Something vaguely communicationesque burst from the speaker, any possible sense lost in thick static. I winced, lowered the volume slider with my index finger, and messed with the frequency adjusters with my other digits.
A video feed swam into focus in the middle of my view. The signal was all over the place. The interpreter seemed to be cycling through every color and shape it could think of on the basis that at least some of them would be correct. But there was a collection of flesh-toned patches in the middle that roughly correlated to a human face.
“Hay-lo?” came the staticky voice. It was high pitched and evocative of the mentally simple.
“Hello?”
“Hay-lo,” it repeated, with more confidence.
“Hi, I need you to listen really carefully,” I said. “I’ve been kidnapped by this crazy Terran div and she’s making me fly this ship, but she’s gone to bed now and for various complicated reasons it’s vitally important that I get off this ship without her knowing. So here’s the deal—if you come here quietly and let me onboard your ship, and fly me away without anyone noticing, I will give you money. I’ve got a lot of money kicking around. It’ll buy you a lot of goods from merchants who do dealings in policed zones. All I ask is a lift to the closest thing there is to a spaceport around here. What do you say?”
There was a thoughtful pause, punctuated with a clicking and humming which was either the static or someone stalling for time.
“Hay-lo,” they said, finally.
I wasn’t sure how to take that. It wasn’t a hostile reaction, it wasn’t telling me to go and stick it, but it didn’t seem to be getting the ball rolling, either. “Hello? Who am I talking to?”
“Hay-lo?”
“Who. Are. You. Who. You.”
“Me-uh? Ohhhh. Me-uh pie-let.”
“Okay. You pilot. Now we’re getting somewhere. I don’t suppose there’s anyone else on there I could talk to instead of you?”
“Cap-ton.”
“There’s a captain?”
“Cap-ton, yay-us.”
“Can I speak to the captain?”
“Cap-ton pie-let. Me-uh pie-let. Me-uh cap-ton.”
I rubbed my eyes. There was something very odd about the way they were talking, besides the obvious. Not exactly like a foreigner with only a passing familiarity with the language, more like a non-human whose vocal cords had never been designed to speak the necessary syllables. But the feed had gotten slightly clearer, and it was definitely a human face in there.
“Okay, let’s start from the bottom and work up,” I muttered to myself, then spoke as clearly and loudly as I dared. “Money. Mon-ey. Do you know mon-ey?”
“Mun-ay, yay-us!” said my correspondent, nodding. That seemed to get through. “Mun-ay foo-ud.”
“Yes! Money buy food. Lots of food. I have money. Come get me. You have money. Yes?”
“Coo-um yu-oo?”
I was reminded of conversations I’d had around closing time outside the Brandied Bracket. “Yes. Come me. Get money. Buy food.”
“Yu-oo foo-ud, yay-us.”
The feed cut off, ending the discourse. But I could still see the other ship on the long-range scanner, and after a moment, it began to move slowly toward my location at the center of the screen.
I slowed the ship in preparation for the rendez-vous, gradually enough that hopefully no one onboard would notice the change in engine noise. Thankfully the ship’s designer had made a lot of effort to suppress the engine sound, along with every other feature that might have been conducive to flying the plying thing.
Every time I’d ventured into the Black, I’d met pirates. The reasonable kind, like Den and Mark. Because of this I had assumed that the Black was densely populated with them. That had certainly been the case back in the Golden Age. But the pirates I’d interacted with since had very rarely been in the mood to update me on the politics of the region.
I did know that pirates had been feeling the pinch as much as anyone, with fewer lootable ships passing through space, and word was that more and more of them were ditching the life in favor of going native on extrasolar worlds. So if there had been changes, they probably weren’t in the pirates’ favor.
All of which led me to wonder at this point who or what I had just enlisted and whether or not this was as great an idea as it had seemed. I considered holding out for a better class of rescuer, but I find it rarely helps to dwell.
The other ship entered visual range with surprising speed, but then, it seemed like a pretty sleek model. As far as I could tell—it was so coated with grime and layers of frozen dust that I almost mistook it for an asteroid. The main giveaway was that an asteroid is quite a cohesive object, and wouldn’t have so many bits looking like they were ready to fall off. Nor would there be a single black smear rubbed out on the windshield, presumably for looking through.
I was staring at it for so long that I completely forgot to hail it. The Incoming Call icon was flashing on my touchscreen. I poked it with one finger, not looking away.
Then my view was filled with a fresh video feed, and I saw the person I had been speaking to, now unobscured by blurring or static. My first thought was that it had been quite some time since I’d last eaten. This was relevant, because if I’d had any food inside me it would probably have immediately ejected itself from whichever orifice was nearest.
I was right—there had been a human face. What I hadn’t picked up on was that it didn’t actually belong to the onscreen person wearing it. It was tied on with what looked like a length of stripped copper wiring.
“Coo-um yu-oo,” said the pilot. It was a leathery green mass that seemed to be having trouble deciding on a shape. One large yellow eye was staring earnestly at me through the mouth hole of the disembodied face.
“Uh,” I began. The part of me that wasn’t shrieking endlessly directly into my mind’s ear was idly wondering if the owner of the face had also contributed those dried-out limbs and lumps of unidentifiable flesh hanging from every extruding component in the background. “You’re. The captain?”
“Cap-ton. Mun-ay. Foo-ud.”
“Yes, those were the basics, weren’t they. Look, sorry to have brought you all the way over here, but I think I might have slightly misunderstood the situation vis-à-vis, erm, human body parts . . . not that there’s anything wrong with . . .”
“Coo-um. Yu-oo. Mun-ay.” At more or less this point I realized that the distortion of the creature’s voice, which I had at first attributed to a bad signal, was in fact the result of trying to speak through a near-constant flow of viscous dribble.
I pantomimed glancing off camera. “Oh! Look at that. Turns out I didn’t need help after all. Thanks for coming anyway, though. I actually have a fairly urgent appointment somewhere that isn’t here, so . . .”
“Yu-oo. Foo-ud.”
I ended the call abruptly. Then I sat perfectly still for a moment, clutching the two joysticks, waiting to see how quickly this was going to escalate. The other ship hung in space in front of me, unmoving, watching like an owl.
Nothing happened for some time. Then I very, very gently pushed the joysticks and began turning away, warming up the engines to begin accelerating.
The other ship opened fire. I wasn’t sure with what—it looked like a jagged ball of garbage being projected from a bent torpedo tube. But it struck the Platinum God of Whale Sharks right in the underbelly, followed by a sprinkling of components that had broken off the attacking ship with it, and the damage was real enough.
There was another breach. I remotely sealed off a depressurized section of corridor that led to one of the communal toilets and made a mental note to put a sign up. But the blast had given the ship a head start on the acceleration process, and the recoil from shooting the missile had sent the other ship into a gentle spin, so I took the opportunity to gun it.
Keeping my gaze fixed on the controls, I heard the swish of the bridge door opening, then the rhythmic thumping of women’s shoes on thick
carpet, and Warden materialized at her usual position behind my shoulder. “What hit us?”
“No idea!” I blurted out. “Complete ambush from something I never saw coming or spoke to.” I winced at myself, but Warden was fixated on inspecting the ship in the rear view.
“Pirates?” she asked.
“No. Don’t think so. Never seen anything like it before this moment. Did I mention that?”
She sighed angrily. “I was laboring under the impression that you had a working knowledge of the Black, McKeown.”
“Not every single inch of it! Whose idea was the plying fire-and-forget jump? What do we do now?”
“Just outfly them!”
By now the Platinum God of Whale Sharks was going flat out. The other ship had matched speed with no difficulty and was keeping leisurely attack distance. It was clearly a very top-of-the-range star piloting ship, much more so than Angelo’s, and easily outclassed us even in a state of disrepair. Experimentally I attempted an evasive move, but our pursuer mimicked it with the nonchalance of a man whistling and holding his hands behind his back. “Great plan!” I barked. “You got some actual flyable ship hidden in your underpants?”
“McKeown—”
Another garbage missile burst from underneath the enemy ship, along with another handful of dislodged fragments. It moved only slightly faster than the two ships, but even so I wasn’t going to be able to shake it off with my ship’s rotation speed.
“McKeown, you are the star pilot here,” reminded Warden urgently.
“Right,” I muttered. I couldn’t think of a way to finger the touchscreen with both hands clutching the joysticks, so I leaned forward and rubbed my nose back and forth across the glass. “Launching weapon countermeasures.”
There was a muffled clonk and several hundred strips of aluminum foil were projected from the rear of the God of Whale Sharks, which I recognized as the absolute bare minimum weapon countermeasure system mandated by safety regulations. The garbage missile brushed straight through them like a movie star passing through the crowd outside a premiere, before the explosion hit like a barrage of flashbulbs.
Instantly the ship dipped forward and the steering went wonky. I assumed something had happened to the port nacelle. I was immediately proven right when I saw a large piece of it drifting past my view. Our top speed and maneuverability had been cut in half.
“Okay, that didn’t work,” I said grimly. I wondered how long it would take my hungry friend to reload that makeshift cannon of his.
“Think of something, McKeown!” instructed Warden.
“Oh, good advice, thanks for keeping your end up.” I gave up trying to keep the ship under control and let it enjoy its twirling death spiral to nowhere as I worked the communicator to broadcast on the universal distress frequency. “Mayday! Requesting assistance!”
“Well, I could have done that,” said Warden, folding her arms.
“Any ship in broadcast range! We are under attack by an unknown vessel! Please respond!”
I listened fretfully to the uninterrupted bed of light static, and then an icon appeared. A signal was coming in from very close proximity. I opened a channel. “Hello?!”
“Foo-ud. Foo-ud. Foo-ud.”
“I wasn’t talking to you!” I blocked the communication and boosted the signal. The broadcast would reach a wider range at the expense of sound quality, so I’d have to speak as clearly as possible. “We’re on a very expensive ship! We have tons of money we just don’t know what to do with! Come and kill this thing—there are fabulous prizes to be won!”
Still nothing. This was within expectations. Flying across the Black was like riding on public transport late at night—the smarter move is to keep your head down and ignore any sign of trouble. But whatever it was on that ship must have been almost ready for another shot and I was out of ideas.
Then, Warden pushed my head away from the chair-mounted mike. “This is Jacques McKeown’s ship,” she said urgently. “This is an urgent request for assistance from a ship being piloted by Jacques McKeown.”
“What are you—” I began, but I was silenced when she shoved her fist into my mouth. The return communication was still static across the board, but it was a very slightly intrigued static.
“Run long-range ID scans on our vessel and you will detect that one of the chip IDs onboard is attached to the name Jacques McKeown.”
The communicator held its breath. Then the response requests started popping up like drops of rain on a pavement.
“What did you say you wanted?” said the first one.
The ship shook again, and the screen went dead. Another piece of something damaged—probably related to the computer system—spun merrily past the front viewing window. The ship rotated until it was entirely upside down, and the engines couldn’t do much more than phut, like a tortoise desperately wriggling its limbs to right itself.
And there, directly above us, was the ship piloted by that face-stealing monstrosity, arranging itself like a vast and terrible foot preparing to stomp down upon the struggling tortoise. I was twisting the joysticks around like the handles of an out-of-control spacehopper while Warden was bent forward almost double, practically lying across my lap as she scoured the touchscreens for a useful function.
The creature’s ship dipped slightly. Its cannon was swinging loosely off its housing and it was split and curved backward a little at the end, but when I saw something within its depths start glowing redly, I knew that it would hold together for its final, fatal shot.
There was a blast, and another cloud of loose bits broke off from the vessel. And when I was still alive a few seconds later, I tentatively lowered my hands from my eyes and saw that the explosion had come from the enemy ship’s opposite side. The missile intended for us exploded inside the cannon, and a succession of follow-up blasts Swiss cheesed the enemy ship in seconds.
“What happened?” wondered Warden aloud. She yelped slightly when the enemy pilot’s face mask, slightly burned at the edges, plopped against our viewscreen.
Something off to the starboard side fired one more shot into the wreckage, removing what little integrity it had left and reducing it to a cloud of rust flakes. A new ship moved into view: a converted ship-to-surface cargo transporter, a little worn, but not showing the kind of neglect I had now learned to associate with face-wearing green monsters.
With the computer down I didn’t have any means to contact our rescuer, but it looked like they were aware of our difficulties and were preparing to connect an umbilical. A scuffed white tube concertinaed out from the ship’s underbelly in an ever so slightly suggestive way.
I turned to Warden. “I need my gun back.”
She jumped and immediately pointed it at me again. “Why?”
“I have to go down to the airlock and greet whoever just saved our lives. There is a significant chance we have moved from the frying pan to the fire to the waste disposal unit, and I would appreciate having some control over the situation.”
“Valid point.” She straightened up and pointed my gun upward, supporting it with her other hand. “We’ll both go and greet them.”
“Oh, for plying out loud,” I moaned, as she marched me down through the ship with the usual stubborn foot shuffling on my part. “We’re in the Black now, aren’t we? This is where I wanted to be. What do you think I might do if I get my gun back—hijack the ship and take it to exactly where it already is? Not to mention the engine’s totaled.”
“Me having this gun, McKeown, seems to be the only reason you have to assist with any agenda other than your own. I will continue holding it until you are a little more used to the idea.”
“You don’t know me, Warden. I’m not just some merc with a price and no morals. I’m a star pilot. From back when that actually meant something.”
“A star pilot who, five sentences ago, confirmed their intention to become a pirate.”
I scoffed. “You actually counted the sentences, didn’t you.”
> “There have been plenty of moments when you were out of my sight,” she continued. “Anyone could have contacted you in that time.”
I scoffed again, louder. I made sure to maintain a look of weary contempt on my face.
After briefly checking on the kids—Jemima nervous but keeping it together, Daniel expressing his boredom with one elongated, inappropriately loud word—we made our way down to the airlock. The umbilical had already been attached, and with the external door forced open, there seemed to be somebody in the airlock already. They were patiently knocking on the interior door.
“Surely you don’t expect me to be the one in front, when you’re the one with the gun,” I said, when she stood well back, taking aim at the inner door.
“I will be aiming over your shoulder,” she said. “Just don’t make any unexpected moves. Open it.”
There was another patient knock upon the airlock door. I sighed and reached for the touch plate by its side.
And in the nanosecond before touching the Open panel, I remembered the old boarding trick. The one that comes in handy if you suspect the crew of the ship you’re boarding are prepared and may be armed and waiting on the other side of the door. The one where you only partially pressurize the umbilical, then throw loose objects at the airlock door to simulate knocking.
As the interior door opened, I caught a momentary glimpse of a small pile of tennis balls floating in midair before there was a sound like a clap of thunder and I, Warden, and several cubic meters of the God of Whale Shark’s internal atmosphere were blasted forward through our airlock and onto the soft floor of the umbilical, which rolled us around like a bouncy castle.
I got up on all fours, which was difficult since the floor yielded hugely every time I put my weight on it, and glimpsed my blaster overtaking me on the left with a merry bounce. I glanced back at Warden. She was rolling around just behind me like a clump of sensible laundry circling a tumble dryer.
Opportunity knocked. I made movements not dissimilar to a breaststroke to navigate the distance between me and my spinning blaster pistol. When I was close enough, I shoved my hand down into the soft floor, creating a slope that the gun could slide down into grasping range.