Shadowplay: Book One of the Starcrown Chronicles, Page 2

  Chapter Two

  The basic principles of space flight have gone unchanged for hundreds of years. The traveling ship is pointed toward the location in space where your destination is going to be and thrust is applied. If you have enough fuel you can maintain thrust until you are halfway there, building up velocity and cutting the length of your trip. At that point you turn the ship 180 degrees about and boost in the opposite direction. If you want to do it cheaper you can boost only part of the way out and coast until you need to decelerate. The only tricky part is calculating the exact direction to point the ship in and how much thrust to apply. Since you are leaving a planet with its own momentum and traveling toward another body with a different motion relative to the one you’re leaving, you need to be sure that you and the thing you’re trying to reach are going to be in the same place at the same time. But calculus has been around even longer than space flight, and with modern navigation computers being what they are, programming a flight is basically a matter of telling the ship where you want to go and when you want to get there.

  One thing is clear. At the end of a trip there is no need to increase power to the drive. Modern torch ships are very efficient. Not only can their ion engines supply thrust for an entire trip, but the thrust generated is so steady that there is rarely a need for even minor adjustments. Boost halfway out, turn around, boost the rest of the way in and shut down the drive. Neat and simple.

  But the ship we were on had drastically increased thrust as we were nearing the end of our trip. That just didn’t make any sense. This contradiction was still on my mind when I drifted back to consciousness some time later.

  I had a dizzying feeling of vertigo for several seconds until I realized that I was in free fall. I found myself floating just above the deck … no, just below the overhead. All around me I could make out the dim forms of my fellow prisoners floating limply around the cell with me by the glow of the emergency lighting from the hallway. That wasn’t good. I strained to listen above the moaning but couldn’t make out the one sound I really wanted to hear—the sound of the air circulation fans. That really wasn’t good. I did a few quick mental calculations and estimated that CO2 concentration would reach dangerous levels in a little over an hour. The Tombs was starting to look a whole lot better than where I was now.

  I tucked my legs and launched off the ceiling with my feet. I managed to get my fingers into the grille of the ventilation duct and brought myself to a stop.

  “Alex?...”

  “Is that you, Pell? Just a second. (Oof).” A moment later she floated into view. “How bad do you think it is? That didn’t feel like a system blowout. It’s more like we hit something.”

  “Or something hit us. That increase in thrust I felt before could have been evasive maneuvering.”

  “Maybe. Do you think the navigational deflectors failed and let some piece of space debris through?”

  “I don’t know, but it felt like it came from aft. My guess is the engine room, considering that all the main systems are down. Our biggest problem right now is that without power there’s no way to open the cell doors.”

  “Hmm. What if…”

  A sudden explosion erupted behind me and the aft corridor hatch sped past my cell. Then I heard the sound of heavy footsteps. A few moments later a dark, bulky figure hove into view—a man in space armor. The blue LEDs on his ankles indicated that the magnetic soles were active. As he made his way along the passageway I could hear the faint whirring of the suit’s built in servos, and gripped in his fists was a high yield plasma rifle.

  The ominous figure ignored the prisoner cells and continued forward, followed by two more men in armor. Silence blanketed ship. There was only one explanation for who they were.

  “Pirates,” Alex whispered. “But here, in the capital? I’ve never heard of anything so … bold!”

  She seemed to be taking it a bit personally.

  “It may be bold, but what’s worrying me is that I can only think of one thing on a ship like this that’s worth anything.”

  Our eyes locked and for a moment I thought I saw a flash of fear in hers. Whatever it was it was gone in an instant, replaced by smoldering anger.

  “We’ll have to go along with whatever they want for now,” she said, thinking out loud to herself as much as to me. “If we keep our eyes open we might be able to find a way out of this mess.”

  Powered armor and plasma rifles made a pretty compelling argument. We had no choice but to do whatever they wanted.

  Just then we heard the sound of distant weapons fire. My ears picked out what sounded like shots from a small hand blaster which were answered by the single bark of a much more powerful weapon. Then silence.

  Most of the prisoners had come to their senses by then and the cells were starting to get noisy. Everyone knows what a failure in main power means aboard a space ship. Alex and I kept ourselves anchored in place by clutching to the ventilation grille while the others bounced and swam their way toward the cell doors in a hopeless attempt to escape. Sporadic arguments broke out as people poked and grabbed each other in a useless struggle to get to the doors. This went on for several minutes until a round of shots reverberated in the hallway.

  As the other prisoners frantically launched themselves away from the door I could see someone returning from the direction of the cockpit. Four of the transport’s crew were being herded by one of the pirates. I recognized one of the men as the guard I had tried to speak to earlier. They moved grudgingly from hand hold to hand hold at prods from the end of his rifle. As they passed the cell door I saw the glint of reflected light around their necks.

  “Obedience collars,” I said to Alex softly. These were the worst types of pirates: slavers. At the going average rate of twenty thousand Solars for a healthy adult, these flesh sellers stood to make an easy two million.

  But how did I know what the black market rate was for slaves? If I was a smuggler, could I have been a slaver too? If that was the case I deserved to be put away for life.

  “All right, listen up!” The pirate driving the transport’s crew had removed his helmet. “We’re going to be opening your cells one at a time. Just shut up and do as you’re told...or else!” He reached out and grabbed the bars to one of the doors on the other side of the passage. His suit servos whined as he closed his fingers, bending the bars he was holding as if they were wax. With a yank, he pulled the heavy door off its track.

  There was no trouble. We all lined up quietly and were each fitted with an obedience collar. Once we were collared we were directed aft. Armored pirates were spaced along the way within eyesight of each other to keep us moving. They obviously had experience dealing with captives and we were hustled quickly through the ship. A lot of the prisoners were new to weightlessness and had trouble moving around, but they learned quickly enough after being clubbed with one of their rifles.

  Judging by the way they were treating the transport, the pirates had no interest in salvaging the ship. Everything was a mess. Emergency bulkhead doors had sealed after their missile strike, which is what I was certain now it had been, but they hadn’t let that stop them. Every doorway we passed had either been forced open or blown in and each cabin ransacked. With one exception. As we filed past the hatch to the engine room the flashing light strip around the doorway warned that the compartment beyond was open to space.

  Their weapons officer must be an idiot. We were lucky that the whole ship hadn’t blown.

  The pirates had docked with our shuttle using an extendible sleeve. We were led through the ruined airlock and into the sleeve in single file to pull ourselves along by overhead tow bars. Once we reached their ship we returned to gravity. We were also greeted by an overwhelming stench. It was a nauseating mixture of burnt wiring and dirty machine oil on top of unwashed bodies and rotting vegetation.

  The pirate waiting for us in the airlock seemed amused by our reactions as the ste
nch rolled over us for the first time and gave each of us in turn a solid jab in the gut with his rifle. Whether it was to get us moving again or simply for his personal amusement I couldn’t tell, but he seemed to be enjoying his work.

  The mess that the pirates had made in our transport was matched by the state of their own ship. Layers of grime covered virtually every surface. A number of wall panels had been removed exposing hastily made repairs to various systems. Scattered light panels were either flickering or burned out which made avoiding the random piles of debris on the decks that much more difficult.

  As we made our way into the ship I couldn’t stop the feeling that I was someplace familiar, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Had I been on this ship before? Could I have been part of this crew at some point? I was really starting to worry about what kind of person I was.

  We were directed down one deck and herded into a large cargo bay. Even in that crowd it didn’t take me long to spot Alex. I recognized those eyes immediately. She was seated with her back against a bulkhead deep in thought. She glanced up and nodded as I slid down next to her.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked.

  “Aside from a killer headache and a cracked jaw I’m just peachy. You?”

  She shrugged. “This is going to make things ... difficult.”

  Like being on a prison transport headed for a life sentence on a frozen rock was a party? I wasn’t sure what she was getting at so I simply answered her with a grunt. She was prettier than I expected. Not in a beauty pageant kind of way, but there was definitely something very appealing about her. Her dark hair was cut short in the style of an experienced spacer, but she was one of those women who could pull off short hair without looking boyish. She had full lips and wide cheekbones and of course those dark, slightly almond eyes. I also enjoyed the way she filled out her jumpsuit. Generous curves in all the right places but not soft. In fact she seemed quite fit, like some kind of athlete.

  Of course she caught me checking her out.

  “Yes?” she said, tugging up the zipper on the front of her jumpsuit.

  “Nothing,” I said, pulling my eyes away from her neckline. “You just seem a little, I don’t know, distracted.”

  “Getting hijacked by slavers wasn’t exactly something I was planning on.”

  Who was? “At least we won’t be rotting behind bars for the rest of our lives.”

  “There is that,” she said flatly. What was it with her? She seemed like her mind was a million light-years away.

  Before I could think of anything to say a commotion started across the room. A brawl had broken out between the transport crew and a group of very angry looking prisoners. Everyone scattered to give them room. It was an ugly fight with two or more men ganging up on each of the former transport crew members. At one point, one of the corrections officers almost broke free but one of the others tackled him to the deck and started pummeling the back of his head as the guard tried to curl into a ball to protect himself. It wasn’t looking good for the officers.

  Suddenly, all of the fighters dropped and began spasming violently. They were clawing at their throats and several of them were actually screaming in pain. After a few moments the spasms stopped and they slumped to the deck.

  “Knock it off!”

  Standing in the doorway was one of the pirates holding a remote.

  “Next time I leave it on!”

  The stunned men lay moaning softly on the deck but I was sure they had heard him. With things back under control the pirate returned to shoving the last of the prisoners into the hold. Soon the combatants started picking themselves up from the deck. The transport crew looked like they were in pretty bad shape.

  Without thinking about it I went over to give them a hand, prisoners and officers alike. The prisoners who had started the fight only had to shake off the effects of the obedience collars for the most part, but the officers had been beaten to a pulp. One in particular had been beaten so badly that one eye was swollen shut and his lip was split and had ballooned to grotesque proportions. It was the same guard who had been posted in the cell corridor when I first woke up, the one who was too busy reading to talk to me. I had seen him take several kicks to the face before the fight had been broken up. As I moved to help him up Alex appeared on his other side and helped me take him over to the corner where the rest of his people were huddled. As we eased him down against the bulkhead I noticed him giving me a questioning look with his good eye.

  “I don’t like an unfair fight,” I said, feeling like I should say something.

  When he was settled we went back to our own piece of wall. A number of the other prisoners were giving us strange looks but we ignored them. I had a feeling this was going to be a long trip.