The New Space Opera 2 (43 page)

In fact, Kipps realized, these were the same men. They were all ex–Indian Army dogfaces. The veterans of a mass draft, the cannon fodder of the booming slums. India was the only country on Earth with enough feet to stick into the necessary boots-on-the-ground. These
jawans
were still in their boots.

“Very soon,” Karwal told him. “There are some technical difficulties.”

“It's always that way.”

“We are counting down. That's a nice shirt. You look good in a
salwar kameez
.”

“I'm out of uniform.”

“You?” said Karwal, grinning. “Space Captain Joe Kipps? Not you, Joe; never.”

“Will this get me in big trouble?” said Kipps.

“It's American. It's all-American technology!” said Karwal. “We didn't invent it.
You
invented it. We just made it
bigger
. With
many more people
.”

“You can draw it when it rises up,” Miss Dhupia offered. “It only looks like it moves very fast. It doesn't walk so very fast. It's just that
the pieces inside it
, they all move so very, very quickly.”

“It's almost ready, Joe,” said Karwal. “When it rises up…from inside there…when it reaches upward, to the stars…” He gazed at the dotted facade of a skyscraper…“Taller than that thing, Joe…Much taller than that.”

“I'm ready,” he said. “I want to see.” And then it happened.

Famed comic-book writer and illustrator Bill Willingham has won fourteen Eisner Awards for his work, which includes creating series such as Elementals, Ironwood, Coventry, Pantheon, Proposition Player, and the well-known
Fables
, the story of exiles from fairy tales living in hiding in New York City, which has been scheduled to be made into a TV movie in 2009. Recently, he's been moving into prose work as well, as witness the vigorous and lively tale of Space Pirates and kidnapped Earthmen that follows…

T
he huge and ancient Oeerlian merchant ship surfaced ponderously out of underspace, sizzling waves of abused relativity boiling and crackling off its shields. It tumbled erratically along two axis, bleeding out trapped ballast from behind its shields, while its relativity translators struggled to relearn the laws of normal space. Then, slowly, it settled itself, brought its main engines online, and began to accelerate inward, along the elliptic, toward the system primary, at a paltry thirty-two standard gravities.

None aboard the freighter noticed the much smaller ship lurking in the shadow of the rings surrounding the nearest gas giant. Anyone who had seen it would have known its purpose at a glance. It was a hunter. It existed to feed off of fat ships like the merchantman. It had overlarge engines, for chasing down prey, and its flanks bristled with weapons nodes for killing what it caught.

The smaller ship was called the
Merry Prankster
, and it was known far and wide as a pirate raider. It hung drifting under the rings, radiating no detectable energy. On the
Prankster
's bridge Captain Brodogue, a massive third-stage Plentiri male, studied their intended target. His brightly jeweled grappling hoons reflexively extruded and retracted in a steady rhythm, signaling his barely suppressed excitement.

“I told you those sneaky bastards were surfacing out here,” he said, unable to prevent himself from venting musk. Each of the other Plentiri members of the mixed crew quickly moved back from him rather than risk falling into an automatic challenge fugue.

“And you were right, as usual, Skipper,” the First Mate said. His name was Danny Wells. He was an exotic creature called a human, from a small, out-of-the-way system, far outside of civilized space. “She looks like a
rich bauble, too. Shall we pursue?” He didn't need to ask, but certain formalities were essential to maintaining a disciplined crew.

“Light her up, Mister Wells,” Brodogue said, “and give chase.”

“Battle stations!” Danny ordered, a broad grin spreading across his face, which the several non-dentate species among the pirate crew always found more than a bit disturbing. “Bring the engines online! Power up the shields! Internal field to chase maximum! Man all guns!”

The crewmembers rushed to obey the mate's shouted commands, knowing that anyone slow to respond might suddenly find himself blasted into stasis for the duration of the action, and thus miss out on his share of the prize.

Danny turned to the conn station and Reedu Jillijon, the ship's Dhin-homy sailing master. He said, “Mister Reedu, will you kindly overtake that ship attempting to make off with all of our booty?”

“Aye, sir,” Reedu said out of his lowest foremouth, giving Danny the respect appropriate to his rank.

In seconds, the
Prankster
went from drifting dead in space to leaping forward at an impressive seventy-eight g's. On board, the crew suffered none of the effects such a killing momentum should produce, due to the remarkable efficiency of the
Prankster
's internal field generators. Danny forced himself to show none of the discomfort he felt inside an internal field dialed up so high. He'd suffer agonizing headaches later, but didn't mind it, since the alternative was to overtake the freighter at a slower velocity, thus subjecting the crew to enemy gunfire for a longer duration.

“They've seen us, Captain,” Credogue said, from the defensive targeting station. He stood over the crewman seated at the console, glowering at the tactical display. He was the
Prankster
's second mate and Captain Brodogue's son. In the nine standard years Danny had known the boy, since the day he'd emerged from his second-stage trialpod, Credogue had never shown a hint of joy, humor, or any other pleasurable state of mind—quite unlike his nearly sybaritic father. “They've increased speed to thirty-seven g's, and opened gun ports.”

“They won't last long at that velocity,” Brodogue said, from his command couch. “They don't have the field generators for it. They must be shitting their pantaloons in fear.”

“Gives them an extra few seconds to target us,” Danny said.

“It won't help them,” Brodogue said.

“It might,” Danny said. “The Oeerlians believe in packing big guns. They'll have tenth-power integrators on a bucket that size.”

“Doesn't matter,” Credogue said. “Their targeting systems predate most civilizations. Who cares how big their hammer is, if they can't aim it properly?”

“We're within gun range,” Reedu said, and on cue the ship was rocked with the first enemy integrator strikes against their shields.

“Then they must have some lucky shooters on board,” Danny said. “Those were spot on.”

“Launch attractions,” Credogue said. The second mate's primary duty during ship-to-ship combat was to oversee defensive operations. Danny heard the muffled, rapid-fire thumping sounds caused by several dozen attraction pods being coughed out through the forward shields. The attractions would ride the bow wave of the shields, staying ahead of the ship for several vital seconds, before slipping off to one side or another. As implied by their name, the attractions' purpose was to scream their heads off in many technologically sophisticated ways, hoping to attract the enemy integrator fire, thus saving the actual ship. Danny privately thought that Credogue had acted too soon in launching the pods. At this extreme range, the shields could easily absorb the integrator fire, no matter what their power. The second mate should've saved the expensive devices for when they were closer.

Danny switched his private screen to the defensive tactical display in time to see several attractions instantly collapse in on themselves, as integration beams connected with them. Each integrator-hit pod briefly formed an unstable pinprick singularity, before winking entirely out of existence. Then he switched over to offensive tactical to begin his own role as the director of their offensive fire.

“Commence fire,” he said to his forward integrator gun crews. “Target shields and weapons nodes only. And I better not see you boys falling for their attraction pods, or I'll collect penalties.” Traditionally, “penalties” were ears, fingers, or equivalent minor appendages, surrendered for gross failures committed during desperate actions. Danny was serious in his threat—he couldn't afford to make empty threats—but he knew he wouldn't have to mutilate anyone later. The
Prankster
's targeting systems were the best available, and each gun crew was trained to perfection. Any attractions the fleeing freighter spit out in its wake would tumble off untouched and ignored, unless the
Prankster
had time afterward to salvage them, to replenish their own expended stores.

The two ships fired at each other as the predator rapidly overtook its prey. In short order, the freighter's shields collapsed, after which the pirate crew made quick work of every gun node that bore on them. From the
first shot to the last, a mere twenty-three seconds had passed. Now the
Prankster
had to act quickly so as to not overshoot the freighter, and thus allow its other, still-functioning guns to come to bear.

“Match velocity,” Danny barked, though he needn't have bothered. Reedu Jillijon was a deft hand at the conn and had already made the needed adjustments. The
Prankster
shut down its main drive and coasted toward the slower freighter that was still under power. This was an especially tricky time in such actions. The crippled freighter could still do any number of things to make itself dangerous to the pirate ship. It could cut out its own drive and let the
Prankster
shoot by it, blasting it as it did so, or it could rotate, bringing its surviving weapons to bear—or any of a long list of other maneuvers. At this point, it was a game of nerves and anticipation, between Reedu at the
Prankster
's conn and whoever was piloting the merchant ship.

At the same time, the pirate ship's communications director started broadcasting the “black veil” warning—a universal message promising that any further resistance on the part of the freighter would result in its immediate and total destruction. Every starfaring species in civilized space knew of the “black veil” and knew that it was no bluff. Once given, it was worth loosing even the richest prize ship, rather than let the warning lose one iota of its threat value.

Apparently, the Oeerlian crew had no desire to sacrifice themselves, for they allowed Reedu to slave their conn controls to his station. Controlling both ships now, Reedu kept the freighter under power until it matched the
Prankster
's greater velocity, and then cut its drive off, so that both ships coasted through space together, at rest relative to each other.

“Have they surrendered?” Brodogue asked, when Reedu announced his control over the freighter.

“No, Captain,” the communications director said.

“So they still have some fight in them, eh?” Brodogue said. Under the accepted conventions of space warfare, a ship could still resist actual boarding, without risking its total destruction. The “black veil” only covered ship-to-ship combat.

“They've signaled they're prepared to negotiate terms, sir.”

Now the captain had a decision to make. He could negotiate terms with the freighter, under which they'd only surrender a portion of their cargo, and then be allowed to continue on their way, or the pirates could board the freighter and fight them hand-to-hand for the chance to win all of the booty.

“So what are these Oeerlians like?” Brodogue said. “Are they doughty warriors in a close-up knife fight?”

“Not usually,” Danny said, “but they tend to hire Vuurick mercenaries to do that sort of thing.” Vuuricks were tough in a hand-to-hand fight. They had redundant major organs and decentralized nervous systems, which made it necessary to injure them thoroughly before they could be expected to stop fighting. They also had between four and eight viable weapons-using appendages, depending on their stage of maturation.

“What do you think, Mister Wells?” Brodogue said. “Will we be content with a portion of the goods, or are you in a mood to risk your neck over there to win all of it?”

“I'll be happy to board her, Skipper,” Danny said, and meant it. “Will I be doing it in your name, or my own?” If Danny boarded the freighter in the captain's name, which was a perfectly honorable request for Brodogue to make, then the captain would receive the lion's share of the loot. But if Danny were allowed to board the ship in his own name, then he and his boarding crew would win the greater share.

“I had it in mind to go myself,” Brodogue said. “It's been a while since I took part in personally separating a few Vuurick scum from their souls. Do you think your crew of black-hearted cutthroats could beat me and my boat over there?”

“Try me,” Danny said.

“The ship is yours, Mister Credogue,” Brodogue shouted, already leaping from his couch.

Danny was half a step faster than the captain, and beat him through the hatchway off of the bridge. He ran through the
Prankster
's lush corridors, shouting frantic commands into his communicator ring as he did so. First he called the boat deck with orders to prep his personal boarding yacht for immediate launch. Then he called his quarters and screamed orders at his personal aide and bodyguard.

“Kyal!” Danny yelled as soon as she came on the line. He had to shout to make himself heard over the sounds of his footsteps, his heavy breathing, and all of the noise Brodogue was making, close behind him. “It's a boarding race! Get my crew on the
Egg
, now!”

“Already under way,” Kyal said in her passionless voice. “And the boat is ready to go. All we need is you.”

“Wonderful!” Danny screamed. “Then we'll get the jump on him! You're a dream!”

“Who're we up against?” Kyal said.

“The captain!”

“Who made the challenge? You or him?”

“He did!” Danny yelled. “Why?”

“Then we may not have a head start after all. Captain Brodogue's a crafty one. He may have anticipated offering the challenge and had his boat prepped in advance, with his own prize crew already aboard.”

“You're probably right! Hang on, Kyal! I'm on my way!” That was when Brodogue, still sliding close on Danny's heels, stretched out one of his prehensile tanglers and tripped Danny, who landed hard on the deck and skidded until the Plentiri captain's massive body rolled over him. Brodogue's laughter—a rapid series of wildly oscillating clicks, in his case—disappeared down the hallway, as Danny levered himself painfully off of the deck. Then he began running again, for the boat deck and his personal launch.

 

The
Raptor's Egg
, its exterior shell a featureless blue ovoid, fell toward the giant merchant ship. Danny was aboard, with Kyal and his prize crew—a dozen veteran killers from as many different races. But he'd arrived too late. The captain's launch was a respectable thirty klees ahead of them, already breaking for soft contact with the merchantman's hull.

“Brodogue's got us skunked,” Kyal said, frustrated but still delighting in her chance to employ the exotic human idiom. She had no idea what a skunk was, but knew she'd used the phrase correctly. She'd long been an avid student of xenolinguistics, and Danny's native tongue, with all of its complicated and contradictory rules, was among her favorites.

“Not yet,” Danny said. “We just need to come in a bit faster than they are, if you've got the nerve for it. Dial up our speed.”

“You plan to ram it?” she said. She was at the helm. Piloting his private yacht was but one of her many responsibilities. Kyal was a Sendarian warrior, which was most likely why Danny first selected her as his personal aide, once he'd reached sufficient rank to rate one. Sendarians looked human—an incredibly voluptuous human, in her case—provided one ignored the average seven feet in height for an adult, the gold skin, or the fact that they were all female. Danny assumed male Sendarians existed somewhere, but Kyal would never discuss it.