Date Point Three Years Seven Months Three Weeks After Vancouver
The Five-Fingers, Pirate Salvage Vessel, Far Reaches
“All I’m saying is that we can’t keep calling it Carltopia,” Darragh argued. “I mean we’ve been talking about renaming it for the last six months, let’s do something about it! We could suggest a few names, and put it to a vote!”
Keffa rolled her eyes, this wasn’t the first time the human had started talking about this, and it wouldn’t be the last. She thoroughly suspected that even if the name should change he’d just find something new to complain about. She actually suspected that his annoying nature was the real reason he’d been transferred from the loading dock to the pirate base’s more legitimate enterprise in recovering the vessels the pirates left adrift and returning them to their owners for a significant salvage fee.
As usual, Keffa had been lumped with the ‘privilege’, as though it had become some sort of running joke to hand her all of the worst jobs. Maybe it had, but somehow she still managed to turn a profit good enough to piss on them all.
“If you suggest ‘Pirate-topia’ again,” she warned, “I may have to eject you from this ship.”
“No need for that,” he replied. “I admit that one was a bit unoriginal. What about ‘Corsairia’?”
“This is not a big ship,” Keffa continued. “The airlock is right there!”
Darragh sighed, sometimes it seemed like Keffa delighted in making him feel bad. “I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then.”
“Look, I’m not saying that all of your suggestions are bad,” Keffa told him. “I’m just saying that nobody likes them.”
“That’s the same thing!” Darragh objected. “If nobody likes them, they are by definition bad suggestions.”
“I’m not going to have another argument over the objective nature of reality,” Keffa replied. “If I have to do that, then I’ll be the one jumping out that airlock.”
“You’re a mean woman sometimes, Keffa,” Darragh told her. “Oh, I have another one, it’s-“
“Signal,” Keffa said as a ping flashed up on her console. “Distant… weird, looks like a life pod. Probably not worth it, especially since it’s so close to a singularity.”
“Wait a moment,” Darragh protested, “we can’t just go leaving people stranded near a black hole. We’ve got to go pick them up!”
Keffa looked at Darragh as if he were some fresh idiot just off of his homeworld for the first time. That might be the way it worked aboard military vessels, and in the vicinity of actual civilised space, but this was the Far Reaches and nobody did shit for free out here. “I’ll need a better reason than ‘because it’s the right thing to do’,” she told him. “This is a business, after all.”
“We pick up space garbage,” Darragh replied, more disdainfully than Keffa cared to hear. “That’s garbage, but who knows what else might be inside? Who else might be inside. What if it’s somebody rich, and they want to give their rescuer a big reward? You’ll be missing out on that!”
Keffa sighed. It really wasn’t that far off her intended route – not that she was going to let Darragh know that – and it didn’t cost much except time to go check it out, then if it turned out to be worthless she could just dump it back into space somewhere closer to anywhere. “This better not turn out to be some sort of Hunter trap,” she warned. “I’ll just let them have you if it is.”
“You’re a human too!” Darragh shot back. “They’re not going to just let you go!”
“They might if I’ve been adding marinade to your shower cycles,” she replied. It was bullshit but he was easy game that way, and it was kind of fun to play around with him.
He looked at her with disbelief. “No you don’t…”
Then, as usual, he seemed to hesitate as she didn’t immediately give up on her lie, and began to sniff his skin. “I… don’t smell anything.”
“How is it that you can be so clever and yet so incredibly gullible?” she asked him with a sigh. She wasn’t even sure that it was fun anymore; more than anything it was getting to be kind of sad.
“I always liked to think of it as being trusting,” Darragh lamented. “But my last girlfriend said the same thing.”
“Whoa… I am not your girlfriend, Darragh,” Keffa said immediately. “Let’s just draw that line right now. I will actually get a pen and draw a line if that is what it takes. Will I need to do that?”
Darragh deflated. “You won’t need to do that.”
“Alright,” she said more kindly, “go get ready. If it’s a pod we’ve got to bring it aboard, so that means scrubbers and gun-bots. Don’t forget to wear a combat vac-suit, the other sort is fucking useless against anything with a decent cutting edge. And bring one of those Irbzrk stun-guns in case it’s something dangerous.”
Darragh sighed again. “Yes, Keffa.”
Keffa watched the poor Earth-born idiot wander off to do what she told him. He wasn’t so bad, really, but despite years working on a loading dock, working with pirates, and having supposedly helped to repel an overwhelming attack, he still seemed like the sort of aimless fool who ended up at the bottom of the galactic scrap heap.
In short, she had no idea just what the fuck she was going to do with him.
+++++
Carltopia, the Outer Cluster
It was morning, or at least that was the time of day they’d decided to call it. The term became rather loose on the inside of an asteroid, but the natives – or at least the inhabitants who’d come earlier – had already made all of these decisions and despite the fact that Chir himself found the day and night cycle a little too short, the effort and arguments involved in getting that changed were simply not worth it.
This morning he was busy with the same routine he followed every fifth morning; a trip around Carltopia – they still needed to do something about that name – to visit all of the important people. Once upon a time all he’d had to do was outline strategies with Jen to bring down the Celzi Alliance interplanetary economy, but now he found himself run off his feet with simple administration. At some point he’d made the transition from simple strategist to base commander and that had brought with it a surprising amount of useless messing around that you didn’t find in a purely military group.
Little wonder why Zripob had been so eager to hand off actual control of the base so that he could get back to raiding; the stress of actually running the place was enough to whiten Chir’s fur before its time.
“Systems Master!” he called out as he reached the technological core of the base. “Time for our meeting.”
Systems Master Kul-Savek turned his eyes towards Chir in a way that he found entirely discomforting. The eyes were on stalks, and were capable of independent movement, and the rest of the body was just as unpleasant. The Versa Volc were a race that resembled the Allebenellin in many ways, but size was not one of them. Like the Allebenellin they made extensive use of robotics to assist them, but they preferred grafting the devices into their bodies rather than simply wearing them. In Kul-Savek’s case this was particularly evident in the half dozen legs he needed to carry around his excessive bulk.
“Base Commander!” the creature chortled, an unpleasant wet, sucking sound. “Time got away from me!”
“I’m not a man to criticize you for working hard,” Chir assured him. The Systems Master was a good worker and, when Chir didn’t actually have to be in his disgusting presence he didn’t dislike the fellow.
He was just glad that this was just a small meeting every five days.
“Well you’ll be pleased to hear that our cloaking grid has just reached seventy percent completion,” Kul-Savek informed him. “Ahead of schedule-“
“Revised schedule,” Chir corrected. The project had been started with an overly optimistic finishing date, and considering that they were reliant on harvesting vessels for the cloaking emitters, it was some sort of miracle that they were as far as they’d gotten. The revised schedule was more relaxed, and thus far they’d hardly fallen behind at all.
“Ahead of revised schedule,” Kul-Savek continued. “And nearing completion of the infrastructure needed to install the emitters. Provided we get them.”
“Commander Zripob has made that his priority,” Chir assured him, and not for the first time. “What about the secondary cores?”
“Two in place!” Kul-Savek beamed. “Last tests due within three days, and then they’ll be live.”
“Good work,” Chir said approvingly. The secondary cores would prevent everything from turning to shit if the primary core went down. That meant at least some gravity, and more importantly all the air, would stay around, but it also gave them extra power to everything else if it was ever required.
“May I ask about the progress with the defensive matrix?” Kul-Savek queried. “I had heard that we’ve put together something quite outstanding.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Chir told him. “They’re at twenty percent along the first stage. The entrances are complete, though. That should help if the Hunters decide to hit us.”
Kul-Savek tensed at the mention of the creatures, and Chir was reminded that most people still found them as terrifying as he once had. Now he saw them for what they were, dangerous but not unstoppable, and he and Zripob had trained the men to think likewise.
That was an attitude that kept them alive.
“Well then,” Chir said, turning to go. “See you in five-“
“I did want to talk about the FTL drive,” Kul-Savek added quickly. “We’re making progress, but the asteroid has an unexpectedly high mass. I need more power to make it work.”
“Systems Master Kul-Savek,” Chir said, “you will be glad to know that I have a pair of humans scouring the Far Reaches for additional reactors as we speak. Who knows what they might have found?”
+++++
The Five-Fingers, Pirate Salvage Vessel, Far Reaches
The Five-Fingers was not, technically speaking, a small ship. It was a Cpkek class freighter – although Keffa preferred to pronounce it as ‘Cupcake’ – and had been extensively redesigned for the work it now found itself doing. That redesign had taken most of Keffa’s life savings at the time, and given the political climate she’d rebuilt it with the expectation that she would be pretty much going it alone. That meant that two of the five living quarters had been knocked out, and a third had been turned into a stasis food storage chamber; all that added up to living areas too small to swing a gricka in.
Darragh had joined her shortly after she had arrived in the loading bay amidst a flurry of automated activity. The scrubbers were all on standby as the auto-retrievers drew the life pod into position, while gun-bots encircled it as it moved; there had probably never been a more attended-to piece of salvage in galactic history.
“Who knows what we might have found?” Darragh enthused as the life pod was drawn in to the loading bay. “It’s almost like unwrapping Christmas presents.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Keffa replied. She’d heard of Christmas, of course; her own mother had told her all about it, while she was still alive, and in Keffa’s experience it was something that Earth-borns never seemed to shut up about. That and birthdays, as though either of them made any kind of difference out here.
The life pod set down into the area she had designated, and the scrubbers immediately got to work. Within seconds all bacteria that might have survived the journey through deep space would be purged, and Keffa and Darragh would be able to remove their helmets. Keffa knew that the risk of such a bacteria was low, astronomically low in fact, but she was not a woman who took many chances, and that mindset had thus far let her survive situations others had not.
“Looks brand new,” she said, giving the pod a quick visual assessment. There was always something about an older life pod that you could pick, even if you didn’t recognise the model. They were normally well maintained, but still… it got so that you could just tell. “I don’t recognise the model, though.”
That was a good sign, she thought. She was familiar with most life-pods – although it wasn’t like there were that many to be familiar with – but something so new that she didn’t recognise it might have all kinds of shiny gadgets. New life pods came with FTL, stasis and kinetics, and all of those things could fetch a decent profit.
That was worth a grin and a half. “Maybe today’s not going to be a total waste. Run her through the database and see what she comes up as.”
“I’ve already started the scan,” Darragh replied, surprising her. It was rare to see the boy – she called him that even though he was technically older than her – making himself useful without being told what needed to be done.
“There might be hole for you yet,” she said approvingly. “What did we get?”
“It says ‘No Match’,” he replied, looking up at her in confusion. “I thought you said this had every known vessel configuration on here?”
“I said it had every vessel configuration on there,” Keffa replied tersely, and held out and expected hand. “Give.”
Darragh handed it over with an annoyed glare. “Maybe it’s just too new for your database?”
“Nothing’s that new,” she replied, letting the device scan the pod again, “and especially not out here in the ass end of creation.”
The datapads busy light flashed madly, data flickering across the screen as it continued to fail to find any match, and when the answer finally came up it was the same as before. There was no match, and that did not make sense.
“This doesn’t make sense,” she said, staring at the answer with a mix of frustration and confusion. “This is supposed to be getting a database update every time I make port.”
Darragh replied with something, but Keffa was too busy staring at the life pod to listen. Things weren’t adding up, and she hated when things didn’t add up. Those were the times she would normally cut and run, but doing that over a life pod was more cowardly than she would allow herself to be; the day she ran from a tiny ship like this, while surrounded by the heavily armed gun bots that kept her ship safe from unwanted intruders.
“What about the diagnostics?” she asked, deciding that she wasn’t quite willing to give up on it yet. Curiosity might have killed the gricka, but the gricka wasn’t backed by ten gun-bots toting twin anti-tank guns.
“I’ll start running them now,” Darragh obeyed, taking up another datapad and linking in to the Five-Fingers’ internal scanning systems. “Looks like about six months in the void. No FTL-“
“Fuck,” Keffa cursed; FTL drives could be worth something if they were essentially new.
“-and kinetics are fully drained,” Darragh finished. “But the stasis field is active, so it looks like someone managed to get on board.”
“Peachy,” Keffa replied unhappily. “Get the rest of the gun-bots here and we’ll open her up. Hopefully the gooey center isn’t too gooey.”
+++++
Hierarchy Life Pod
Askit stared at the fist, utterly perplexed as to why Adrian had made it and why he now held it out. The human had a history of strange behaviour, however, so he experimentally mimicked the motion to see what would happen.
What happened, as it turned out, was even more bizarre. With the utmost care, Adrian gently tapped his fist against Askit’s, and then opened it as he pulled away, fingers gesticulating slowly, and for whatever reason this movement required Adrian to make explosion noises with his mouth.
Askit studied the strange behaviour, trying to determine just what in the void was actually going on, but quickly decided that the answer must lay beyond mere observation. “Maybe now you can tell me what in the void it was that I just took part in?”
“That was a fist bump,” Adrian said, giving the act a name that aptly described it but no kind of reasoning behind it. “I like to add the explosion.”
Well, thought Askit, if he’d already decided that he was going to take part in the act, he may as well go all the way. He opened his fist and flexed his fingers in the same way Adrian had, or at least as close as he could manage. “Bang.”
“‘Bang’?” Adrian repeated, looking for all the world like he’d just tasted something disgusting. “Mate, that’s the most woeful fucking explosion I’ve ever heard.”
Askit tried again. “Boooooom.”
Once again this flat intonation had so completely failed to meet Adrian’s exacting standards as to what sound an explosion should make when verbalised that he sighed in dismay. “Just hit the fucking stasis button.”
“I did that before this whole ‘fist bump’ enterprise,” Askit replied. “Our rescuers are at the door, and it only took…”
He looked at the current date and sighed. “(Six months). Well, better late than never.”
“You can’t be fucking serious?” Adrian asked, shocked. “We had a beacon!”
“We’re in the Far Reaches,” Askit replied. “We’re lucky it wasn’t (six years).”
Adrian frowned. “Yeah, well it’s still a long fucking time. Who the fuck knows what’s going out there? A whole shitload of bad news can happen in six months.”
“Well, it’s not getting any less shitty waiting for us,” Askit decided, and slid out of his chair with the aid of his good arm. He hoped that these people had some sort of medical facilities, because his injuries were really becoming extremely distracting.
“Let’s go see what’s out there then,” Adrian agreed with a sigh. “It can’t be much fucking worse than the shit we’ve just come through.”
“That’s the spirit,” Askit replied. “If you would be so kind as to get the-“
He was interrupted by a pair of stumpy fusion blades sliding through the door with a loud hiss.
“-door.” he ended, staring at what was happening as the blades began to rotated around a central point. It seemed as though they were cutting a large circle out of the life pod’s tiny hull, which would only be big enough to remove most of the door.
“What the fuck is that?” Adrian asked, equally stunned by the situation. “It looks like some sort of fuckin… hole cutter.”
“As usual your mastery of the obvious serves to delight and amaze,” Askit replied sarcastically, feeling more than a little unnerved by the sudden application of far more force than was necessary to get into a life pod that was by no means locked. “I think they’re just cutting their way in.”
“We better hope that’s the case,” Adrian said, brandishing the short fusion cutter in a manner that plainly suggested he didn’t think much of it. “Otherwise we’re shit out of luck.”
The fusion blades vanished once they had completed the circle, and a grating noise informed them that the circle was being lifted free in favour of a hole big enough to walk through. That being the case Askit decided that the better part of valour would be to hide behind a chair and see what happened.
That was the sensible thing to do, so naturally Adrian did the exact opposite. He walked to the hole with a serious lack of caution and shouted “G’day” with all the cheer and bravado he could muster.
Then a flash of light and burst of power struck him in the helmet, and Adrian was suddenly on his back. He was screaming, although it quickly reduced to a dull moan, just as the flailing spasms reduced to a slight twitching.
That was a little bit unexpected.
“You know our wager ended (six months) ago, yes?” Askit asked him. He wasn’t going to give up fifteen million credits just because Adrian got himself shot in the face.
Adrian groaned, rolling over to face him. His helmet was scorched, and his face burned. He looked at Askit with wide, whitened eyes. “Mate,” he said with a gurgle, “I think I’m blind.”
+++++
The Five-Fingers, Pirate Salvage Vessel, Far Reaches
There was a lot that could change in a few seconds. A few seconds ago, Darragh had been the absolute pinnacle of readiness. He had been prepared, he had been alert, and he had been almost completely unafraid of anything suddenly springing out and eating his face.
That sort of thing was probably incredibly unlikely.
Keffa had even been generous enough to outfit him with the best equipment money could buy, as well as the best that could be cobbled together or stolen. That included the latest in combat hardened vacuum suits – coloured in shades of ugly brown as usual – and a brand new, top-of-the-line Irbzrkian ‘stun’ gun capable of dropping a human or a Vulza and flash frying just about everything else.
There had also been the twenty gun-bots that stood between him and the door to the life pod – that also helped on the matter of his courage – and Keffa had held her own stun gun ready for any kind of surprise attack that might emerge from the hole that was opening up.
Such as something given to suddenly springing out and eating faces; it wasn’t entirely possible, after all.
“Don’t worry,” she had said over the communicator, a grin in her voice. “If there’s anyone in there, they’re going to be pissing their pants at all of this.”
That had turned out to be entirely untrue.
The plan had been very reasonable when she had first explained it to him. It was that Darragh couldn’t have imagined anybody reacting all that well to having their little life pod sliced open by a glorified can-opener, and even if the occupants were armed it would be natural for them to take up positions and prepare for an attack.
That was when they were supposed to get the happy surprise of not being murdered, and instead getting rescued for a modest fee. Well… modest-ish.
Darragh thought that the main reason that this plan had failed is that it hinged on the occupants being both sane and reasonable, and at least one of the occupants had instead been Adrian Saunders.
That was exactly the sort of human being who thought it was appropriate to poke his head out in front of an army and shout “G’day” in that ridiculous Australian drawl.
It was practically begging to be shot in the face – accidentally, mind you – with a lightning spewing hand-cannon. That was especially the case when the bloke holding it was some poor fecking bastard with recurring nightmares about fighting alien slugs in mechanised doom suits.
Darragh wasn’t sure what was happening once the insane Australian recoiled out of sight, but he imagined it probably involved lots of convulsing while shouting the word ‘Fuck’. It was not an experience that Darragh had ever felt compelled to personally investigate, because quite frankly four hundred thousand volts sounded like a lot.
“So…” he said, as the reality of the situation began to fully dawn on him. “How about we just put this back where we found it?”
+++++
Even in the brief moment it had appeared in the circular opening, Keffa had been able able to recognise the face inside the helmet. She had seen it every time she made the run to Irbzrk, sometimes even when it took her out of her way. That had been the face of Galactic Hero, Adrian Saunders.
Also known as the man who began the Great Hunt; the Saviour of Irbzrk, and most recently filling a variety of interesting positions in Keffa’s own fantasies. He had been dead, so that sort of thing hadn’t been any weirder than her mother’s rather disturbing obsession with some sort of singing, gyrating entertainer from Earth.
“That was Adrian Saunders,” she said breathlessly, staring vacantly at the hole. It took a moment for reality to settle in, at which point she whirled to see Darragh staring equally vacantly at the weapon in his hands.
“You just shot Adrian Saunders!” she accused, but the fact seemed too big to really make any sense to her. Adrian Saunders was alive, she’d rescued him, and Darragh had shot him in the face with what amounted to a portable a lightning gun. This was not exactly the way he’d found her in those dreams.
She turned slightly away from Darragh so that he couldn’t see the rising flush in her cheeks. She was angry, she was horrified, she was wildly excited and just a little bit turned on.
“You just…” she began, not really sure how to best frame her words or even how to properly deliver them at this point.
Darragh did it for her. “I… think I just shot Adrian Saunders in the face with a stun gun.”
His voice was as the hollow as the look he gave her after speaking. “I might be about to die.”
“He’s supposed to be dead,” Keffa managed. “He was definitely not dead.”
“Fecking pity for me, that,” Darragh bemoaned. “You’re sure we can’t just throw it back out?”
“I pass by his statue whenever I go to Irbzrk,” she continued, not even really paying attention to the Earth-born idiot who’d just managed to shoot her crush. It seemed much more important that her crush was alive and in a position to be grateful to her for swooping to his rescue. Now there was the start of a whole new kind of dream!
“Statues,” Darragh corrected miserably. “He’s got two.”
“There’s only the one,” Keffa replied firmly. “Right next to it there’s just this blue-haired thing that supposedly stopped a crazy human who was killing everyone. They’re not related.”
“They’re both him!” Darragh muttered bitterly. “Some sort of awful disguise…”
“You’re serious?” she asked, trying to mentally compare the two statues and coming up short. There just didn’t seem to be a way for that to be the case, it didn’t fit together in any kind of way. “That’s got to be a load of bull-“
She was interrupted by someone new on her link; someone with a higher, slightly nasal voice. “Testing, one two three.”
“-shit,” she finished absently, thrown by the sudden intrusion into what was supposed to be a private communication system.
“Ah,” the voice continued. “We have a winner. We would like to discuss the terms of our surrender.”
“Terms of your surrender?” Keffa asked. “Who the fuck is this?”
“My name is Askit,” the voice replied, “and I am by far the second most remarkable person you will ever meet.”
“Who’s the first?” Keffa asked, staring towards the open hole in the life pod.
“That would be Adrian Saunders,” the voice named Askit replied. “And you’ve just shot him in the face.”