbing them. “I won’t steal medicine from those who need it, not all of it anyway.”
“You are too generous, Pirate Queen!” Jack informed her.
She smiled knowingly. “Thank you, Shipmaster,” she said, “I know.”
Date Point 3 Years 2 Weeks After Vancouver
Cimbrean
“That brings us to seventeen Hunter vessels,” Chir reported. “With the new components we just brought in, we’ll be able to expand the machining center and get the damaged ones fixed ahead of schedule. Trycrur will be pleased.”
“Make sure we keep the cloaking project as our main focus,” Jen said. “More ships for a fight is fine, but if we can avoid that fight altogether it’d be far better for us all. With the Monkey Barrel and the Hellhounds in play, we should be able to increase the number of vessels we can harvest.”
Her communicator link lit up and beeped, priority call from the tech station. “Excuse me, Chir,” she said, frowning as she took the call; anything from the tech station was usually going to be important or bad news. Or both.
“This is Jen,” she said as it connected.
“This is Lead Tech Hargit,” the other side replied, and Jen seemed to remember the name belonging to one of Chir’s Gaoians who had joined on during their time at Irbzrk. “We’ve detected an inbound vessel, very small and fast. It looks like it’s ready to run, but it’s hailing us.”
“And?” Jen asked, knowing they wouldn’t have contacted her if that was all there was.
“It’s obeyed orders to come to a full stop,” Hargit continued, “and asked for you. We followed your orders on maintaining secrecy over the presence of yourself – being a human – but they requested a message be delivered.”
That was strange, and Jen had the feeling this was going to become one of the ‘bad news’ notifications. “What message?”
“A question…” Hargit relayed, “‘What’s the craic?'”
Jen paused; that was a saying she hadn’t heard someone else say in a long time, not since she’d left Earth. She’d once said it to Adrian, and he’d proceeded to look for the structural fault he thought she was referring to until she realised she’d needed to correct him.
It was a saying native to Northern Ireland – roughly equating to ‘how are things?’, or ‘what’s happening?’ – and not the sort of thing that you’d easily find out in space or being directed as a secret message to anyone if you didn’t know a lot about who they were. “Escort them in.”
“As you say,” Hargit replied. “I’ll direct them to landing zone four.”
The link disconnected and Jen shifted her attention to a confused looking Chir. “‘What’s the craic?'” he asked.
“Something fucking crazy, Chir,” Jen replied, thinking over the possibilities, all of which excited her and all of which worried her. “I think we’re about to have some interesting visitors. Make sure they’re escorted to my office.”
“Escorted?” Chir asked meaningfully.
“Use a Hellhound on remote control,” Jen told him, “but the escorts are to be unarmed. Make sure our ‘guests’ are aware that it is built to handle everything.”
“I’ll personally involve myself in this one if you don’t mind,” Chir said. “I don’t want anybody else in charge of that thing in case they get nervous.”
“I was going to ask you to do that anyway,” Jen replied. “Get two others to do the actual escorting, but I want that Hellhound present at all times.”
“If it needs to fire, it will cause casualties amongst our own, possibly you included,” Chir reminded her with concern.
Jen nodded. “I know that and so do you, but they don’t and those things look damned menacing, they do. Get them to my office and I’ll take care of the rest.”
+++++
Darragh Houston. Just turned twenty, until recently under the impression he was the only one from Mother Ireland to have been introduced to the cosmic community and currently very uncomfortable in the presence of a very attractive redheaded Irish girl who appeared to have some kind of dangerous space weapon pointed at his man parts.
Come to think of it he wasn’t sure whether it was the gun or the girl who looked more dangerous, but right now he was willing to put them on a par and work it out better later on. Presuming, in fact, that he experienced a ‘later on.’ There was still the killer robot in the room, after all.
So from the way things were right now it wasn’t looking good.
“So…” he said conversationally, “that’s an interesting deadly robot you’ve got there. One of the Gaoians told me it was your idea!”
“We’re not here to talk about me,” the Irish girl he assumed to be Jennifer Delaney replied. “We’re here to talk about you. I’ve got all day, so don’t bother holding back.”
“Do you think we could do without the gun?” he asked. “I’m harmless, really. What ah… what sort of gun is that, anyway? I’ve not seen any like it out here.”
“It shoots a small metal bolt at high speed using kinetic technology,” Jennifer Delaney informed him flatly. “This one includes a powerful electric shock intended to subdue a target.”
That was an impressive sounding device that Darragh would have preferred pointing anywhere else. He knew she was attempting to intimidate him – of course she would, since this was apparently her impressive operation and he’d come unannounced and possibly unwanted – but knowing that it was an intimidation tactic certainly did not stop it from working.
“But again,” Jennifer Delaney said, “we’re here to talk about you.”
“Ah, well…” Darragh replied, fumbling for words. It always seemed so easy to talk about yourself when you didn’t have a lightning harpoon pointed at your genitals. “What’s to say? My name is Darragh Houston; I’m originally from Larne; I was abducted from a beach in Ballygalley after my girlfriend broke up with me when I was sixteen, and after I escaped from my captors I found work Stevedoring on Ugom. Oh, and I just turned twenty!”
“Happy birthday,” Jennifer Delaney said dryly. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“Well…” Darragh replied, starting to sweat. This was easily the most difficult interview he’d had in his life, although he’d really only had a few when he was trying to get a part time job in the fast food industry so he could drum up some extra dosh. “I got picked up by this white giraffe guy named Kirk – well that’s what we were all calling him anyway – and-“
“What you were all calling him?” Jennifer Delaney interrupted him sharply. That was a little rude, but at least she’d taken an interest in something besides pointing that destroyer of manhood at him.
“He was going around gathering humans, you see,” Darragh quickly said. “He was trying to get some of us home, the ones of us who wanted to, anyway. Most did because most didn’t want those fecking Hunters crawling up their arses.”
Her gaze seemed to harden in a worrying manner. “I must have been overlooked, I suppose,” she said, and he could have sworn that for a moment he had heard a tremble in her voice. That gun did not tremble though, he had to give her credit on that.
“Ah, well…” Darragh replied, lost for what to say. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to? There was a long list of people and this was dangerous space, you see?”
“So why are you here and not back on Earth?” Jennifer Delaney asked him. She did not beat around the bush; Darragh normally liked that in a woman – or he thought he would have liked that in a woman if he’d really seen all that many in the past few years – but it was potentially more endearing without firearms involved.
“I was supposed to give you a message,” Darragh said, glad to finally be coming to this part. He began to reach for his pocket, and froze as she scowled. “Just… it’s in my pocket.”
She relented, so he continued, taking out the folded note. He went to pass it to her, but she shook her head.
“You’ll be reading it out loud,” she said. “I need to keep pointing my gun at the right place.”
“It’s quite long,” he told her, hoping maybe that would change things. He could see by her face that it did not.
“Abridged, then,” she told him with a cool smile.
Darragh swallowed hard, looking down at the letter and glancing over it. He’d read through it, of course, and normally he could have told anyone what it was all about. Right now he was unable to recall anything about its content whatsoever and found himself reading it again as if for the first time.
“Ah,” he said, “well, it’s from Doctor Anees Hussein… he’s the ambassador of humans to the Dominion if you didn’t know.”
“I don’t care much for politics,” she replied. “Keep going.”
“Oh… well… he hopes you’re well…” Darragh continued, aware he was sounding like an idiot. “He also wants to let you know that humans have FTL now. How about that, right?”
“That won’t help those inside the barrier,” Jennifer replied. “Not unless you’ve got a worm hole, as my understanding goes.”
“Yes! That’s the next bit!” Darragh continued. “He wants to you to help with that.”
“I think people would notice if we stole a wormhole beacon,” Jennifer replied thoughtfully. “That doesn’t make it impossible…”
“No, no… wait, you could do that?” Darragh asked in surprise.
Jennifer shrugged. “We’ve already stolen a full cruiser.”
Darragh almost laughed, albeit from amusement at what was done, or in a kind of horror that they’d actually tried and succeeded in doing it, he wasn’t sure. “He wasn’t sure whether you could even manage something like that, and I actually think he had something else in mind in the event that you didn’t. He says that to help Earth he needs you not to keep beating the Celzi quite so badly.”
That really got her attention. “The Dominion are paying me to do otherwise,” she said sharply. “If I start acting in bad faith…”
“I don’t think he wants anything like that, but he’d like you not to bring down their ability to fight the Dominion, or at least not yet,” Darragh explained. “It’s alright right here in the letter! They want you to help get Earth into space! They’re offering to make this a colony, and you the colonial governor!”
“Governor?!” Jennifer laughed. “Me? I’m a pirate! I worked in I.T! What do I know about running a colony?”
Darragh looked around awkwardly; the office was incredibly ornate and well furnished, and from what he’d seen so far Jennifer’s operation was a sizable one. “You seem to do well enough with what you’ve got here!”
“This is a stolen mansion on a stolen planet, full of stolen ships and other stolen things and people who steal them,” Jennifer told him. “Governor Delaney? I wouldn’t know the first damned thing about running a community!”
“Don’t tell me!” Darragh protested. “Doctor Hussein’s the one appointing you to the position!”
“Fecking hell!” she cursed, leaning back, yet this in no way affecting her aim.
“So about that gun…” he said, glancing at it. “What if I promise I’ll behave?”
She sighed, and lowered the gun. “Well, it’s not like you’d get far even if you did try anything, and you don’t look like the last two guys.”
Darragh raised his eyebrow at that revelation. “The last two guys?”
“My last two encounters with humans ended on a particularly sour note,” she told him with a grimace. “The most recent was a mass-murdering English psychopath who very nearly had his chance to torture and kill me. The one before that was an Australian psychopath who tried to ‘protect me’ from the Hunters by strangling me unconscious and then going off to wage bloody war on them.”
Darragh blinked. “Are you talking about Adrian Saunders?”
“Oh great, now he’s so famous that he’s got a statue and a groupie,” Jennifer said bitterly. “There’s probably a song about him too, by now.”
“But there’s a statue of him on Irbzrk!” Darragh said, confused. “They say he saved everybody on the station!”
“There’s a lot more to that story than meets the eye,” Jennifer replied. “And besides, that statue was supposed to be gone. Some big blue hairy thing took some kind of flamethrower to the thing!”
“Well it’s back now,” Darragh told her. “Along with the statue of the big blue hairy thing. I think they called it an ‘Umanhay’, although I’ve never heard of it before.”
Jennifer froze, and Darragh had the feeling he’d said the wrong sort of thing. The way she looked it seemed like somebody was going to die and as he was there and she had a very unpleasant sort of gun he suspected that it may well be him.
“Oh,” she said, slowly and with a voice that trembled with anger, “that complete and utter fucking arsehole…”