Saturn Moon of Titan
ANTIN VARGO HAD LONG AGO ASSIGNED HIMSELF the rank of “captain.” He had never been a member of Starfleet, or of any fleet. He had, however, been in space literally for as long as he could remember. His father had been a ship-for-hire, ready to do anything for gold-pressed latinum or any other form of currency that could easily be spent without bringing the Federation down on one’s head. He never cared especially about how legal the job was, or for whose side. The job was the job. “Everybody has his reasons,” Vargo’s father would tell him, and if one didn’t presume to judge those reasons, then everyone got along with everyone else just fine.
Antin had been his father’s perpetual companion. His dad had never gone into detail as to what had happened to Vargo’s mother, and Vargo had long ago come to the conclusion that his father had kidnapped him in infancy. He had little doubt that somewhere out there his mother still shed tears of grief over him. For his part, Antin couldn’t give a damn. What life could possibly compare to the one he was living? Total freedom, not answerable to anyone, looking out for himself and only for himself.
He was seated in a bar in the central port city of Titan, the Saturn moon that had become a popular way station for itinerant star jockeys such as himself. Antin’s bald pate glistened with sweat; the air system in the bar wasn’t remotely cool enough to deal with the crowd crushing in there during happy hour. His nose was mashed flat from a few too many fists in his face, but his mouth was perpetually in a half smile. This was due to a cut he had taken to the side of his mouth, courtesy of a quickly drawn knife that he really should have seen coming but didn’t duck away from fast enough. He’d had the scar attended to, but there was still some residual nerve damage. He didn’t mind it: he’d come to relish the fact that he had a smile at the ready no matter how dire the straits. It made him seem vaguely contemptuous of his adversaries.
It had earned him the nickname “Grim,” short for “Grimace.” He’d decided that “Grim Vargo” had a nice ring to it and had taken to introducing himself that way.
He had the opportunity to do so now when a willowy woman approached him in the bar. His eyes widened. She was clad in tight-fitting black clothing that adhered to her like a second skin, and she had a loose cloak draped around her. She had the hood pulled up, obscuring much of her face, but what he could see of it was drop-dead gorgeous.
Vargo had a love of old Earth detective novels, and this woman’s entrance and approach made him feel as if he was in one. He waited for her to veer off and head to some other guy’s table, but instead she wound up standing in front of his.
She stared at him with a piercing gaze. He started to say “Hello,” but the word caught in his throat. He coughed once to clear it and then tried again, this time managing to get the simple two-syllable word out.
“I need a ship. I understand you have one available.”
“You understand correctly.” He gestured to the seat next to him. “Why not sit down and we’ll discuss it.”
“There would be no purpose served. Either we depart now or I find someone else who will accommodate me.” She glanced around the bar, clearly already looking for someone who would give her what she wanted.
“Now, now, wait a minute.” Vargo was immediately on his feet. He was a large man, although more broad shouldered than tall, so much so that sometimes he had to step sideways through doorways.
But he wasn’t short either. Nevertheless, even standing, he felt as if she were towering over him. “Whoa,” he murmured and then composed himself again. “I’ll be happy to take you on. Fact is, you caught me between runs. And obviously you had the proper taste to come to me.” He looked at her carefully. “You know, you look vaguely familiar.”
She hesitated and then said, “Are you familiar with the Starship…Voyager?”
“No.”
She blinked. “No?”
He shrugged. “Should I be?”
“It…managed to return to Earth after a lengthy absence. There was quite a bit of attention paid to it.”
“Not by me. I’ve got better things to do than worry about whatever self-congratulatory back patting Starfleet and its stooges are involved in. Anytime something comes across the ether that’s Starfleet related, I tune it out. So whatever this Voyager was up to, I sure wasn’t watching. Why? Were you part of its crew? Because—wait! I know! You were an exotic dancer on Altair, right?”
“I was on Voyager,” she said frostily.
“A dancer there? You had a tattoo right under where you’ve got that eye thing now, right—?”
“No.”
“Okay. Well, like I said, I never watched any vids of Voyager.”
“Your loss.”
“Whatever you say, lady.” He stuck out a hand. “Grim Vargo.”
She glanced down at it and showed no interest in gripping it. He lowered it but said, “And you are?”
“A passenger.”
“A nameless passenger?”
She hesitated a long moment and then said, as if speaking a word unfamiliar to her, “Ann.”
“Ann. Ann what?”
“Ann,” she said firmly. “Have we spent enough time in pointless queries?”
“Not quite enough. Where are we going and how are you planning to settle accounts?”
She reached into the folds of her cloak and withdrew a small oblong case. Vargo instantly recognized the size of it. She placed it on the table and opened it just enough for him to see two bars of gold-pressed latinum peeking out from within. “Sector 10,” she said. “An uninhabited moon. That is all I will say for now.”
“Good enough,” Vargo said readily.
He headed out of the bar with Ann right behind him. Vargo had been around long enough to develop eyes in the back of his head, figuratively if not literally. He kept glancing back at Ann and noticing that she was warily looking around. That implied to him that she was on the run from somebody. Well, that was hardly a new situation on Titan. A good number of people passing through were doing so to get away from somebody else. He suspected that she had obtained passage on a commercial vessel in order to get there, which wouldn’t have been all that difficult. Titan was a central hub. But booking passage out of the solar system could be a bit more challenging, especially if one was heading to places that the Federation in general, or Starfleet in particular, felt were hot spots. That was when things got dicey…and guys like Vargo managed to get their more lucrative commissions.
Vargo’s ship, the ship that his father had bequeathed him, was one in which he took great personal pride. So much so, in fact, that he’d christened it the Pride. It could comfortably haul six people and had enough storage space for a fair-sized cargo. It was basically wedge shaped with sleek lines and a weapons system that he’d managed to build up so that the ship wasn’t exactly helpless when it came to defending itself, plus a few little tricks that even Starfleet would be caught off guard over.
Ann looked around the interior, flipping back her hood so that she could have an unobstructed view. It was Vargo’s first chance to see her face, and he was struck by her pure, stunning beauty. He had no idea what the metal implant on her face was; he’d never seen anything quite like it. Was she a cyborg? Was that possible? If so, considering her face and figure, it was amazing what they could do with technology nowadays.
“Adequate,” she said. She was studying his instrumentation panels with what looked to be authority. It was obvious to Vargo that she knew her way around a ship. “Maximum warp speed?”
“I can get her up to warp four if I ask her very politely.”
She stared at him blankly. “Was that intended to be humorous, or does your ship possess intelligence?”
“Humorous. Intended. Obviously unsuccessful.”
“Obviously.”
Vargo fired up the engines, and moments later the Pride had lifted off Titan’s surface and was approaching the outer atmosphere. From the control panel, Vargo said proudly, “She handles smoothly, don’t she.”
“The vessel’s operational functions are within acceptable parameters.”
“Please, stop. You’ll make my head swim with such gushing compliments.”
Suddenly, an alarm signal began to flash on the panel. This immediately caught Vargo’s attention. Ann noticed it as well. “An incoming hail?” she inquired.
“A priority-one hail is what it is. It’s a crime to ignore one, believe it or not. Aaaand I’m guessing that’s the source.”
A starship had glided directly into the smaller vessel’s path. There was no danger of collision, at least as long as the Pride was willing to change its course or slow down. It was obvious to Vargo, however, that the starship wasn’t about to simply get out of their way. The far larger ship was challenging them, and the signal was obviously from them.
“An Akira-class, from the look of her,” Vargo muttered. He glanced at the details of the incoming hail. “Registry says she’s the Thunderchild. I can’t imagine why they’d want to speak to a two-bit space jockey like me.” Slowly he turned to Ann and asked, with his eyebrows raised, “Can you imagine why they would?”
She said nothing.
The hail continued to sound, the light blinking insistently.
“Okay. Fine.” He reached over to tap the panel in order to accept the hail.
“Help me.”
He looked back at her, and her face was as set and calm as it had ever been, but there was a flicker of quiet desperation in her eyes. “Someone who is…very dear to me…is in trouble. I need to get to her. I need your help. Please.” She paused and then added, “Please…Captain Vargo.”
“Call me Grim.”
“I would rather not.”
He paused and then laughed loudly, like a barking seal. “Damn, lady, but I like your style.” He hit the comm panel panel and said, “Yeah, go ahead.”
“This is Captain Matsuda of the Thunderchild,” came a voice. “Prepare to be scanned.”
“This is Captain Vargo of the Pride. Prepare to go to hell.”
Ann raised a single eyebrow and there actually seemed to be a slight twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth.
There was a brief hesitation and then Matsuda’s voice came back. “Pride, this is nothing personal. We’re scanning all departing vessels from this port. Starfleet is looking for a particular individual who, we believe, is attempting to book passage to a site that represents a security matter.”
“Is this individual a Starfleet officer?”
“Negative. But—”
Vargo interrupted him, knowing full well that Starfleet captains didn’t take kindly to being interrupted, but not caring overmuch. “Well, then, if he, she, or it isn’t a member of Starfleet, then I don’t see that you get much say in where they go or what they do.”
“Ordinarily, yes. However, we have our orders.”
“And I have my freedom and a right to privacy.”
“Captain”—it was clear that Matsuda was beginning to lose patience—“you’re not being given a choice in this matter. You are being scanned. If you are transporting the individual for whom we are looking, we will beam them out.”
“I don’t think so,” replied Vargo, and he tapped a large black section of the panel board.
“What was the purpose of that?” Ann asked.
Vargo grinned wolfishly. “A little something I cooked up. Scrambles their sensor apparatus by feeding it false readings. At the moment their readings are telling them this ship is captained by a giant rabbit and crewed by a hundred smaller rabbits.”
“They will be able to overcome whatever scrambling system you have created.”
“I know,” said Vargo. “But meantime they won’t be able to lock onto a damned thing to beam anybody anywhere. And it confuses them long enough for me to do this.”
He slammed the Pride into full impulse and the ship fell away from the Thunderchild like a stone. The ship pirouetted gracefully and then angled away from the starship as quickly as it could.
“We’re out of tractor beam range,” he said.
“Perhaps, but not for long,” replied Ann, looking at the readings. “They’re coming after us.”
She was right. The Thunderchild was in pursuit, no longer making any endeavor to communicate with the Pride.
“They will overtake us in no time,” Ann said. “Even if you go to warp, they are still much faster.”
“Then we outthink them,” said Vargo. He angled the ship down and around and flew straight as an arrow toward Saturn.
It took Ann only a moment to realize what his intention was. “You are taking us into the rings.”
“Yeah.”
“You hope to elude them by hiding in the rings of Saturn?”
“Not hope to. Will.”
Within seconds the Pride had sailed into the outermost ring, the E-ring. In no time the ship was completely enveloped in ice and dust.
“Good,” Vargo said after a moment, checking his readings. “They’re not coming in after us.”
“There is no reason that they should,” Ann told him. “They can simply monitor us from above and either wait for us to emerge or, if they get a lock on us, haul us out with their tractor beam.”
“Ahh…and now we come to another trick up my sleeve.”
There was a large red pad next to the black one and Vargo slid his finger across it. Ann looked around as the lights flickered and the engine began to shut down. Power, however, continued to flow through the ship. Her mind was racing through the possibilities of what she was seeing, and Vargo had to admit to himself that he was impressed when she turned to him with a look of startled realization.
“You have a cloaking device?” she said.
“Yup. It’s an older one. Grabbed it in salvage off a dead-in-space Romulan ship. Took forever to figure out how to connect it up to my system.”
“Starships have developed ways to overcome cloaking devices.”
“I know…by tracking the ion trails. Thing is, I’ve shut the engine down. We’re just floating. And the composition of the ring will hide the ion trail we left behind so they won’t be able to determine our likely course.”
Ann considered all that and then nodded. “Impressive,” she admitted.
“Thanks. I’m flattered.”
They said nothing then, simply biding time and watching the image of the Akira-class starship hovering nearby. Slowly, very slowly, the Pride drifted down and away, until the E-ring was left behind and the ship was twisting away in space. Still the Thunderchild made no move to go after them.
“Remember, they don’t know we’re cloaked,” Vargo reminded her, even though he suspected she needed no reminding. “They think we’re still in there and are still scanning for us.”
Vargo was clearly correct. The Thunderchild was making a slow sweep of the E-ring, obviously trying to get some hint of the Pride’s whereabouts. Meanwhile the ship they were searching for continued to drift away.
“Come on, come on,” Vargo muttered, his gaze never leaving the starship. Finally, he saw what he wanted. “Perfect! They’re moving along the path of the ring trying to pick us up! Now it’s just a matter of time.”
Long minutes passed as the starship, meticulous and thorough in its movements, continued its slow but determined sensor sweep of Saturn’s outer ring. Finally, when the Thunderchild had moved all the way to the opposite side of Saturn, Vargo said, “Okay, time to get the hell out of here.”
The engines had not been completely shut down but instead shifted over to standby. Vargo now brought the engines to full life and activated the warp drive.
The instant he did so, he spotted movement from the far side of Saturn. It was the Thunderchild.
“They know we are here, but they do not know where,” said Ann.
“And that’s exactly the way it’s going to stay. We’re gone!” shouted Vargo triumphantly. Space warped around the vessel and the Pride leaped into warp space.
If the Thunderchild had had a lock on the ship’s whereabouts, they would have been able to follow, even overtake it. But Vargo had moved too quickly, and the cloaking device had left the starship sufficiently confused as to the ship’s location that it was too late for them to act. As a result, while the Thunderchild was still trying to figure out what had just happened, the Pride was hurtling away at warp 4. Vargo laughed delightedly at his cleverness and looked to Ann for her reaction. There was nothing. She simply sat there blank faced.
“Is your name really Ann?” he asked finally.
She turned and looked at him. “In a manner of speaking.”
She said nothing further.