Poor Man's Fight (26 page)

Hardly anyone saw
Lauren move around him. She was considerably smaller than Parker—her head came up only to his shoulder—but she got behind him, driving her elbow up into his armpit with an audible “crack.”

Parker roared in pain.
Lauren slipped around in front of him. Her fist shot straight into his jaw. Staggered by the blow, Parker didn’t even register the leg that slipped in around his until Lauren shoved him back. He hit the ground hard.

“
Casey’s not in charge here!” Lauren barked loudly enough to silence all the cheers and commentary. “I am! I am the quartermaster of this voyage and I run this meeting! We will
not
attack our shipmates! We will
not
break faith!”

Her challenging gaze swept the crowd
. No one took her up on it. “We were in the middle of a vote on Casey,” Lauren huffed. “Any opposed? No? Fine. Casey wins.” With that, she stomped back to her chair.

The silence held
as Casey stepped forward. He passed the fallen Parker, leaving him to cough up blood where he lay. Casey held out his hand to help Darren up.

“Darren followed my instructions as captain to the letter,”
Casey announced to the crew. “Yes, he got rolled. Yes, he was conned. Maybe we all got screwed ‘cause Darren slipped up, but it was his first night here and he was alone. Maybe it’s my fault for not looking out for him better. Maybe it’s the fault of all of us for not looking out better for one another.”

He turned to look Darren in the eye. “Are you going to follow the ship’s rules we set down here?” he asked. “Are you gonna follow orders in battle? Look out for your mates? Fight like hell when the time comes?”

Darren almost answered with “yes, sir,” but then he remembered where he was. “Yeah,” he nodded, wiping the blood from his nose. “Yeah, I will.”

“Then I’ve got no problem with you.” He turned back to
Lauren. “The floor is yours,” he said with a bow and a flourish.

“Somebody get that asshole out of my sight,”
Lauren said, gesturing to Parker. “He’s lucky he pulled that before we hashed out our rules, or he’d be in much deeper shit right now.” She waited for a couple of other pirates to heft Parker up. The crowd parted as the men hauled Parker away, but they didn’t go far. They simply dumped Parker back to the ground just a few meters away from the edge of the crowd.

“On that note,”
Lauren continued, “the code. We work from the code of the last voyage.” She held up her holocom in the air, projecting a large image for all to see. It displayed a bullet-pointed list in bright letters. She set the flat projection to rotate slowly.

“One: One pirate, one vote, in all matters of the ship. We set course on a vote. We attack on a vote. We go home on a vote. All in favor?” The unanimous vote of approval, though a foregone conclusion, always boosted morale.

“Two: In combat or shipboard emergency, we follow the orders of the captain and officers without dispute. Every shipmate backs the officers in time of emergency. Every officer is just another shipmate at any other time. All in favor?” Again, consent was unanimous.

“Three: No mate shall strike another, nor steal from another. Disputes are brought to the quartermaster and settled under direction. All in favor?”

The measure met with loud approval. In many ways, the quartermaster wielded more power on the ship than the captain. She meted out justice. She maintained a semblance of order. Without a battle to fight or a disaster to manage, the captain was just another shipmate—surely the most influential, but still just a popular individual among equals.

“Four: Every mate shall stand watch with care. Every mate shall maintain weapons with care. Every mate shall answer to his mates for failure in either of these charges.” Again the crowd roared its approval.

It was all very simple, Darren considered, but that wasn’t much of a surprise. Nobody became a pirate without first becoming fed up with the restrictions and expectations of society at large. Religion or lack thereof, ethnicity, planet of origin, personal habits—outside of harmless banter, nobody gave a damn.

The final matter had to be handled with some slight delicacy.
Lauren cut the power to her holocomputer projection. “So on to our last item. One pirate, one share. I’m sure we all agree to that. Let’s talk extra shares and compensation.”

A new projection appeared. It listed the captain as getting three shares, the quartermaster two, and several other officers—all
still to be elected—receiving extra shares as well. That would all be debated, as well as compensatory cash for anyone seriously injured. Several shares would be set aside to make up a bonus fund for acts of bravery or ingenuity. All that, Darren knew, would meet with some difference of opinion.

Surprisingly, the first
man to speak called for another share for their captain.

***

“Hamilton VI?”

“No.”

“New Corsica? Lotta wildcat mining ops in the asteroid belt. Easy to hit, easy to hide, easy to fence the loot.”

“Hnh. We oughta think bigger.”

“Casey’s right. Not worth our time.”

“Tarawal?”

“Probably too big.”

“
Izumoto’s Star?”

“Seriously? Jesus fuck, Wei, you want to get us all killed? Fuck no.”
Casey spat a bit of bone from his meat into the fire. “Military budget’s huge.”

“What’s wrong with Hamilton VI?” asked Krietmeyer. He was lean and eager, with hungry eyes peering out at the others from under a ragged mop of brown hair. Of the five captains present, he was the only one serving his first term.

“The whole Hamilton system is NorthStar territory, K,” Casey answered. His patience implied a lot in a moment like this. These were all rough men and women. The fact that someone of Casey’s standing spoke to him as a peer lent him legitimacy among the other three captains. “NorthStar lost a bundle on the
Aphrodite
raid. If we hit them too hard and too frequently in too short a time, it becomes cost-effective to hunt us all down. If we spread out the pain, though, make others share the burden… then we’re just part of the cost of doing business.”

“
Aphrodite
was your windfall,” Krietmeyer pointed out. “Not ours.”

Casey
shrugged. “NorthStar Security isn’t gonna differentiate, K,” he said. “When they finally get their dander up, we’re all gonna look alike to them.”

Conversation faltered. Most of the captains stared into the fire, considering targets for their raid. In the distance, the party continued.
There would be an open vote to ratify the choices their captains offered; until then, cheap drinks and cheap laughs kept everyone amused.

“So I guess that leaves out anything in Archangel space and the Hashemites, right?” asked Wei. The bald,
heavily tattooed captain of the
Monkeywrench
had just won his fourth term as captain an hour ago. He was perhaps a bit more daring than the captain of
Vengeance
, and allegedly loved combat more than the payoff at the end, but he’d been around too long for his survival to be a matter of pure luck.

Hannah Black, captain of the
Guillotine
, grunted in confirmation. “Archangel stepped up their patrols after the
Aphrodite
hit. And they’ve bitched up enough of a storm to get Union and corporate ships out there to share the load. We nearly got caught smuggling goodies out of the system. Had to bribe the hell out of the crew that boarded us.”

She heard a whistle from Ming, the perennial captain of the
Yaomo
. “How much does it cost to buy off a boarding crew from Archangel?”

“Hell if I know,” Hannah shrugged. “We got boarded by NorthStar people. The captain of the patrol ship would’ve gotten a big bonus for catching us, but the boarding team? Not so much. They were happy to be bought. Still,” she said, swilling more of her drink, “cost us
half the advance we were paid for the job.”

Krietmeyer nodded. “Probably the same all over Hashem, then,” he said. “
Aphrodite
made port there a lot. Hashemite media made a big stink out of it.”

“Well, wait a second,”
Casey said, scratching his chin. “Hashemite space is too big to cover all their bases all at once. They have a big fleet, but it’s old and that’s a lot of territory. Either they stretch too thin or leave some spots weak. And given what just happened, they probably shifted a lot of their muscle over to face Archangel… what’s on the other side of Hashem from Archangel?”

Hannah pulled up a projection from her holocomputer and browsed through an astrocartography program. It was simple stuff,
meant for secondary school or low-level university classes, but it did the job. Soon, Hannah had a three-dimensional projection of Hashemite space for everyone to see. It was, like most multi-system states, something of a free-floating blob. Star systems suited for terraforming, let alone naturally habitable ones, rarely appeared in neat clusters.

“Krok space,” Wei spat. “Fuck that.
Stick to hitting humans.”

“Fair,”
Casey conceded. “What about the other directions?”

“Ras al-Khaimah,” Hannah noted, pointing to the topmost system. The image expanded, revealing a star orbited by seven planets
with few moons. Labels and simple information appeared beside each of the planets. Two were inhabited, and according to the display they currently lay on nearly opposite sides of their star. “Huh. Prime is probably out. Fifty million people there. They’ll have invested in planetary defense by now.”

“
What’s that other one?” Casey asked, leaning in with interest. He pointed to the icon for the less-populated planet. “Qal’at Khalil? Does that mean something?”

Hannah input a query. “Qal’at is Persian for fortress. That doesn’t bode well.”

“Yeah, but I’ve never heard of it,” Casey murmured. He poked his finger into the projection, calling up further information. “Khalil… okay, so Khalil’s the third son in line for the crown. Must’ve named the place for him. The family probably stuffed him there to give him something to do out of the way from the actual government. See, look? Mining, some tech manufacturing. It’s small, but it’s not nothin’.”

“Six million people is still way too much for us,”
noted Ming.

“No, look how they’re distributed. The capital city’s in this nice subtropical spot, but it’s less than half a million people. All the working stiffs
must be in this belt here in this mountain region. The loot’s here, but all the people are over there, where we could lock ‘em down from orbit. And that’s if they feel like putting up a fight at all. How many of them are really gonna stick their necks out for Prince Khalil and his fat-ass royal buddies?”

“You never know,” Wei warned. “Might stick up for him just out of pride.”

“Figure it’s a coin toss.”

“Civilian gun ownership is illegal in Hashem,” Hannah put in. “The royal family doesn’t want the scrubs getting uppity. They’ll have
security forces to keep the locals in line and to put up a good show, but I doubt it’ll be anything serious. The threat will be from whatever’s ready to go on Ras-al-Kaimah Prime or patrolling the system at large. And like Casey said, that’s a lot of space to cover.”

Casey
glanced around at the others. “Nobody’s been here before, huh?”

“I’ve got a few
Hashemites in my crew,” offered Wei. “Don’t know if they’ve been to this particular planet—probably not—but they’ll know a thing or three regardless.”

“
Okay,” Casey mused, “let’s think of a couple other possibilities before we get excited, but we’ll ask around. Maybe someone’ll know a little more.”

“You think we can sell this?” Krietmeyer asked.

“Well, we ain’t done talking,” conceded Casey. “We may come up with something better. Gotta pass this through the crews regardless. And we can’t go in at all without taking a good look at it first. But yeah,” he nodded, grinning slightly. “I got a hunch this will work out.”

He let the topic drop after that. It wouldn’t do to push too hard too soon.

***

“Can’t believe they bought all that bullshit.
Twice
,” huffed Ranjan as he stared out of the
Guillotine’s
bridge canopy screens. The ship had been on the ground at Khalil City’s spaceport for over an hour, feigning the same atmospheric systems malfunction that brought them in for their first groundside look a day before. That touchdown had been the last of a week’s worth of soft, tentative reconnaissance missions. This visit was the opening of something quite different.

“Hey, we’re a luxury yacht, Ranjan,” Hannah Black smirked from her seat in the center of the
Guillotine’s
bridge. She had her boots kicked up onto her control panel. There were only four crew posts in the compartment, but as shipboard operating stations went, they were all fairly comfortable. “They wouldn’t want to offend any corporate bigwigs by inspecting us as thoroughly as the common rabble. And anyway, we got inspected. Sort of.”