Pirates of the Outrigger Rift (16 page)

“Neena, Neena Landow. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone
here from your office before.”

“Most of our investigations are done undercover. It’s easy
to be up to spec when you know you’re talking to an inspector.”

Neena nodded. “Well, I suppose that makes sense.”

“Splendid. Well, that about wraps it up for your office. Now
I need to check out the yard itself. Do me a favor. Don’t let it get out that I’m
here. I want to be able to observe the work without being noticed. I don’t want
the workers to feel like they’re being spied on.”

“Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me,” Neena said.

Chandler snapped his fingers. “Oh yes, I almost forgot. I
need a listing of the ships you have here, their berth numbers, and their
ownership records.”

Neena had the computer compile a list and she gave it to
Chandler. She didn’t even notice when he left with her notescribe board.

Chandler left the administrative offices, put on a vacsuit,
and caught a car tram to berth twenty-nine, where the
Swan Princess
was
docked. The blackness of open space contrasted with the spotlighted forms of
the huge ships. Men scrambled over the hulls in magboots, repairing hull
breaches and communications arrays.

He still held the notescribe; it tended to ward off people
with questions and made him seem important, like someone official. No one likes
to talk to an official, since they tended to write down names and make reports.

When he got to the
Swan Princess,
he took a look at
the outside of the sleek vessel. It was massive for a private ship and had
obviously been damaged. There was evidence of fresh repairs in the aft section.
He keyed the com unit on the wrist of the suit to examine the ship data
provided by Radje. He hoped he would get lucky inside.

A guard stood at the main airlock, but he looked half asleep—at
least until he caught sight of Chandler approaching with a notescribe. The
guard immediately straightened up and looked serious.

Chandler waved his notescribe at the guard, smiled, walked
straight to the airlock, and cycled through to enter the ship. He was relieved
when his vacsuit’s pressure sensor indicated that he could remove his helmet.
The air inside smelled of solvents and paint.

The corridors were lined with real wood, darkly stained red
and polished glossy. This was a luxury yacht that only the foolishly wealthy
could ever afford. He sighed. No doubt Rocco would replace the wood with purple
crushed velvet and lay orange shag carpet everywhere.

He checked the cargo hold and engineering sections first. He
crawled into nooks and crannies, taking images of equipment serial numbers with
his comlink, because they could be traced back to their manufacturer. Then he
went to the crew’s quarters and located what would have been Radje’s shared
cabin. He counted the air vents along the wall. Third from the left.

He fished in his pocket for a multi-tool, unfolded a driver,
and popped off the vent cover. There it was: Radje’s stash of liquor and stims
along with stolen credit sticks and a stack of pornographic datastores.
Everything matched Radje’s description.

He pocketed the credit sticks and walked to the crew’s
common area and down the central passageway to the crew’s galley. On all ships
this is where crew members tended to spend a lot of their free time eating and
playing cards. There were several tables reserved for the crew’s mess, and he
walked to the one farthest from the door. Chandler reached under the tabletop.
He fished around for a while until his fingers felt what he had hoped for. He
pulled out a joker right where Radje had said it was stashed. Not only was he a
sneak thief, but he was also a dirty card cheat. Chandler looked at the back of
the card. It was one of the special decks printed for Randol with the logo of
the
Aurelius
as part of the design.

 “Well, well, why am I not surprised?”

Chandler had plenty to prove it was the
Aurelius
. He
pocketed the card, donned his helmet, and exited the ship, then took the tram
back to the transport dock. He boarded the
Marlowe
and left the
shipyard.

Chandler keyed his comlink and made a call to an old friend.

The viewscreen displayed the scarred, grim face of John
Richmond wearing a Confed lieutenant commander’s uniform. His eyes narrowed. “Mike
Chandler? How the hell did you get this number?”

“You gave it to me.”

“Huh. I must have been drunk.”

“Believe me, John, you were.”

The man laughed. “How the hell are you? Finally sick of
civilian life?”

“Not sick enough to join up again. I’m still doing the
private security thing.”

“Not much money in that these days,” Richmond said.

“Sad, but true. I see you’ve moved up in the world. Your
lips must be getting sore from kissing all that ass and taking orders.”

“I mostly give orders now. I have an ensign that I farm out
to do all the ass-kissing for me. So tell me, why are you contacting me after
all this time? I assume you need a favor.”

Chandler shook his head. “Nope, not quite. This is an equal
swap, favor for favor. I’ve been doing some work that’s spilling over into
Confed intelligence territory. I think I have something you want but I need
something in return.”

“We don’t normally pay for information unless it’s big.”

Chandler shook his head. “No credits required. I have the
giftwrapped recovery of a stolen luxury yacht, but when you raid the shipyard I
need you to feed me all the information on who piloted that ship to the dock. I
have no hope of getting it otherwise. I need to talk to him to get details on
where a hostage might be kept.”

“You sure about the ship?”

Chandler shrugged. “About as sure as I was when I told you
not to dance with that big-nosed woman in the bar on Prana.”

“Yeah, I married her.”

“Like I said, have I ever steered you wrong? What do you
think? Stolen ship for some information?”

The man smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

H
ank pulled up a visual of the planet Trent from the nav
library on the main viewscreen. Its primary moon, Mordi, Randol’s home base,
was their destination. They were making slow progress to it. The damaged
hyperdrive kept them at only twenty percent of their maximum speed.

Sai sat on Hank’s lap with her arm around him. He zoomed in
on Trent’s surface. The patchwork quilt of crops and the beauty of the oceans
brought back memories.

 “It reminds me of Hava,” Hank said. “Early mornings rising
up out of bed to do chores. Fresh breakfast on the table when I got back.”

“Were your parents settlers, or had your family been raised
on the planet?”

“Well, my dad was a soldier, born in the heart of
techworlds. He joined the Confed and then left service with them to join the
forces of one of the local human confederations on the edge of Manspace. He
fought in the Cygnus uprising. He was wounded. Never quite healed right. Never
talked about it much, but you could tell. He mostly just bummed around after
the war. Odd jobs here and there. I have no idea what brought him to Hava, but
that’s where he met my mother.”

“Farm girl and spacer romance story?” Sai traced her finger
down Hank’s cheek, to his neck, and then she started playing with the bit of
chest hair that was exposed in the notch of his partially opened shirt.

Hank smiled. “Pretty much. My mom would tell me stories
about it when my dad wasn’t around. He didn’t talk about the past, ever. Good
times or bad. He lived in the moment. One harvest at a time.”

“Did you have any brothers or sisters?”

“A younger brother, Roger. He died one winter of a sickness.
We never figured out what it was. That’s the problem with a lot of these
frontier worlds. Strange new microbes, not enough money to afford the latest
medical technology. Things take a few generations to mutate to infect the human
population. Likely it killed those without some sort of immunity and the rest
of us will be never be bothered by it again.”

“Sounds like a hard life.”

“I thought so at the time. Looking back, it was pretty much
paradise compared to the alternatives I’ve seen.”

“I don’t know if I have any brothers and sisters or not. No
way of knowing.”

“You didn’t exactly have a pampered existence. Looks like it
made you into a tough customer.”

Sai smiled and raised a fist toward Hank. “You know it.”

Hank took her small fist into his hand and brought it to his
lips.

“Hank, it’s funny. Kids just don’t have any idea about what
their life is really like until they look back. They don’t know they’re poor. They
don’t appreciate it if they’re rich. I was warm and cozy in my room at Dirion’s.
I didn’t know until later that it was basically a rat hole. Kids just have no
clue about life.”

“I got news for you, darlin’—we still don’t. But I try my
best to appreciate every good thing that happens in life every day. Tomorrow
might be a sight less pleasant.”

Sai stroked the hair on Hank’s forehead. “So what finally
happened on Hava? Why did you leave?”

“Well, like I said, I grew up milking cows and dodging horse
shit. But as I grew, I developed a bad habit. I started to dream. I would stare
up at the stars and wonder why anyone would choose to live on Hava rather than
explore the galaxy. I got sick of the work and the monotony.”

Hank made an adjustment on the control panel.

“I was a stupid teenage kid, just the kind that joins the
military. I signed up for a stint in the Scout Corps. It sounded exciting in
the pamphlets—discover new worlds, make first contact with alien races, be a
hero. They don’t print the casualty stats. My academy graduated two hundred,
but only twenty-five were left after our first year in the field.”

“It must have been hard on you,” Sai said.

“You and your partner are out there so far from normal human
life that you think you are the only humans in the universe after a while. I
think Elsa is the only reason I didn’t crack up.”

“It’s about time you mentioned me,” Elsa said. “I thought
you two had forgotten I was plugged in.”

Hank chuckled. “Elsa and I spent a lot of time working,
exploring, drinking. That was before the accident, of course. She was just a
lanky young lady with midnight-black hair and a mean temperament.”

“Some things don’t change,” Elsa said.

“Finally, I knew it was time to come home. Returning from my
last tour of duty, I had the chance to stop by Hava on my way to HQ. There’d
been a plague. Another microbe … some mutated virus. It devastated the
population. This time it hit my mom and dad. They were long gone. If I’d stayed
on the farm, I’d probably be dead, too. At the time I wondered if that hadn’t
been my proper fate. All I know is that my childhood and everyone in it might
as well have been a dream.”

It was quiet in the cockpit. Sai looked at Hank with moist
eyes and whispered, “We all travel crooked roads. You can only move on.”

Hank sighed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring you down.”

Sai put a finger to his lips. “It’s okay.” She leaned over
and kissed him.

Elsa’s voice interrupted their cuddling. “Well, if you two
are finished with your hanky-panky, I need you to go back and look at the
hyperdrive. I think you need to adjust the plasma flux manually.”

“If I didn’t know better, Elsa, I’d think you’re jealous.”

“I’m convinced she’s going to get tired of you pretty soon. You
really aren’t as interesting as you think you are.”

“What? I am amazingly interesting. I fascinate myself at
times. But more than that, I am roguish.”

“Roguish? As in dishonest and unprincipled? I suppose so, but
I hardly call that an attractive trait.”

“No, no … sexually mischievous and happy-go-lucky, and
women love that.”

Elsa let off a synthesized snort. “Only in holovids. In real
life it gets annoying very quickly.”

“Sai, what do you think? You like roguish, right? It sets
the juices flowing. Doesn’t it?”

Sai stood up and laughed. “No comment.” She left the pair
bickering and went into the galley.

Lieutenant Commander Richmond was true to his word. In
exchange for the information on the yacht, the Confed pulled the shipyard
records and gave Chandler everything he wanted.

Rocco’s obviously forged records indicated that the ship had
previously belonged to a Jack Melville out of Freemont City on Hampton. Chandler
was not surprised when he discovered that Melville was a factory worker and had
been dead for twenty years. That trail went nowhere.

But Chandler still had the pilot who had delivered the yacht
to the shipyard. The ship hadn’t been conjured out of thin air; it had been
delivered from some location, somewhere. Luckily, the pilot was a real, living,
breathing, drinking person, and he wasn’t hard to find.

His name was Remo, and he was trying to make Chandler go
broke buying him beer. Together they sat in a booth at a dive bar in
Gardenburg, the largest city on Matilda.

“Let’s get back to the question,” Chandler said.

“Sure, I got nothing else to do but sit here and answer a
bunch of fool questions,” Remo said, slurring his words. “But since you’re
buying? Why not?”

“Where did you pick up the yacht? What system? What planet?”

“It’s really complicated.”

Chandler sighed. “How can it be complicated? Where did you
go to pick it up?”

Remo laughed. “I went where they told me.”

“And where exactly was that?”

“Nowhere, I picked the thing up in open space. It was just
floating. They gave me the control codes so I was able to dock with it and
bring it in.”

“Didn’t you think that was pretty suspicious?”

Remo looked at Chandler with a blank expression. “I’m a very
trusting person.”

“Yeah, I sensed that when I first met you,” Chandler said. “What
were the coordinates?”

“I don’t remember the coordinates exactly, but it was in the
area of the Outrigger Rift.”

The Outrigger Rift was a treacherous area of space that
butted up against a major trade route. It was an odd area of asteroids, small
planetoids, and bits of random matter and dust all drifting in a chaotic mass. There
was something inherently wrong with the fabric of space-time in that particular
part of the universe. Some theorized that distorted gravitational waves had
ripped apart multiple star systems in the region, leaving the area looking like
a junk pile of creation. No one knew for sure, but it was obvious that
something catastrophic had occurred.

There were thousands of hiding places and no way to track
ships in the midst of the swarm of debris. It was a perfect base of operations for
pirates because even knowing that the outlaws were there made no difference. It
would take the entire Confed fleet years to conduct a complete search.

“Can you get me the coordinates somehow?” Chandler asked.

“Maybe, if I had enough motivation,” Remo said.

“I could make it worth your while.”

“How?”

“Does seventy-five credits sound good?”

“A hundred would sound more inspiring,” he said, smiling.

“Done,” Chandler said, handing the man a credit stick. “Now
where do we need to go to get the coordinates?”

“My pants,” Remo said as he reached into his back pocket. He
withdrew a small device, then tapped a few keys. He scrolled through a list and
found what he was looking for.

“Let me send it over.”

Chandler took his notescribe out and received the
coordinates.

“There you go,” Remo said, pocketing the device. “Good luck
with that.”

Chandler looked at the numbers—the coordinates really were
in the middle of nowhere.

“Who contacted you? Who hired and paid you?”

“Listen, buddy, I’m happy to have the work. I do my job and
take the pay. People know what I do and how to find me. They tell me where to
go, and if the money is good I move things from point A to point B. Simple.”

“You realize that the ship was stolen,” Chandler said.

“I don’t know nothing about stolen ships. I just deliver
them.”

“I have it on good authority that it was probably stolen by
Thorne.”

Remo nodded. “Odds are that’s true. He steals a bunch of
them. I know. I used to work for the crazy sword-carrying bastard. I spent a
year on that rock he calls his
lair
.”

“You’ve been to his base?”

“I just said I spent a year there.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s in the Outrigger Rift.”

“Where?”

“No idea.”

Chandler sighed and rubbed his forehead. “What do you mean?
You lived there for a year.”

Remo nodded. “Yep, and in that whole time I never set my
butt in a pilot’s chair. I never saw the readout of a nav computer, and I didn’t
want to. I never told anyone I could pilot. You see—”

 Remo put an arm around Chandler and leaned in. His breath
could have peeled paint.

“—I wanted to leave after I got my money. No one who knows
where the base is gets to leave. Sure, they get paid better, they get first
dibs on the food and the hookers, and they have better quarters, but they’re
just high-paid prisoners. Thorne can’t afford to let them out. The Confed would
find ’em and get ’em to talk and Thorne would have a battlecruiser up his
butt.”

Remo took another drink. “Thorne is crazy, but he ain’t
stupid.”

“Can you give me some information about the base? Tell me
the layout, how many men, the security?” Chandler asked.

Remo nodded. “Sure, give me enough money and I’ll tell you
everything.”

“Do you know where they keep prisoners?”

Remo shrugged. “I know the general area. But they don’t
normally let the grunts in that part of the base.”

They haggled a bit and determined a price. Remo detailed the
number of men and the number of ships normally stationed at the base. He wasn’t
sure how they determined their targets. They lucked out on a few, but typically
he knew they set off on sorties with a known target because they were well
prepared.