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One hundred and forty light years from Earth, a ship floated in the cold expanse of deep uninhabited space. Like most deep-space vessels, it was an ugly utilitarian thing. A long grey steel hull was dotted with a haphazard collection of geometric lumps built onto the cylindrical main structure. Attached to two perpendicular nacelles were immense cylinders half as long as the ship itself and just as wide. Each housed one of the ship’s main gravitic actuators, which when activated would pump a dense stream of gravitons into the focal array of an Anson Gate.
If the appropriate mass ratio was achieved, spacetime itself would collapse into an Einstein-Rosen bridge that terminated at a corresponding gate in another location. If the mass signature was correct, and the calculations were perfect, both ends would ‘open,’ and suddenly something far, far away would instantly become very, very close by. If things didn’t go well, a few billion giga-joules of energy will have been wasted and a profitable expedition would start costing a lot of credits. Gate jumps were expensive things, and those who had mastered their mysteries were destined for riches beyond imagination. Those who attempted and failed occasionally had their ships, cargos, and crews crushed into the volume of a chick pea.
This ship bristled with the flashing of signal lamps, illuminated viewing screens, and more than a few weapon emplacements. On the whole, the exterior was covered by a veritable swarm of winking, swaying, and oscillating lights and widgets which made it seem like insects were crawling all over the oblong mass as it gently steamed toward what appeared to be nothing at all. The conning tower sat at the very forecastle of the craft, and observing the infinite universe from the main viewing panel gave the impression one was standing on the edge of eternity itself.
A man stood on the bridge of the half-mile long craft, staring blankly into the perforated blackness of the empty void before him. Like his vessel, he too was an ugly utilitarian thing. He was tall, lean, and stood with a vertical alignment so rigid one might suspect his spine was simply a column of steel and not human bone at all. His face was pale to the point of ghastliness, and his hands were sinewy and gnarled with fingers long and slender yet curiously strong and vigorous. Eyes so deep brown they may as well have been black sat in deep crevices under heavy brows, and a nose narrow and sharp enough to cut glass sat between them.
The silver hair atop the man’s head was cut to a geometrically perfect flat top, and devolved into a severely cropped and inky black beard that rode an angular jaw to the chin. The chin, being similar to all his other features was sharp and pronounced. It was a face chiselled from flint, and the man who wore it took that as a compliment. Flint was hard and sharp and useful, and there were far worse things a for man to be compared to.
Atop the forecastle, Commodore Sergei Nikolayevich Vladivostok felt like the most powerful man in the universe. The Mikhail Kalashnikov may have been a re-purposed cargo vessel, but his decades as a “freelance acquisition agent” had taught the man most people referred to as “Vlad the Impaler” a lot about how to design a warship. Many tailor-made combat vessels had learned to their dismay not to underestimate the Kalashnikov on the space-ways, and the hull of his prized possession proudly bore the crossed-out insignias of eleven littoral frigates, six destroyers, and two heavy cruisers. Someday, Sergei hoped to add a Council battleship to the mural, but he wasn’t sure his beloved Kalashnikov was up to that task yet.
Unlike many men in his profession, the Commodore ran his ships like a real military fleet. While all his crew were technically privateers, and entitled to a share of the spoils, the terms of their contracts were explicit about military discipline and comportment. There were even systems where he was not technically considered a criminal, thanks to the veneer of professionalism he had applied to what was really just a flotilla of pirate ships.
Slap a coat of paint on your ships and give everyone a uniform, and suddenly people will think you are a real Navy, he laughed to himself, it’s all in the presentation.
But Commodore Vladivostok did not have time to dwell on such things. He had gated into this abandoned sector of deep space for a very important contract meeting, and the ludicrous advance fee that had already been deposited into his account had come with very specific instructions. He was allowed to bring only one ship, and he needed to be present himself to discuss the terms. Everything about that screamed “assassination attempt,” but there was far too much money on the line for him not to come.
The Commodore had a long and storied history of outsmarting assassins, and the pedestrian appearance of the Kalashnikov was specifically maintained to encourage underestimation. As was his way, the Commodore was far less worried than another man might be under similar circumstances.
Which is not to say he was careless or stupid about it either. He had followed the letter of his instructions if not the spirit. The Kalashnikov was an extremely capable warship, and while he had not brought the rest of his fleet with him to this quadrant, they were stationed close enough to jump in if needed. If it came to a fight, Sergei could have a hundred ships at his back in less than six hours. Between the firepower of his ship and the skill of its captain, Vladivostok was confident he could last six hours against just about anything other than a Krieger-class battleship. His spies had ensured that the closest Krieger was thirty-six hours away, and they were impossible to hide or move quietly. At nearly a million tons, a Krieger’s jump signature could be spotted from six or seven light-minutes away, and this was more than enough time for the Kalashnikov to clear the system if it had to. There were two Jaegers close enough to gate in, but the Commodore liked his chances against two of the sprightly destroyers if they decided to give it a shot. They were feisty and heavily armed for their size, but the fast-attack ships were not designed to handle anything the size of the 400,000-ton Kalashnikov.
Yes, Sergei Vladivostok felt good. He felt better when his comm chimed and his communications officer reported that a large but unarmed civilian vessel had jumped in to the vicinity.
So not a warship then, the thought relieved him, probably not an ambush at least.
Just because the looming risk of a pitched space battle appeared to be off the table, did not mean that he was safe. Any manner of enhanced super assassins may be waiting on that yacht, and barring the artificial leg he wore from his right knee down, Vladivostok was one hundred percent flesh and blood human. He preferred to keep his fighting ship-to-ship, where he was unmatched, as opposed to hand-to-hand. Personal combat was skill set the old pirate had allowed to wither as he rose to the current heights of his command. These days, he had people for that sort of thing.
“Have Mr. Roper suit up and meat me at launch bay one,” he ordered in his brisk and confident style, with a hint of his old Russian inflection.
“Roger that, sir,” his comm officer responded and Sergei sighed.
“This is a naval vessel, ensign. We say ‘aye,’ not ‘roger.’ You scan, sailor?”
“Sorry sir, roge... er... aye, sir!” the man stammered.
Recruitment for a pirate ship was complicated and often meant getting leftover mercenaries or discharged military personnel. The Commodore did not always have the luxury of as deep a talent pool as he would like. But the new comms officer was smart and hard-working, so he would forgive the man for his hard-coded infantry training.
“I am heading down to the shuttle bay. XO has the con. Tell the Commander that she is to stay alert for incoming ships and let Mr. Roper worry about keeping me alive. Her priority is this ship. Copy?” His executive officer was fierce and loyal, but her pathological attention to his safety could sometimes cause her to give orders not conducive to mission success. Roper's contract had helped with that, so the mercenary’s prodigious expense was acceptable.
“Aye-aye, sir. Comms out.”
At least he can be taught, the old sailor mused as he headed for the lift. As the door slid open with a mechanical hiss, he found himself staring at his bodyguard. The XO must have had the damn fool waiting for him if the monstrous thing was already in the lift.
Many people were terrified by the appearance of Marcus “Grim” Roper. But as a man who had commanded bloodthirsty pirates for some decades, the hideous and alien nature of this thing was no more off-putting than half a dozen other freakish aberrations that the old pirate had run across in his many light years’ worth of travels. Quite the contrary, Sergei considered himself fortunate to have the grotesque thing in his employ.
Grim Roper was one of two known functional full-prosthesis cyborgs in the galaxy. Though attempted several times by various militaries, the psychological trauma of putting a person’s brain into an android body had proved to be more than the human psyche found tolerable. Only the most disconnected, apathetic, dissociative of sociopaths handled the complete and total loss of biological feedback without devolving into a suicidal or homicidal frenzy.
Roper was just such a sociopath. Vladivostok was a well-travelled man, and he had never met anyone as brutally cruel as Roper. Except cruelty wasn’t the right word for it. ‘Cruelty’ implied that the man took pleasure in hurting people. But Sergei wasn’t sure if Roper took pleasure in anything. The cyborg seemed almost devoid of emotion, yet also consumed by a need for both battle and money. It was not clear to the Commodore exactly what the mercenary even did with the exorbitant fees he collected because the money certainly wasn’t going towards drugs or women or any of the other things pirates and criminals typically liked to blow credits on. But it was clear that Roper lived to fight, and he liked to get paid very well for it.
Not that the ublyudok isn’t worth every copper credit he charges, Vladivostok admitted, if he can fight like an entire regiment of heavy infantry, he should collect the pay of one. Sergei respected competent personnel, and exceptional personnel even more so. Money invested in quality product was money well spent.
He sidled into the lift next to his silent bodyguard, “Good morning, Mr. Roper.”
From his height of just over seven feet, “Grim” Roper glanced down through the armor-plated lenses that housed his forward-looking sensor array. They didn’t look like eyes, but if one squinted they might mistake them for a man wearing thick goggles. That the man had a mostly featureless plastic face with a lipless slit of a mouth was a separate set of issues. The head was at least a human-head-shaped, but it was dark grey and entirely devoid of ornamentation. Just a boring slate skull with a boring grey faceplate mounted to a boring grey column of neck.
“Good morning commodore,” the speaker inside the mouth slit droned. The voice was not harsh or overtly mechanical, but the congeniality was so obviously a programmed affectation that it almost made the salutation sound less cordial than if it had just said “fuck off.” The knowledge that there was a living human brain inside that thing only made it worse. An android emoting poorly was almost a foregone conclusion, but there was technically a human being inside the chassis.
Well, the brain of one at least. Sergei stifled a shudder.
Not that the overall appearance of the chassis made it any better. The rest of Roper’s frame was humanoid, just bigger and heavily armored. Interlocking sections of loricated panels sheathed the android body in multiple layers of protection, and the aesthetic was evocative of a Teutonic knight in plate armor. Roper had explained that this was intentional on the part of his designers as a way of engaging in subtle psychological manipulation of those he was supposed to be dealing with. If anything, the whole plan backfired because instead of conjuring romantic thoughts of dragon-slaying heroes, Roper looked like the villain in every sword and sorcery holovid ever made.
Raised disks along his shoulders, upper arms and forearms marked the hard points where various weapons systems could be mounted. Of course, showing up “unarmed” was one of the rules of this meeting, and so none of Roper’s miscellaneous implements of death were currently equipped. This was another one of Vladivostok’s bent rules. Technically, Roper was unarmed, but practically speaking, everything about the thing was a weapon. With a full suite of armaments, Grim Roper was a corpse-making force of nature on the battlefield. Without them he was merely a thousand pounds of pure nuclear-powered nightmare fuel.
Sergei chuckled, that will have to be sufficient.
“Sir?” the bodyguard inquired at the Commodore’s audible mirth.
“Nothing, Mr. Roper. A private joke is all.”
“As you say, sir,” Roper responded without inflection. Sergei was glad of that. Whenever Roper attempted inflection, it always came off as menace.
“It appears our rendezvous will be on a Gate-capable civilian craft. Any tactical considerations I should know about?” This was as much a test as anything. The Commodore knew the particulars of virtually every class of spacecraft known to man. But as a naval commander and not a front-line fighting man, he was always interested in Roper’s input on such matters.
“Hull will be thin, making heavy weapons unlikely and ill-advised. Section doors will be airtight but not armored. They will be incapable of preventing me from moving around at will. Craft will be fast and manoeuvrable, likely capable of outrunning the Kalashnikov for at least the first eleven minutes. If they are going to try anything, the evidence indicates it will be an attempt to run, not fight.”
“I concur, Mr. Roper. Any particular tactics I should employ if our partners attempt something untoward?” Sergei was not interested in dying today, and whatever his expensive bodyguard said was the best plan was almost certainly going to be the best plan.
“They will not use any weapons that can harm me unless they are willing to perforate their own hull. This seems unlikely. Stay behind me at all times. I will guide you to the runabout and hold the line until you are clear.”
The pirate grinned up at the cyborg and laughed, “And what will you do? Die defending me?”
“No. I will secure the vessel and return with it. Or in the event that is impossible I will cripple the vessel and return without it.”
Sergei grinned some more, “Ah, yes. I sometimes forget that the vacuum of space poses no threat to you.”
“I do not believe that, sir. I do not understand why you persist in testing me. Do you derive pleasure in my responses?” It was hard to tell when Roper’s questions were rhetorical in nature. His lack of modulation made everything he said sound like a vague threat. Except for his actual threats. Those were never vague.
“I command a hundred and sixteen ships and twelve thousand men. I test everyone, all the time. Do not assume you are all that special, Mr. Roper.” In all the galaxy, there were only a handful of people with confidence sufficient to chastise Grim Roper. Vlad the Impaler was one of them, and Roper acknowledged that.
“As you say, sir.” The lift hissed open and the main shuttle bay appeared before the forbidding pair. “After you, sir.”
“Thank you, Mr. Roper,” and Sergei stepped out onto the deck. His runabout, the Dancing Knorr, had already been prepared for its brief trip over to the meeting. As per the instructions from his mysterious partner, he would pilot the sleek, athletic craft himself and leave its usual six-man crew behind. Vladivostok was chagrined to admit that there was something thrilling about all the skulduggery of this opportunity. It reminded him of the old days of the Frontier Wars before he commanded an entire fleet. It had been a chaotic time, and the old pirate had sown the seeds of his current empire in the border skirmishes and trade disputes of that era. That was when the much younger Captain Vladivostok would have had to sneak around slitting throats and securing lettres de marque with the emerging governments along the frontier systems.
Now I spend my time harassing freighters and dancing with corporate capital ships, he reminded himself, and nostalgia always forgets the bad parts of the past. The wise man avoids it.
Vlad the Impaler boarded his runabout silently, with his big grey bodyguard clumping up the ramp behind him.
“Let’s go meet the new boss, shall we Mr. Roper?”
“As you say, sir.”