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The Ariadne system had eleven planets. The inner rocky planets, while rather inhospitable, were extremely mineral-rich and thus desirable mining stations. The galaxy was full of such planets, but the Ariadne system had some distinct advantages that made it more attractive to the enterprising businessman.
The Matins Gate, which was one of three gates in that region of space, was located in a highly convenient location just a few hours jump from the third planet’s gravity well. A gate close to a mining station was a very happy coincidence. But then there was Ariadne Prime to sweeten the deal. Prime was the fourth planet in the system and it was habitable by humans wearing only minor protective gear. An inhabitable way station close to both a mining station and a gate station was about as lucky as any star system could get. Word of it spread quickly.
Much like a nineteenth-century gold rush, several hundred thousand of the roughest, toughest and most uncouth people available were drawn to the hard work and good money of the distant frontier post. The mining brought miners, and the miners brought gin mills, retail commerce, and hospitality. In barely two years’ time, Matins Station grew from a small floating maintenance dock for freighters into a popular, thriving hub of industry. Times were good at Matins Station, even if it was not a particularly delightful place to live and work.
In stark contrast to that, there was Vespers. Vespers Gate was located just outside of the sixth planet, a massive Jovian with more than a hundred moons. This gate, so close to a large gravity well and far from the lucrative terrestrial planets near the central yellow dwarf, was much less popular. The Gate physics were complicated there, and it was a seventy-hour ferry ride to the closest mining station. Less wealthy corporations and well-funded private prospectors often took advantage of the easier permitting and lower gate fees at Vespers, but realistically, it was far too convenient a hub for smugglers and pirates to attract any real commercial success.
Not as lawless as Galapagos, Ariadne was still in its infancy and the allure of the wild frontier had caused opportunistic criminality to exceed the fledgling government’s ability to police the sector with any measurable success. The obvious mineral wealth of the system meant that this was a temporary condition, but for now the Vespers Gate Station remained a certifiable hotbed of illicit activity.
On the far side of the planet from that station, a medium-sized freighter steamed slowly and quietly through space with a sleek corvette in escort. The freighter resembled a giant guppy, with a minimal crew compartment sticking out from the front of a bloated blister of a cargo hold. It was an ungainly looking thing, with its tiny head and bulbous body, but it was efficient. It held a lot of cargo for its mass and was cheap to operate.
Safely hidden behind the gravity horizon and radio static of the gas giant, Sergei eyed the clumsy freighter from a distance. The Kalashnikov was back to fighting fettle, even without the forecastle, so he had brought no other escorts. Most of his fleet was tied up in a slugfest with various Commodity Carriers convoys, anyway. He would not need them for this mission, so he had left them to their tasks.
He did not attack right away. His quarry was just outside of effective particle beam and railgun range, and firing missiles right now would give too much time for the corvette to intercept them. Often bold but never rash, the Commodore was content to watch the hapless ship and its feisty protector for now. The heavily armed escort was no match for his proud beauty in a fight, but the lithe fast-attack vessel would carve up missiles as fast as the Kalashnikov could launch them at this range.
Not that he even wanted to. His intel was very solid on the freighter, and he was one-hundred percent certain that Pops Winter was aboard that stupid-looking scow. Blowing it up with the Chairman still inside would be a senseless waste of potential profit, and he refused to be senseless or wasteful. The location of whatever hidden riches Pops had amassed was locked away in the old mobster’s brain, after all. It was a fortune no one wanted to leave hidden in space if such could be avoided.
Just blasting the Chairman across the whole sector would do, of course, but such theatrics shouldn’t be necessary. Once Laura arrived there would be at least one attempt to board the ugly freighter, and failing that they could dispatch it at their leisure.
Today will be a good day. I can feel it. Vladivostok could not keep his obvious good cheer from showing on his face.
Twenty minutes later, the comms officer alerted him to the arrival of his partner, and he quickly gave orders to dock the Red Vengeance at the aft cradle where it would be safe. He did not want the vessel in the way if things came to blows. The ship was well-armed and fast, but it added nothing to a fight that did not have other capital ships for it to harass. His vessel could blanket the sector with enough ordnance to blast the freighter and its escort into atoms and then blast those atoms into quarks. A full broadside from the Kalashnikov was an indiscriminate thing, and he still needed the woman alive.
A few moments of silence passed, and then Laura joined him on the bridge. Her new appearance was a bit of a shock, and his spies had informed him that if he attempted to abuse her as he had before it would not be so easy a thing to accomplish this time. Sergei was a man who had mastered the art of being bold and cautious at the same time, so he was unperturbed by this development.
“You are looking well, little suka,” he started, and she cut him off.
“Commodore, if you use that word again I will castrate you in front of your own crew,” she smiled as she said it, but a new face could not alter the expression of frosty menace she wore.
“I suppose you could do that now, Laura,” he smirked, “And how does the thrill of physical dominance taste to you? Does it feel good to be stronger than a man?” He sneered, “Was that not the whole point?”
“Means to an end, Commodore,” she met his jibe with cool indifference.
“Another lesson, then. You would not survive any attempt to harm me. You might actually kill me, but you would outlive me only by seconds. New muscles and new toys do not make you the master of your environment, Laura,” he went back to watching the screen.
“But they do make me the master of your future, Sergei,” she pointed out. “Under your rules, you only live for as long as my own survival remains more desirable than your death. Pray that does not change.”
Sergei’s response surprised her. It was a full-on belly laugh, sincere and filled with mirth, “At last! You begin to play the game, tovarisch!”
He saw the resolution in her eyes, and clapped her on the back in a comradely fashion, “This is not a game of stratagems and projections, my dear. It is war. You are only truly in this game when you are ready to fight, yet also prepared to die. Now, Laura. Now you will begin to understand how the pieces on your board actually move and act.”
In that moment Laura realized that she would never understand men, but his good humor was infectious all the same.
“So, what game is the Chairman playing then?” she asked the grinning pirate.
“Oh, I think he is running to one of his little stashes for money or guns.” Sergei looked confident of this.
“With no escort?” She was genuinely interested in his impression of the situation.
“He snuck away. He wants us to believe he is still on Earth. A big escort implies a valuable cargo, and that makes men like me curious.” He waved at the two ships on the screen, one large and one much smaller, “See how his containers look empty to scans? They use special tarps for that. Makes things look like massless space to active scanners. Empty ships are worthless, so pirates and patrols leave them alone."
He rocked on his heels, smug and filled with glee, "This is the finest pirate ship in the galaxy, and such tarps do not fool me. We can tell when a container is actually empty, and when a smuggler's blanket is making it appear so. It's a good play from the crafty old fool. This looks exactly like a moderately rich entrepreneur with a hold full of contraband trying to make a little money on the frontier." He nodded his approval with a twinkling eye, "Ship is big enough to carry a decent amount of cargo, and the escort is enough to keep little fish away. Big fish like Vlad the Impaler aren’t interested in small fry like a single freighter.”
“Really?” She hadn’t considered that.
“Unless he is hauling something very exotic, just one of my missiles will be worth more than most of his cargo.”
Laura pondered that. Pops was more than brave enough to attempt a stealth run to Ariadne if he thought no one would be looking for him. While not typically a big risk-taker, the old man had never shied away from the occasional chancy gambit if it suited his purposes.
“OK then,” she concurred, “I presume we will attempt to board first?”
“Da. We will need to draw the corvette away and then close to grapple range. They cannot outrun us, so this will be a simple matter.”
“Why not disable them with a railgun shot or something?” Laura was confused. Chasing the target down seemed unnecessarily complex.
“We cannot ‘shoot-to-disable’ Laura,” Sergei answered without condescension for a change. “Anything I put through the hull of that fat-bellied pig has a chance of destroying it outright. If I aim for the engines, reactor goes”— he pantomimed an explosion—“if I aim for the cargo hold? Ship is not disabled. Aim for the bridge?”
She finished, “Kill everyone inside. Got it.”
He nodded, “So we push the escort away. He will not stay to fight. Hired escorts like that are not going to fight to the death if they can avoid it. We shoot, he runs. We board the freighter and take Pops.”
Laura liked this plan. It was solid, flexible, and seemed to cover the bases well. They had overwhelming military superiority, so even if there was a trick of some kind, they could just vaporize the enemy and leave.
“How do we push the escort away, then?”
The pirate grinned, “Like this. Tactical, give me firing solution for the escort, kinetic impactor only.”
The tactical officer responded, “Kinetic impactor, Aye. Standby for firing solution.”
He had barely finished talking when his console chimed, “Solution ready, sir.”
“Engage the target, Tac.”
“Aye, sir,” the officer hit a button, and the screen showed a small pinprick of light jet away from the ship with laconic ease.
“Now watch,” Sergei whispered, “We’ll make a pirate of you yet, Laura.”
The corvette veered off from the freighter and arced inward toward the Kalashnikov.
“He has seen our little mosquito, and now he comes hunting like a good little escort,” Sergei instructed.
The missile was accelerating rapidly as it approached the corvette, but a blue-white dagger of light streaked from the darting black vessel and struck the impactor before it could connect. The missile disappeared in a soundless corona of orange light and hurtling shrapnel.
“Yes, good boy,” Sergei crooned to no one in particular, “now come find me.”
Then to his helmsmen, “Shallow dive, helm, skim the atmo at fifteen degrees, polar. Enter and exit at your discretion, but I want us between the corvette and the freighter when we come out.”
“Aye, sir. Brace for turbulence.”
Laura held her breath. This manoeuvre did not sit well with her. A drop into the dense atmosphere of the giant planet did not seem like a promising idea at all to her. But both the Commodore and the crew seemed very comfortable with the extreme tactic. If the ship didn’t get torn apart, the EM interference from the highly ionized atmosphere and the massive gravity distortions should keep them invisible to the corvette until they came out the other side. She understood what he was trying to do. Once the Kalashnikov was between the two ships, the Corvette will have already lost the fight and failed in its mission. There would be no reason for it to stay and get pummelled at that point.
“Relax, tovarisch,” he read her mind, “The ship can handle such a trick. You think I chose this type of ship for its looks? Ha! She is ugly, but she is strong. A little dip into the soup will not harm her.”
Just then, the deck lurched and lights flickered as the huge vessel struck the dense atmosphere of Ariadne VI. Laura’s new augmentations kept her balanced and upright to her extreme delight, and she found herself enjoying the ride.
“And a soupy little suka she is!” crowed Sergei with a chuckle.
Forty seconds later, the shuddering jaunt ended and the pirate ship emerged from the planet’s thick veil of gasses to within a thousand miles of the unsuspecting freighter. Sergei barked orders with casual ease, “Tac! Solutions on all vessels, all weapons. Active pinging on all fields, please. Let them see you doing it, too.”
“Full Monty, Aye sir!” Laura did not understand the reference, but assumed it to be something puerile and nautical.
The effect of the dramatic show of force was instantaneous. The black corvette, having been well and truly outmanoeuvred by an ugly converted freighter, turned its engines toward the Kalashnikov and tore off at maximum acceleration for the safety of the planet’s far side. The tac officer lobbed a few more kinetic impactors at the fast little ship, just to keep it running, and then he turned his attention to the main target.
From the freighter, which was now confirmed to be a Commodity vessel tagged the Silverfish, several dozen tiny pods fell away and streaked outward as the crew began abandoning the doomed vessel. This close to Vespers, it was a logical move.
They all must know that we are after Pops, not a bunch of random spacers. Laura agreed with the strategy, and she would have done the same thing if she were part of the Chairman’s crew.
From the tac station came the report, “All lifeboats jettisoned, sir, looks like all hands are abandoning the ship.”
“Leave them, Tac, stay on-mission, please.” Sergei was not, in fact, interested in random spacers. The tac officer continued, “Only one biological on ship, sir. Cargo hold appears to be filled with empty containers.”
“We were right. He was out here to pick something up. Probably cash and weapons,” Laura observed, “Judging by the size of that cargo hold, quite a bit of both, it seems.”
“He is an angry and desperate man,” the Commodore agreed with the assessment.
The comms officer called out, “Freighter hailing us, sir!
“Well by all means, Comms, let’s have it on screen,” Vladivostok fairly beamed with pride and joy at the totality of his victory.
Pops Winter’s face loomed large on the main terminal. He appeared well, all things considered, and his prototypical look of benign irritation was the only visible sign that the might be something less than happy.
“Mr. Chairman!” Sergei boomed with exaggerated cordiality, “Can I invite you to my ship for some tea this fine afternoon?”
“I suppose you can, Sergei,” Pops answered without inflection, “But I believe I’ll have a brandy, if that is not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all, Pops. We will be alongside shortly,” and with that, Sergei cut the connection.