The Space Pirate 1 (10 page)

“Sure, sure,” FIGJAM enthused. “Your tits wobble when you’re angry. I dig it.”

Charley raised her right blaster.

“I dig it,” FIGJAM said more urgently. “I really do.”

“Good,” Charley said tiredly, looking out over the hazy mountain range.

She checked Silverton’s coordinates and was surprised to find that his cache was actually very close to her current location. First thing was first though - she needed water, otherwise she wasn’t gonna find the loot cache. Period.

“Stay here,” she told FIGJAM, and immediately felt silly.

Blaster poised, Charley began clambering over sharp rocks. The ridge seemed peaceful enough. Free of sand skinks at least. Not far to the north the two rocky bluffs rose to either side of the track, creating a steep-sided gorge. It was in this direction that Charley stumbled, hoping for a muddy puddle or trickle of water. Anything to slake the burning thirst in her throat.

High up above the peak to her right she heard a strange squeak. It was that high-flying bird again, wheeling around in agitation. Except it wasn’t a bird - it was a black, leathery bat. Charley was amazed at its sheer size. The thing must’ve have had a wingspan longer than the D23’s length and the weight of a large man.

“Happy for you to stay up there,” she mumbled quietly as she picked her way among the boulders. She was heartened to hear the sound of trickling water coming from the gorge wall to her right. Her pulse quickening, she cleared away a vibrant saltbush to find a crawl space large enough for a human. A slow trickle of water dropped from the edge of the hole. Charley positioned her mouth under the trickle and lapped gratefully at the water. It wasn’t exactly a torrent, but at length she felt like she’d had enough for the time being.

Feeling less woolly-headed now, she considered the hole in the rock and had a thought - could this be Silverton’s loot cache. There was only one way to find out. Feeling a strange sense of foreboding, she huddled low into the crawl space and began dragging herself through.

15

After ten yards the tunnel hadn’t widened and her light had all but faded. With a burst of inspiration she reached into her pellet case and rummaged through the various colors. She needed to shimmy back a few feet so she could distinguish them in the faint light. The pellet she’d used on the jeep back at Boss Pete’s compound had been green. Green for poison gas. Was there some kind of logic to the pirate pellets? What she needed right now was a flashbang. Something to illuminate the tunnel and show the way. What color would that be? White? Yellow? In the end Charley went with the yellow, only because she remembered Silverton saying something about smoke, which would probably be white.

She rolled a yellow pellet along the tunnel and buried her head in her arms. There was a loud fizzing sound up the tunnel and she waited another second for the initial flare to die away. She looked up and smiled. Not only had the pellet been a flashbang, it showed the tunnel opening out into a wider cavern just twenty yards ahead. Charley took the remaining distance at high speed, glad to be making progress and hopeful that the loot cache lay in the cavern.

As she got closer she could see a pair of blinking lights set into the far wall. This was it! That must be a security panel. She cleared the tunnel and stood, glad to be able to stretch her back. By the fading light of the flashbang she could see the lateral walls. The rock there looked weird, folded into patterns like vertical drapes. She stepped closer to the red lights, then decided to do a double take. That wasn’t rock. They weren’t walls. Every inch of space to either side of Charley was occupied by leviathan bats. They were hanging upside down from strange protrusions near the cavern ceiling. Judging from the various squeaks erupting around her, Charley had probably disturbed their slumber.

Many years ago, when Charley was just a street urchin in Sandflower Downs, a cool stranger had passed through. He’d worn a fancy utility suit and had an air of violence about him. He’d come to town to collect the bounty of several men staying at the whorehouse. A man of violence indeed, except that he was very kind to the little girl who hung out under piles of trash.

“Kid,” he had told Charley on his way out of town, “when in doubt, fire first. It’s nicer to regret being wrong than regret being dead.”

So Charley drew both blasters and fired indiscriminately into both walls. She raked the colony good and hard, enjoying the meaty thud of her plasma blasts. The cavern filled with a chorus of anguished squeaks and other sonar related pings. Several bats flew at Charley at once, knocking her clean off her feet. One enterprising beast locked its jaws around her ankle, biting hard. Charley yelped, firing at the bat at point blank range. Her body was buffeted around by the bats jostling to attack. The cavern was a chaos of leathery limbs that packed quite a punch. The high-pitched squeak infected Charley’s mind, threatened to envelop her in panic. She felt herself being dragged across the cavern by the bat at her ankle. She felt a wetness there and knew she was being eaten. In savage desperation she waved her arms, firing as she wheeled. Her right blaster maxed out, falling silent just when she needed it most. Charley yanked herself free of the feeding bat and crawled back to the hole. Luckily several bats were still flying crazy, panicked circles and she had some semblance of cover as she made her way. She reached the hole just as two bats made lunges at her feet. She hauled herself through and the creatures reluctantly let her go.

From there, she fumbled through her pellet rack as leviathan bats scrabbled madly at the hole. She got a close up of their hairy, slimy mouths and was slapped in the face by their foul breath. Clutching a red pill, Charley rolled it underneath the bats into the cavern. It was what she hoped it would be - a very light incendiary. It ignited several of the bats in flight, bringing them down in a cacophony of grunting. It scared others, increasing their panic and causing them to bump into each other. Charley followed up with a white pellet which quickly released a thick cloud of cloying smoke. The abrasive air particles rose to the ceiling of the cavern, choking the bats but leaving Charley relatively unharmed. The bats at the hole retreated. Charley took a deep breath and watched as the bat colony turned on each other, driven mad by her various toxins. As she considered her next move, she remembered that she hadn’t yet called the Galactic Office of Names. She swore vehemently as she hauled herself back down the passage. She hoped she hadn’t missed a golden opportunity to get across that cavern.

Blinking in the bright sunlight, Charley dusted herself off and contacted the relevant authority via her wrist pad. She was greeted with drop shaft music for a good ten minutes before an actual person deigned to talk to her. She spent the time pacing up and down after checking that the DC23 was okay.

a voice squeaked from several thousand light years away.

Charley was taken aback by the use of her name, but guessed it was transmitted with her wrist pad ID.

“Yes, I want to change my name please,” she said. “I just discovered I’m the daughter of a deceased man.”

“I’m sorry Miss Walker, but without valid authorization I cannot enact any changes to your official details.”

“Oh sure, just a moment,” Charley said brightly, scrambling over to the DC23. She opened the trunk and grabbed Silverton’s gray hand. The smell was terrible.

“Ready when you are,” she reported.

“Transferring fingerprint,” Charley said, pressing Silverton’s decaying thumb into her wrist pad. She waited with bated breath while it was processed at the other end.

came the eventual reply.

Charley was gobsmacked. On one hand she was elated to be a Silverton, daughter in spirit to the pirate lying in the trunk before her. On the other hand, what kind of civilization allowed such an easy change of identity? They didn’t even ask how Charley had gotten hold of the body. She made a mental note to leave instructions that she be cremated when she died.

“Well, yes actually,” she stammered. “May I have access to my father’s last will and testament?”

“And to you,” Charley said absently, waiting for her wrist pad to ping. When it did she couldn’t open the incoming document fast enough. Many of the contents were quite strange, and included snippets of bad poetry and some kind of pirate haiku. It seemed Silverton was a sentimental man, leaving various favorite possessions with lovers of the past. Charley made a list of the things she needed to leave alone once in the loot cache. One of the very last lines of the document contained exactly what she needed - the access code to the cache.

“Bingo bango,” she said triumphantly as she memorized the number.

Charley needed another drink from the trickle before she entered the cave. She hoped it wasn’t contaminated by the toxins she’d spread throughout the inner cavern. She climbed back into the tunnel with a heavy sigh. At the far end of the crawl space she checked her blasters - both were back online. Another flash bang painted the walls with light. Most of the colony was either critically injured or had retreated into cracks in the wall. Charley stood confidently, dispatching the last few with precise blasts aided by the targeting computer. The visor was only useful when there were a handful of targets. A stampeding horde and the reaction time was better spent trying to get the fuck out of the way. Finally the last bat went down with a mournful shriek. Charley was free to step forward and check out the security panel on the far wall. She entered the code with greedy anticipation. A thick steel door opened noiselessly and lights flickered on in the next room.

Charley beamed as she walked into Pirate Silverton’s loot cache. The first thing she noticed was piles of money. Intergalactic credits mostly, but exotic currencies from far-flung places too. Bags, cases, clips, digital dispensers. Credits galore. More than enough to send Charley halfway across the galaxy to live it up in some beachside hotel for six months. But she’d made a promise. Worse still, she’d made a promise to a pirate. Something told her that such promises carried weight. Sure, Silverton was dead now, but Charley had a keen sense of justice and instinctively knew that crossing a pirate was bad fucking energy. It may not come back to bite her, but there was always the possibility. She didn’t want that hanging over her head. So she would leave the money alone and loot everything else she could. And there were some seriously weird objects in Silverton’s loot cache.

For starters, there were the manaquettes. Sex dolls from gods knew where. It seemed Silverton had quite the perverse streak. Either that or he had simply traveled alone for much of his career in deep space.

There were six manaquettes in total, most of them dressed in garish sex garb that seemed impractical even for a manaquette. The sixth lifelike figure was different. For whatever reason, Silverton had dressed that one in a practical utility suit. No, more than that. Charley gave a low whistle as she touched the jet black fabric. It
felt
expensive. Light and tactile but extremely tough at the same time. Charley activated the holotag at the base of the neck. It was from a production house called DSM, or Deep Space Merc. The tag claimed the suit was heat, cold and toxin resistant. The style was classic and non-demonstrative. Simple, elegant lines. Charley thought she’d try it on and was gratified to see it fit snugly around her pert frame. The zipper even allowed her to expose just enough cleavage to gain the advantage over most men.

Nodding in satisfaction, Charley moved on to see what else was in the cache.

Apart from the money, Silverton had amassed quite a gallery of exoticana over the course of his life. There were idols of all kinds - animalistic, shamanistic, cosmonautic, cybernetic. Silverton clearly had a fascination with the various cults and religions across the galaxy. She got the impression that pirate lore borrowed from a number of belief systems, adapting them all to its own particular philosophy. The main thing she learned from this loot cache was that a pirate hoarded idols and totems like other people kept photographs - they told the story of the pirate’s life.

Still, Silverton hadn’t mentioned anything about totems and idols. As far as Charley was concerned they were all fair game. She piled them all into a bag, ready for transferal to the D23. She wondered how much money she’d get from them.

Further back in the loot cache Silverton had stored a variety of weapons and armor, just as Charley had hoped. She didn’t find a saber exactly like the one she’d been forced to sell in Zeba, but she did lift something possibly even better. It was a scimitar, deadly and curvaceous. It probably demanded a different technique to the saber, but it was much lighter and it hefted more naturally in Charley’s right hand. It sliced through the air like the saber had done and Charley suspected it was of the highest quality. Better still, it came with a sheaf so it wouldn’t cut Charley to pieces as she walked around. She found a basic utility belt and slid the deadly scimitar into the band at her hip, just behind the right blaster holster. She even found a custom pellet rack to attach to the belt. It felt so good to gear up.

16

There were multiple pieces of armor but Charley suspected they were too big for her. It was common for pirates to wear armor pieces over their utility suits like the ancient warriors did many centuries before. There were titanium gauntlets, breastplates, boots, greaves and pauldrons. All of it could be shield-activated also. Silverton must’ve seen a
lot
of close quarters action.