“Mayday, mayday,” a ragged, tired voice emerged from the speakers on the bridge of Patrol Cutter Bellerophon. “Please respond. Life support is giving out and I don’t have much time left.”

“Track that signal, radioman,” Gareth St. John Dankworth barked the order at his bridge crew. As an Auxiliary Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, he was the only commissioned officer aboard, the rest being enlisted men. He was responsible for all of their lives.

Gareth stood up from his station on the compact bridge and keyed the overhead address system.

“All hands, stand by for maximum maneuvering,” Gareth ordered. “Chief, bring the reactor to full power and be prepared to push it hard.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the call came back.

“Mayday repeating,” that lonely voice called again. “Please respond. Warning. My claim was hit by pirates. Protect yourselves…”

Gareth lurked over the radioman, watching the man furiously spinning knobs and watching gauges.

“What happened, Ferrie?” Gareth demanded.

“Lost his signal, sir,” the Spacer Two replied. “Got a partial vector, but it’s like he just stopped transmitting.”

“Give me the new course,” Gareth said, keying the ship-wide again. “All hands, brace for acceleration.”

Ferrie tore off a piece of paper from his pad and handed it to Gareth. As commander of Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, Gareth took two steps to the big man standing at the ship’s wheel. You had to have muscles to spin the wheel while simultaneously pulling and turning it on the post. Tom Atkins was always equal to the job, nearly as big and strong as Gareth.

“Come about Atkins.” Gareth read the numbers. “New heading right three points, up five. Lock that in and pour on the juice.”

“Right three up five,” Atkins echoed. “Stand by. Ready for acceleration.”

“Hit it, mister,” Gareth said.

Aft, the full power of the Choueiri Arcjet Ionic Drive lit, a blue-white, electrical fire driving the sleek greyhound of Sky Patrol across the dark depths of the asteroid belt.

“Radioman,” Gareth called without looking at Ferrie. “Keep your eye on your scanners. There will be rocks ahead of us.”

“Commander?” Chief Edevane called from the reactor room. “At this speed, should we spin the shields forward instead?”

“Good idea, Chief,” Gareth replied. “Bring them to zero, zero, zero.”

“Coming up, Gareth,” the Chief said.

The Star Shields. A five-yard thick concrete barrier you kept between you and the Sun at all times, just to reduce the solar radiation the ship absorbed. They had solar panels on them to supplement the reactor, and the ship was still exposed to the cosmic background radiation, but every little bit helped.

At this speed, having a concrete shield in front might protect them from ramming a small asteroid at speeds too great to maneuver safely.

As the Star Shield came around, the big picture window across the bridge was occulted. Atkins and Ferrie would be flying on instruments and scanners, rather than good, old-fashioned eyeballs, but Gareth couldn’t imagine two men better for the task.

“Commander, I’ve got a new signal,” Ferrie said. “Two of them, as a matter of fact. One stable on the surface of that asteroid there. The other seems to be receding.”

Receding? Why would it be receding? Of course, his ship had gotten here before the pirates could flee.

But those folks were running now. Just as the Law was arriving, like in any good western vid.

Gareth ground his teeth, but he really had no choice now but to let them go.

“Ferrie, lock everything you have on the second signal and track them as long and far as you can,” Gareth ordered. “All hands, prepare for full reverse acceleration. Atkins, bring us to rest with the asteroid and land us as close as you can to the signal.”

Bellerophon had a gun on the bow. She was a patrol cutter, after all. But Gareth’s duty was to rescue the vessel’s crew, assuming they could. Only after that, or if the man was dead when they arrived, could the posse set off in pursuit.

Simple orbital geometry and physics worked against him now. They were going faster than the supposed pirate, and could run him down if they turned. But every minute might be one too long for a man injured and perhaps dying down there.

Justice never slept, however. Earth Force Sky Patrol would never rest. Right now, he was just spotting the pirates a head start, that was all.

The second signal receded as the ship slowly settled on the surface, but remained on Ferrie’s screen.

You can run from me. You cannot hide.

“Duewall, Vitro, Hlavka, get suited up to join me on the surface. Chief, you’ll be in charge until I get back,” Gareth ordered, moving aft to the main airlock.

The three men were his usual team for missions on the ground, so they had anticipated him. All were already in their fishbowl helmets in the airlock when he arrived.

Unlike an officer of Sky Patrol, in his tall boots, white hotpants, and maroon tunic, these men wore short boots in black leather, laced up the front. Gray pants flared outward a little at the knee like mushrooms covering their feet. Their collarless, pullover tunics in maroon at least matched his for color, and they had left their kepis with the ship, the short brim of the cap even then too much for their fishbowls. Each man wore his rank on his neckerchief: Duewall’s solid red; Vitro’s solid white, and Hvalka’s solid black; so Gareth could at least tell them apart from behind.

Gareth had stopped by his cabin and grabbed the Lasrifle from that locker as he headed aft. Better to be overarmed than under. Once he got to the airlock, he used his thumbprint to open the arms locker and hand each man an Ionic Stunner and a stick-on holder for their thighs.

He locked the fishbowl over his head and opened the radio.

“Bellerophon, this is Dankworth,” he said loudly. “We’re all set here. Go ahead and activate the airlock.”

Behind them, a bank vault door swung shut with a loud beeping before it clanged into place and a wheel spun to set the bolts. Air hissed out of the room around them, until Gareth felt his uniform tighten just a little. A light began to blink, and the outer airlock door swung in.

Asteroid mining was frequently a lonely, obsessive task. Most of the true rocks were almost completely nickel and iron. Huge mega-conglomerates could grab those with robot ships and feed them into enormous hoppers that reduced them to stacks of bars and ingots.

Small-scale miners had to prospect in places the big guys didn’t bother, with their spectrometers and gear, looking for the exotic metals, up in the platinum group, for example, or the rare earths, for the things Earth’s economy needed to continue to grow. Here, you dug for a while, then moved on, hoping to find a vein of the pure stuff left over from the ancient supernovae that had seeded this solar system.

Every once in a while, a man might find a stone as big as a patrol cutter that was nearly a pure nugget. If he could keep it secret and register and protect his claim, his grandchildren might still be fabulously wealthy.

Assuming no pirates came along and robbed you.

The hatch opened and Gareth let his Earth muscles drive him across the surface of the small moonlet like a swimmer in the low gravity. Behind him, the other three followed as well as they could, but none of them had his skill or power.

Ahead, a steel and composite box, longer than it was tall or wide. Blunt at one end and flared for drives at the other.

Gareth spied a figure in a mining armor splayed to one side, as though he had been trying to crawl back to the ship when he collapsed. Or died.

Gareth homed in on the figure.

“Vitro,” he called. “I’ve got a man down here. Move it.”

Rather than speak, the medic surged ahead of his companions for a second before they caught up.

Gareth was there and had the man turned over. When he did, he could see the air and drops of blood seeping out of a series of blaster marks on the surface of the armored suit. At least the man had stood facing them when they shot him.

Quickly, Gareth pulled emergency patches from a pocket of his suit and began slapping them in place on the leaking holes. Mining armor usually had weeks of air and a solid air scrubber aboard, as you might just live in the suit for several days, rather than lock through to the interior of your ship.

Gareth felt the medic slide in alongside him and start pressing buttons of the side of the man’s helmet.

“I’ve got lifesigns still, sir,” the medic said. “Weak, but present. Looks like we got here in the nick of time.”

“We’ll need to get him out of the armor, Spacer,” Gareth said. “His ship or ours?”

“I trust my equipment better than some random stranger, sir,” Vitro said. “But mining armor’s too heavy to lift, unless we get a mover or something out of his ship, maybe.”

“There’s no time for that,” Gareth decided. “Will he survive if we move him?”

“Can’t tell without getting him open, sir,” the medic shrugged. “But those are heat burns, so they might have cauterized inside. Probably worth risking.”

“Good enough,” Gareth said. “I’ll carry him on my back. Duewall and Hlavka, you each stabilize a hip. Doc, you get to the ship now and get your medbay ready.”

Gareth slipped an arm around the armored figure and lifted. Even in the low gravity of this moonlet, there was a lot of mass. But Gareth was not deterred. He grabbed and thrust upward with his hips and thighs, getting the figure more or less standing as the other two Spacers gripped arms and held him.

Gareth turned and backed into the armor to piggy-back him.

Over the radio, low moans suddenly sounded, so the man was awake. Probably mindless with pain, but there was nothing any of them could do until they got him out of his armor.

Gareth reached back awkwardly as Duewall and Hlavka draped the arms over his shoulders. He stood up to his full height, which thankfully was enough to clear the shorter man’s feet. It was too much to leap there in a few bounds, so Gareth focused on keeping his balance forward, even as his men helped him. In the distance Vitro was entering the airlock, so he’d be ready when they got there.

That amount of mass made him feel like Atlas lifting up the world, but Gareth would not be defeated. They would get the miner to safety and do everything they could to make sure the man survived.

They were Earth Force Sky Patrol. They would always protect the innocent first.

And then punish the guilty.

Gareth looked up from his paperwork as Vitro entered. The medic looked like he’d been drug backwards through a knothole.

“How is he?” Gareth asked.

“Badly wounded, but I think he’ll make it, sir,” Vitro sighed. “Another ten minutes or so and it would be a different story. Problem is, he needs a proper hospital. I’ve done the best I can, but mostly that’s to stabilize him until real doctors can open him up and fix things.”

“Very good, Vitro,” Gareth said, standing. “He’s your primary duty until then.”

“Yes, sir,” the medic departed.

Gareth let his thoughts crystalize for a moment, and then came to his decision.

From his office he went forward to the bridge. Spacer Three Mohammed bin Aziz al-Bukhara had the ship’s wheel for now, with Atkins resting. Omar Ferrie should have gone off duty at the radio station, but had refused all orders, sure that the faint signal he still held would be lost if someone else tried.

Gareth couldn’t really argue with the man, so he opened the ship-wide comm and took a deep breath.

“Chief Edevane and Spacer One Atkins to the bridge,” he called. “All hands stand by for maneuvering orders.”

Quickly, the two named men appeared on the tiny bridge.

“What’s up, commander” Edevane asked as they arrived.

“We have a problem,” Gareth said. “The injured man needs to get to a base hospital if he’s to have any chance to survive, but our faint trace on the pirates will vanish if we do.”

Both men nodded. Most of the crew knew the score on that one. And to a man it probably galled them nearly as much as it did Gareth. They were Sky Patrol. They were supposed to be the good guys, but sometimes the good guys were stuck.

“Chief, there’s only one way to handle this,” Gareth said. “I’m going to board the miner’s vessel and stay in pursuit. You’ll get this ship back to base and then round up help to come after me.”

“Sir, are you sure that’s wise?” Atkins blurted out.

“No, Tommy,” Gareth replied. “It’s probably stupid, but it’s the only chance we have to capture those men before someone else becomes the next victim.”

“As you order, sir,” the Chief said with a quiet, stark voice.

As senior enlisted man aboard, he was used to being in temporary command while Gareth was off ship, perhaps on the surface of an asteroid as before. Now, he would have to be responsible for everyone and everything until he could get the little ship and crew to Asteroid Base Three and the Commandant.

“Atkins, I need you driving for a bit,” Gareth said. “You’ll need to put us right next to the miner’s ship so I can move some gear over in short trips. After that, you and al-Bukhara will have to hard burn home as fast as you can. Questions?”

“Negative, sir,” they both said in unison.

In a moment, the ship was a flurry of activity. Gareth left the Chief forward and went aft to locate the miner’s badly-damaged armor. It would be key to the next phase of the plan he had considered.

Outside, Atkins used his deft touch to drop Bellerophon almost close enough to the other ship to simply toss things by hand between airlocks. Gareth suited up and he and Hlavka hauled the armor over, as well as several other things Gareth would need.

Finally, he moved to the bridge. Thankfully, the ship was designed to be easy to fly, even in the armor suit. Some men evacuated the ship of all air for weeks at a time, just boarding to move to a new location, but not bothering with anything else.

Asteroid miners were some of the roughest, toughest men in the Solar System. Only comet wildcatters, mining for water on the fragile snowballs of space, could give them a close run for the money.

And Earth Force Sky Patrol, of course.

“Radioman Ferrie,” Gareth opened the radio between ships. “Confirm the last course laid in.”

“Roger that, commander,” Omar said quickly. “They did a dogleg burn about three hours ago. Probably felt they were safe enough. Anybody but me might have lost them before that.”

Gareth smiled. Not much brought Omar Ferrie joy besides outsmarting other people with his radio gear. There wasn’t a better radioman in Sky Patrol, as far as Gareth was concerned.

“Very good,” Gareth concluded. “Chief, you are now in command until relieved. I’ll be expecting the cavalry soon.”

“We’ll be there, Gareth,” the old man of the ship said.

On his internal screens, Gareth watched the slender dragonfly of a ship hop delicately into the air and turn for home. They would probably break every speed record known in the process of getting there.

Gareth spent a little time, just making sure everything was clear in his head as he pressurized his new ship and got ready. Then he lifted off and programmed in a course, based on the mathematical wizardry of his Radioman.

All of space travel was just Newtonian geometry, with a little Einstein thrown in to give it extra flavor. So many seconds burn on a particular course for acceleration, and then you coasted for the most part until turnover. Sometimes, you could get lucky and slingshot your way around some planet or moon for a gravity assist. It was just like playing snooker back home, except that this table wasn’t flat.

Still, he had them. Justice might be delayed, but it would not be denied. Gareth programmed in the course and watched it for a bit, just to make sure everything worked.

Then he went aft and began to prepare a little surprise for his pirate friends.

Gareth somehow knew the exact moment when the pirates detected him. A space cop develops that sixth sense, even across astronomical distances.

Based on the first burn away, and then the dogleg the ship had taken, Radioman Ferrie had estimated one of three larger asteroids that must be where the pirates had their hidden base. Briefly, Gareth had considered chasing them directly, cutting the chord of the ring of asteroids, but he wanted to truly surprise these men.

And all spacers are superstitious folk. They would recognize the ship chasing them, especially when it took almost the same course they did. Ferrie’s course had him maneuvering around a few larger rocks, but nothing terrible.

In bad vids, asteroid belts are always shown with large and small rocks so close together that slips have to maneuver crazily to avoid collisions. It was like the director took a vehicle chase on the surface of a planet, and just projected it into three dimensions with rocks substituting for parked cars and trees.

And sure, there were lots of rocks out here, but space was huge. Big rocks were almost alone in the depths of space. As long as you flew slow enough, the little ones wound usually bounce right off your hull, and you can dodge the small moonlets.

So Gareth had taken the same, seven hour burn as the pirates had. Then the dogleg down and left. It wasn’t a crowded section of the asteroid belt, but perhaps less well-known. More dangerous. A shade denser, as two large asteroids had managed to graze each other in the last few thousand years and spalled off chunks of each other.

Now was when things got a little risky, but it couldn’t be helped.

Gareth had spent his time repairing the miner’s battle-damaged armor from the inside so it no longer leaked air. He left the outside scorched and gruesomely covered with flash-dried blood.

The man who had worn it wasn’t all that much shorter than Gareth, as these men tended to be big and burly, so the armor fit him a bit uncomfortably, but he didn’t need to wear it long.

The mining ship itself had been vented back to space, like before. After that Gareth had programmed it to slave its movement to any other ship that came close. He had even run a private comm wire from the bridge down to the cargo bay through some ducting, and plugged it into the back of the armor, hidden as long as he stayed leaned back.

Someone walking close should think that the armor was hung on the normal rack, but Gareth was standing exactly next to the rack, in front of a non-existent set of hooks.

He could watch.

On the scanners, his ship had autonomously gone into turnover as it approached the three moonlets, slowing at a reasonable, measured pace that wasn’t a threat to anyone.

Still, someone had noticed. A ship had lifted from the surface of the second moon, right where Ferrie had guessed from his math. Gareth’s ship came to a stop as it detected the other, and waited.

They waited.

Gareth smiled, hidden down on the cargo deck and watching a feed from the bridge sensors.

The pirate pinged them hard, but the miner seemingly ignored the other vessel.

It started to come a little closer, no doubt with their own, highly-illegal bow gun pointed at the intruder, ready to blast first and then run.

But the new vessel didn’t react. Didn’t run. Didn’t chase.

Just sat there, dead in space.

Could it have followed them here?

“Miner XJ-9641Q, what do you want?” an angry man called over the comm.

Gareth didn’t bother replying.

Superstitious.

They knew who was chasing them. They had just shot the captain and killed him twelve hours ago, as far as they knew. Sky Patrol had been close enough to respond, but had gone to rescue the man, and let the them escape.

And this wasn’t Bellerophon in pursuit.

A second ping, this one omnidirectional as they looked for Gareth’s ship, maybe somehow hidden and lurking in the darkness.

Nothing.

“Miner XJ-9641Q, respond,” the voice was harder now. Meaner.

Nothing. The ship was just programmed to wait now. If they got closer, it would let them. If it fled, it would begin to follow, but not at full speed.

Just enough that an Auxiliary Agent of Sky Patrol could keep them on his scanners when they did.

Time passed.

The pirates waited.

Gareth expected that they were preparing to run, but stuck by the strange behavior of the ship that had followed them.

Someone would say it. All spacers were superstitious to some degree. Pirates were usually worse.

Was it haunted?

Gareth grinned and waited. He had covered the inside of his faceplate with a thin, black gauze. Not enough to limit his vision, but it would make his suit seem dark and empty when he moved.

And he would.

But he had to wait.

Eventually, greed or curiosity got the better of them. The pirate maneuvered closer, running a curve to one side, where they could see the open bays of the ship. Their sensors would pick up no pressurization anywhere on the bridge. And Gareth had left the windows uncovered, so they could even look in and see nobody on the bridge.

Ghost ship.

Would they run at that point?

This was the hardest part. He could only guess at their behavior, based on probabilities. That, and human psychology.

An empty ship was worth money if they could fence it somewhere. And Sky Patrol probably hadn’t had time to set a trap.

Probably.

Gareth smiled and waited.

Eventually, greed overcame them, as he had expected it would.

The pirate ship came closer.

She wasn’t a sleek, purpose-built warship like Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, but she also wasn’t an efficient box with engines, like the miner. Somewhere in between, with space for cargo as well as a pirate crew. Gareth suspected he might be facing two dozen men, all told, but many of those would have to remain on the other ship.

He would have to face a dozen men, at most. Possibly less, since no captain would risk too many men in what might be a trap.

Gareth set his radio to listening for nearby transmissions.

He got lucky enough to actually see through the open cargo bay doors as the pirate ship navigated close, just out of the corner of his faceplate if he leaned forward. They came to rest a few hundred yards away and waited.

Another hard ping lit up the miner’s scanners.

Nothing.

Nobody.

Except perhaps ghosts?

Gareth smiled and waited.

Time was in his favor now. Bellerophon would be racing as hard as they could burn to headquarters, possibly using a tight-beam laser to tell the Commandant what was going on.

Then again, maybe not, as his men would want to be the ones leading the charge to rescue their commander. Every minute the pirates sat confused just made it that much more likely that the cavalry would come riding over the hill with trumpets blaring at some point.

Another ping. Hard and focused this time. Someone looking for anybody moving around. Any clue what was going on.

Something other than an angry ghost stalking them for the many crimes they had committed.

On the bridge feed, Gareth was able to pick up a half-dozen signals as pirates emerged from the other ship. Their suits were mostly functional, when they flew into visual range of one of the cameras he had left on, rather than the heavy-duty, powered mining exoskeleton Gareth wore. They were sealed tight and had some modicum of protection against sharp edges and such, but not anything like Sky Force Assault suits.

He considered pitying them for a moment, but these men were pirates. They had left a man shot and bleeding out, only fleeing when Sky Patrol arrived to chase them off. He didn’t have a yardarm handy, so he’d just have to make do.

Six men crossed the space between ships. This vessel was tumbling ever so slightly, relative to the pirate. Not much, just enough to show different faces over time.

Ghost ship, right? No living crew would let a vessel roll on their gyros without at least compensating, even if it was too slight to notice, except for the pilot.

The hull clanged as the first pirate landed with his boot magnets, hard enough that the vibrations passed through the steel at Gareth’s back as a sound, contained within his tiny world.

More thumps.

The internal cameras were on, but the feed was controlled inside Gareth’s suit, same as the ship’s scanners. He watched six men with beam pistols cautiously make their way into the cargo bay, trying to look all directions at once.

A zero-gravity instructor had once thwapped the side of Gareth’s helmet with a cane when he automatically locked himself onto the deck during an exercise, even as the man was hanging from a side wall.

There is no down in space.

Gareth was locked to the deck himself, but only because the armor needed to look normal.

Each of the pirates made the same mistake now, setting themselves on the same plane of motion with the ship, like they were under gravity. It would make the next steps easier.

Gareth nearly laughed when the pirates came around a corner and saw his armor, covered with blast marks and dried blood. On the radio channel they were using, he heard the scream and cries of surprise. His risk now was that they might shoot on general principle. But armor was expensive stuff, not to be unnecessarily wasted.

“But we killed him,” one of the men said shakily.

Someone flashed a light at the faceplate of Gareth’s armor from across the bay, but it would show black with all the inside lights off and gauze across the glass.

“He must have gotten out of the armor and found the medbay,” another voice said. Probably the man in charge of the boarders. “Find him.”

The group tromped into the bay, with a pair heading aft to the engineering spaces and four going forward. The space was small, but Gareth had locked each door and they would have to open them with the mechanical override to get inside.

Finally, they got the first hatch open and the man in charge tapped one on the shoulder.

“Wait here and keep watch,” the man ordered.

The pirate nodded and stood to one side, watching the hallway forward as the other three went into the crew area, sneaking carefully looking for a ghost.

Gareth leaned his head forward and the two aft were out of sight. It was just him and the one pirate.

He didn’t like pirates.

In atmosphere, a miner suit makes noise. They were all in vacuum now.

Slowly, Gareth reached down for the weapon he had concealed in an outside pocket of the armor, and pulled out his Lasrifle, modified by removing the stock to become a long-barreled pistol.

It was unsporting, but he was one cop against six pirates, and a dead man if they made any sound. Gareth shot the man, the beam going clean through the helmet bubble of his suit, cracking the ferro-glass as it did, and killing the pirate instantly.

The man died without a sound. Without any clue what had killed him, most likely.

Gareth slid the pistol down by his side, mostly out of sight but still in his hand.

He waited.

“Rudy, check in,” a voice said.

That must be the dead man attached to the deck by only one foot, as his death thrashing had knocked the other loose.

A good captain would have had life sensors constantly transmitting, so they knew when a man got into trouble. Here, a pirate had died and nobody even noticed.

“Johansson. Mills. Find Rudy,” that stern voice from before said. “Wake the bastard up with a few kicks if you have to.”

Those must be the two aft. The man hunting ghosts or ambushes forward certainly wouldn’t want to be alone. Not on a ghost ship.

Gareth waited.

Sure enough, the two emerged from the rear, clomping noisily along the metal of the deck rather than flying gracefully, like he would have done.

“Rudy, wake up,” one of them said.

The man was too dead to say anything, and his wounds would have largely cauterized, so he wasn’t standing in a cloud of frozen blood droplets.

The two men walked up to the corpse. One of them punched the man.

“Damn, Rudy,” he said.

Gareth moved like lightning. Like Death itself.

He lifted the Lasweapon and shot the one in back. Again, a clean hit through the helmet, rupturing the man’s life. The second started to turn, for whatever reason, and unleashed a terrible scream across the radio channels as the beam collapsed his face inward and splashed his brains across the ruptured rear of his helmet.

Again, Gareth dropped his hands and moved back to his spot, just another empty suit.

This ship was haunted. Three of your men have already died, captain. Without a word being spoken.

“Johansson? Mills? What’s going on?” the lead boarder asked.

“What are you men doing over there?” a new voice broke in. Deeper. Authoritative. Probably a pirate captain.

Hopefully, a nervous one.

“Rudy, Johansson, and Mills aren’t responding,” the first man spoke. “We’re moving back to the cargo bay to see why not.”

“Move carefully,” the captain cautioned. “I don’t like this.”

None of them would.

Superstitious. Too many horror vids as kids, or even grownups.

“Mary, Mother of God!” Someone screamed over the radio. “What the hell happened to them?”

“What’s going on?” the captain demanded over the cries and sounds of revulsion.

Sounded like someone just threw up inside his helmet, too. That would be extra yucky, when all you had on was a fishbowl. Gareth could at least puke down into his chest cavity if he needed to.

Finally, the man in charge got the others sorted out.

“All three are dead,” he reported in a shaky voice. “Helmets crushed.”

Crushed? No, but if you refused to get too close, the starring would look like that, maybe.

Angry ghost, anyone?

“Get clear,” the captain ordered. “We’ll blow it out of space and that damned ghost with it. That’ll teach it.”

Gareth grimaced, but it couldn’t be helped. He had hoped more men would emerge and he could pick them off one at a time. Now, the pirate ship would be preparing to destroy the miner.

He only had one chance.

The three emerged, flying across the bay and past him as if the Devil himself was on their heels, the final one crawling almost sideways to see around the puke splattering his helmet. The last pirate was looking right at Gareth when the arms of the miner armor suddenly came up.

The pirate’s blood-curdling scream was the most terrifying thing Gareth had ever imagined might emerge from a human throat, but that didn’t stop him from shooting the man dead. The way it suddenly strangled into a gurgle probably unnerved the rest.

Gareth caught the second pirate with his next shot, even as the man tried to wriggle like a fish on the hook.

The boarding lead was a fish in a barrel, but Gareth had no mercy left in him. He shot the man in flight, watching his corpse bound bonelessly off the far end of the bay to lay crumpled in on the floor, held down by one magnetic boot.

He only had seconds until the captain ordered the other ship to open fire.

Gareth lurched upright and dove to the near corner of the open bay, torqueing the steel with his glove’s exostrength so hard it probably wouldn’t seal again until he cut the plate out and replaced it.

But it got him where he needed to be. He peeked out and saw the pirate vessel only one hundred yards away, slowly rolling away to put some distance between the ships.

If he had a bow gun, it would be facing the wrong way, but the sensors and cameras would show him. Gareth stowed his Lasweapon and threw himself across the space with a running start.

Just because, he opened the radio to transmit for the first time.

“You killed me, now I’ll kill you all,” he snarled over the line in the ugliest, angriest voice he could imagine. “You’ll all be coming to Hell with me.”

Someone left a line open at the other end.

“Captain,” the man screamed. “Oh My God, he’s coming for us!”

Gareth nearly laughed, but he was Sky Patrol and these men had chosen to be pirates. The miner they’d left for dead had probably been the least of their crimes.

The mining armor had compressed nitrogen gas to use for maneuvering. Gareth pushed hard on his thrusters, somersaulting forward until his powerful legs were forward. That ship could outrun him eventually, but they were at a dead stop right now, so they would have to accelerate.

He wasn’t about to allow that.

Instead, Gareth landed on the side of the hull with a terrific force that must have echoed through the pirate vessel like a demon trying to claw his way in. His magnetic boots locked him down and he was part of the pirate ship now.

Quickly, Gareth climbed around the side to the airlock. Most ships this size only had one, located well aft, with perhaps an emergency airlock forward.

Rather than try subtlety, Gareth just climbed inside and grabbed the door that the now-dead boarders had left open. Grunting with effort, and aided by exomuscles designed to lift heavy rocks, Gareth ripped it off its hinges and chucked it into deep space. They might use an emergency airlock, if it existed, but not for a while, and nobody was using this one until they rearranged the interior hatches so they could vent a large section of the ship to open space and not kill themselves and all their friends in the process.

Satisfied, Gareth crawled back out onto the hull and stomped aft until he got to the charge nozzles. Those were already running, starting to push the ship away, so Gareth pulled out his Lasweapon and shot each of the three in order.

A Choueiri Arcjet Ionic Drive was a fragile thing. Each nozzle shattered like a frozen bell dropped from the top of a tower.

Satisfied that the pirates couldn’t get far, Gareth stomped forward on the roof, making sure to slam each magnetic boot down hard as he did, so those men would know that the Devil himself had come for them.

He felt like Beowolf.

Forward, Gareth found the bow gun he had expected. It wasn’t much more rugged than the engine nozzles, but Gareth still used his fists to rip it bodily from the hull rather than just shooting it. Somewhere, a breach alarm would be added to the chaos, as the gunnery chamber was now vented to space, along with any men that hadn’t managed to get out fast enough before the hatches automatically sealed.

Then he went looking and found the emergency airlock. It was closed, which meant that desperate men might come flooding out to attack him. He had calculated the crew to be perhaps as many as two dozen, before the casualties he’d inflicted.

Gareth punched the door frame hard. Again. A third time. A seal gave. A fourth. The door began to surrender to his wrath. A fifth. It failed inward.

No massive breach emptied the ship, so they had sealed the inside.

He could just kill them all now. Rip the inner airlock apart and let all the air surge madly out of the ship. They deserved it.

But Auxiliary Agent Gareth St. John Dankworth was Earth Force Sky Patrol. The good guys.

He had done enough, for now.

He stomped around to where the bridge windows looked out. Inside, a half dozen men stared at him in utter terror, including one man who had to be the captain, better dressed than the others and seated at the rear of the chamber in a chair that reminded Gareth of a throne.

The man had watched too many pirate vids in his time. That, or the steel cutlass on his hip, balancing the flame pistol on the other side, was his signature.

Gareth could not think of a less useful thing to carry into space. But he also wasn’t a pirate.

“Are you ready to join me in hell?” he asked over the radio in a quieter voice.

The men on the bridge were silent, but Gareth could see their mouths open with screams. One even seemed to start foaming.

The captain snapped. Gareth could think of no other word to describe it. The man calmly drew his pistol and shot the two crewmen seated in front of him like a gunner and pilot. Then he shot the other three before they could react.

Finally, he raised the pistol and shot at the window, but Gareth had seen the pistol come up and ducked to one side.

Still, the plasteel window ruptured outward in a massive explosion of air and debris. Bodies raced out into space. Only one of them was still alive, but Gareth shot the captain as he went by, unwilling to risk that man surviving death pressure long enough to fire back.

The gust of snow went on too long.

Gareth realized that the internal hatches were open in the ship, and the whole thing was venting.

More bodies slammed into the window and then got ejected into eternity. Papers and anything light enough went with them.

When it finally died down, Gareth entered via the windows the captain had apparently shot out in his madness.

Inside the ship was a horror show. Every hatch was open, but many men had simply died at their stations, or trapped in their cabins.

It was a flying Dutchman. An abattoir.

They were pirates. Gareth would have found a yardarm for them, but it would have been done the right way. The legal way.

So he supposed that they had just chosen the die on their own terms, rather than at the hands of the law.

He connected a wire to his system and opened the radio.

“Patrol Cutter Bellerophon, this is Dankworth, come in,” he said.

“Gareth!” a friendly voice called back. “Thank God. What’s the situation?”

“Marc, is that you?” Gareth asked.

“Affirmative, my friend,” Auxiliary Agent Marc Sarzynski replied. He had been Gareth’s best friend since they met on the first day of the Academy. “The Commandant needed someone to take charge of your cutter, and I was handy. The rest of the squadron is vectoring in from all corners. What happened?”

“The pirate vessel has been neutralized,” Gareth replied.

“All by yourself?” Marc asked, but he would have done the same. That was the kind of man his best friend was.

“Affirmative, Bellerophon,” Gareth said. “Near the destination point Ferrie calculated. The pirate crew is all dead.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Ghosts frightened them to death, I suppose,” Gareth replied.

After that, he would say no more on the subject.