Lethal Cargo Read online

  LETHAL CARGO

  A CAULDRON OF STARS

  BOOK 1

  ––––––––

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  ––––––––

  Copyright © 2018 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  Cover design by Jamie Glover

  Photography by Andrew Dobell

  First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Knights Hill Publishing.

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  1

  Moments after we touched down on Gvm Uye Sachttra, an antique floater bumped over the dirt field we’d been assigned as a landing pad. Several natives jumped out. They were about five foot high, furry, dressed in colorful diapers, with long muzzles crammed with teeth. “The St. Clare?” they said, through a ruggedized box hanging around the boss alien’s neck, which translated their clicks and hisses. “Twenty standard tonnes of food aid and agricultural implements for the refugees?” They wore lanyards identifying them as employees of Help the Hungry.

  “That’s right,” I said. “If I could just verify your IDs.” They stretched out their forearms, and Kimmie, my admin, scanned the credit dots embedded in their blackish flesh. They checked out. It’s always nice to meet honest aliens.

  While we were unloading the crates, the boss alien said, “Travellers.” He or she cast a dirty look in the direction of the vine-swaddled conifers that edged the pad.

  “I know,” I said.

  The spaceport sprawled along the coast north of the refugee camp, and several rocky barrier islands. We were on one of the islands. The Travellers were on the next one over. One ship, a sow-bellied cruiser daubed with thermal paint pictures of the macabre Traveller pantheon. Two prizes, already hacked up and stripped of saleable parts.

  “Lousy rotten demon-worshipping pirates,” the alien’s translation box said, while its toothy mouth hissed.

  I’d have smiled if it wasn’t so true. “Pretty much.”

  The alien nudged me. We were standing on the top deck of the St. Clare. I was wearing jeans and a parka, wishing I had brought a heavier coat, white-knuckling through a bad hangover. “This is a good ship,” the alien said. “You could take ‘em out. How about it?”

  The alien wasn’t wrong about my ship, anyway. I was justifiably proud of the St. Clare. She was military surplus, but not from the Fleet. She’d been the imperial flagship of a two-bit alien emperor who had been deposed shortly after commissioning her. I’d picked her up second-hand, and although she wasn’t perfect, I steered my thoughts away from what we called our “mechanical failure.” Not only was the St. Clare fantastically tough, she also boasted the armaments of the warship she had originally been. Forward of the superstructure, the elongated truss supported a flat top deck 50 meters long, which ended in a ”head” whose serrated jaws concealed the mouth of a powerful railgun. We also had two turret-mounted large-caliber Gausses, plus a maser point defense system, and dual missile launchers on the belly for 360° coverage. Better have it and not need it than … yeah. All too often, we did need it.

  “How much?” I said.

  The alien named a laughable sum.

  I shook my head. When I was in the army, I had killed people for peanuts. But those days were long behind me. Nowadays, I wouldn’t even consider it for less than seven figures. “If I hit them on the ground, it would depend on how accurate the strike was, but their antimatter containment ring might blow. Then you wouldn’t have a spaceport anymore.”

  “Our chief-one-appointee made a deal with ‘em,” the alien said gloomily. “They get to sell their stolen goods at our spaceport. We get to live. Probably.”

  And people wonder why aliens don’t like us. As one of the two great powers in the Cluster, humanity poses as protector of all the little guys who got caught on the hop by our third colonization wave, and forever lost the chance to develop spaceflight capabilities in their own way and in their own time. To be fair, if it wasn’t us it would have been the Eks, and we’re nicer than they are. But space is big. Ungraspably, horribly big. The Fleet can’t be everywhere at once. And unfortunately for our image, most of the predators out there are human, too.

  Such as the Travellers, whom I had reasons of my own to detest. But I was trying not to think about that. Bitterness is ugly.

  Dolph, my business partner and pilot, climbed down from the top of the bridge. He was tall and skinny as a rifle on legs, with a black ponytail straggling over the collar of his coat, and binos slung around his neck. “That ship has a HERF mast,” he said.

  “Charming,” I said.

  “Plus you have to figure they’ve got auto-nukes,” Dolph said. “There are clamps on the ship, nothing there. They probably left ‘em in orbit.” He scowled up at the clouds.

  Auto-nukes—autonomous nuclear missiles—are also illegal, for a very good reason. You can’t tell ‘em from regular sats, until they fall on your head. I crunched some vitamins and chased them with black coffee from one of those self-heating bulbs. My hangover receded some.

  To be honest, any sane captain would have bailed at that point. But I was too experienced to back down … and too broke.

  “God, it’s cold,” I said. Dust hazed the distance. This whole strip of coast had been deforested. Even in human form, I could smell woodsmoke blowing from the refugee camp, and the tang of the sea.

  Martin, my engineer, lowered the final crate of food aid into the floater, and we got down to the best part of the process: collecting our fee. Kimmie, wearing two pairs of fingerless gloves, processed the balance of the aliens’ payment. This far out from the Heartworlds, accepting payments is a dicey business. All transactions have to be physically cleared through the nearest node of the EkBank, which in the case of this planet was four light years away. Normally, we’d stick around until all our payments had time to clear, so we could chase up anyone who tried to stiff us. That could take days. I was not planning on sticking around here, but I knew that Help the Hungry was good for it.

  Click, and I was 50 KGCs richer. That was payroll and operating expenses covered for the month, plus a few KGCs over that I could salt away for my daughter’s education. What I told her was that I was in the aid business.

  The boss alien sidled closer to me. “You are not really human, are you?” the translation box whispered.

  I looked down at the odious little creature. “Sure I am.” I was six foot one, with light brown hair that I kept short so it wouldn’t flop in my eyes. My open, square-jawed face served me well in business negotiations. I looked more built than Dolph, but sadly, not all of it was muscle. That’s what you get for spending too much time in freefall, and more time sitting on your keister.

  “No, you are not.” The alien seemed quite sure of it. “You do not smell like a human.” It pointed a claw at Dolph. “Nor does he.” Martin had gone off to fetch the refuelling stand from the edge of our pad. Irene, my weapons officer, had just come out of the ship with her second-best rifle slung over her shoulder. The alien pointed at her. “She is not human, either. All of you smell like … animals.”

  “Hot damn,” Dolph whispered to me. “Sniffed out by an alien on Planet Back-Asswards.”

  “What about me?” Kimmie said. She was wearing a purple coat, to match her purple hair. She had a sweet, round face. A ruby sparkled in her nose.

  �
�You are human,” the alien said, and hissed at her. “Goodbye,” it said to me. “Please give our regards to the team at head office.” All the aliens went down the port ladder head-first, like squirrels, then got in their floater and drove away. The levitation field, now compressed down to a few inches, bumped over every little irregularity in the ground, making the cargo jump up and clatter. There’s a reason floaters are not more widely used.

  Dolph was laughing. “Good thing most people don’t have that keen of a sense of smell.”

  “We are, too, human,” I said. “Homo sapiens versipellus.”

  “Phooey,” Kimmie said. “I’m just a boring mainstream human.”

  I smiled at her. “If all mainstream humans were like you, the Cluster would be a better place.” She was the youngest of the crew, as well as the only normie. I had a soft spot for her.

  Irene was climbing the ladder to the top of the bridge. That’s what we called the three-storey armored superstructure, but most of it was the cargo hold. The actual essentials were safely tucked away below. While Dolph unloaded the remaining cargoes, I followed Irene up the ladder. The wind was like a wild thing, trying to rip me off the exposed rungs.

  I knelt beside Irene behind the main radar dish, automatically falling into old habits of concealment from enemy spotters. From up here, we could see the Traveller ship over the untended hedges on the shores of the islands. This spaceport really was a dump. There were hardly any proper landing pads. Mostly you were just putting down on hardened dirt. In many places, rocks poked through like bones sticking up from a dessicated carcass. Most spaceships can cope with less than perfectly flat surfaces—the St. Clare certainly could—but all the same, it was an accident waiting to happen. Then there was the native greenery that had been allowed to grow up between the pads. A real mess.

  There were two pads in between us and the shore of our island; one held an Ek landing shuttle, the other was empty. In fact, most of the pads nearby were unoccupied. Travellers can clear out a spaceport faster than rats in a kitchen. Despite what you may have heard about space piracy, the easiest place to steal spaceships is on the ground. The Travellers’ standard m.o. is to scream down out of a blue sky, land practically on top of their targets—they’re good at flying, I’ll give them that—and overwhelm them with high-speed ground assaults. Then they’ll fly their prizes away, sell ‘em or break ‘em up for scrap, spend the proceeds, and repeat.

  They were selling, not stealing, today … probably. That margin of doubt was what had persuaded all the sane captains to leave.

  “Looks like we missed all the fun,” Irene said. She measured the distance to the Traveller ship with a professional look in her cool blue eyes. “I could make that shot.”

  “In this wind?”

  “Sure,” Irene said. She was a vet, as were Dolph and I. But whereas we had been in the special forces, Irene had been a sniper. She probably could make that shot. She was the best marksman I’d ever met, or rather markswoman—55 kilos dripping wet, with fine blonde hair pulled back in a severe ponytail, and a husband and two kids at home.

  “Those ain’t worth the antimatter in their containment,” I said, eyeing the Travellers’ prizes, a tramp freighter smaller than the St. Clare and a harp-backed scow. “Anyway, we still got a few more cargoes to deliver. The small-lot crap.”

  “You’re the boss,” Irene said, making a face. “I’ll just stay up here and keep an eye on them.”

  Figures in black coats moved around outside the Traveller ships, mingling with aliens and humans who were probably dickering for the stolen ship parts. They were too far away to make out any of their faces. I thought about going back down to borrow Dolph’s binoculars, then decided against it. I was better off not knowing.

  I helped Martin hook up the water hoses to refill our reactant mass tanks, which involved dragging the refuelling stand across the pad on its rusty wheels, unkinking the hoses, attaching new sediment filters, and swearing like mad. At least it got us warm. While we were doing that, more customers arrived to pick up their stuff, and another floater delivered our return cargo—twenty tons of amateurishly packaged shipments for Ponce de Leon, mostly pre-processed rare earths, and some luxury items such as pelts and rare timber.

  “Start loading,” I yelled up to Dolph.

  “Can’t,” he yelled back.

  “Why the fuck not?”

  We were all grumpy. We always looked forward to getting there, after days in the field: shopping, going out for a drink, mooching around and feeling the dirt under our feet. Even on a semi-civilized Fringeworld like Gvm Uye Sachttra, there’s intel to be picked up and connections to be made, the lifeblood of the logistics business. Sometimes we’d make a side trip into the country and get in some hunting. All scrubbed off the agenda, because of the Travellers.

  “Still got one shipment hasn’t been collected,” Dolph yelled.

  “Oh, for—” I let loose with some curses that should have turned the air blue. “Which one?”

  “The toy fairies.”

  I cursed some more. Some whimsical individual had ordered 9,000 electronic toy fairies from a Ponce de Leon supplier. Leaving aside the frivolity of shipping expensive toys to a refugee camp, it wasn’t that unusual a shipment. Half of what we typically carried was aid and relief supplies. The other half was low-quality consumer electronics. Aliens love that junk.

  I checked my phone. The customer’s name was Rafael Ijiuto, and he owed me eight KGCs. That was the difference between buying Lucy a new holobook or not. I tried to call the guy. My phone wasn’t working. No connectivity.

  “I’ll go look for him,” I said resignedly. “Coming, Dolph?”

  “Can I come, too?” Kimmie yelled.

  “No, sweetheart,” I said. “It ain’t safe out there.” Ignoring her look of outrage, I climbed the ladder to get one of the toy fairies out of the hold. It would help Rafael Ijiuto to identify us, since I didn’t know what he looked like and vice versa.

  The packaging was unusually heavy-duty: each fairy was encased in an airtight, opaque plastic bubble. I ripped one open with a knife and took the fairy out.

  It had four wings, two for gliding and two that acted as a rotor. Basically, it was a fully functional drone masquerading as a toy. Lucy would love it. I decided to give her this one as a present. Rafael Ijiuto wouldn’t miss it, and I would not have time to pick up anything better here.

  I fastened the remote control bracelet on my wrist and pressed the up arrow. The fairy rose into the air, its wings and long tresses sparkling luminously in the dimness of the hold. Watching the thing circle above my head, I unaccountably shivered, like someone had walked across my grave.

  The fairy turned its head down towards me. The violet eyes in its plastic face froze me with a malevolent stare. I took a careful step backwards, watching the thing without blinking. For an instant I was back on Tech Duinn, stalking through the undergrowth, scarcely breathing …

  I came back to myself when my right hand closed around the butt of my Midday Special. Flushing with embarrassment, I turned the toy off. It fluttered down placidly to my wrist. Tense, much, Starrunner? It was just a toy. Good thing no one had seen me overreacting like that.

  There was a junky old electric buggy sitting under the trees. Dolph and I got it started, after some fiddling with the battery connections, and drove down the coast to the refugee camp.

  2

  We spotted Travellers here and there on the main drag of the camp, browsing the stalls. They typically flew with huge crews, twenty or thirty people to a ship—their ground troops. The tattoos on their faces flickered and writhed, rendering them unrecognizable to facial recognition technology—not that there was any surveillance in a place like this, anyway. The skirts of their hideous black coats ballooned in the wind, permitting glimpses of the weapons strapped to their bodies.

  The locals could have overwhelmed them at any time, a hundred to one. But whoever controls orbital space controls everything on the ground. That�
�s just how it is, and that’s why a few lunatics with auto-nukes can roll right over millions of dirtsiders, leaving a trail of pain behind them, like grass flattened by heavy tyres.

  “At least it ain’t Cole’s clan,” Dolph said.

  “How do you know?” I said. “The attrition rate is something insane. We probably wouldn’t recognize any of them by now.”

  Yuriops cut across our path, their horns making them fully eight feet tall, while the sensing cilia of stargends nodded to avoid the cat’s cradle of power lines overhead. Eks fingered the local wares with their four hands. They knew the Travellers wouldn’t mess with them. Humans were their preferred prey, and sure enough Dolph and I were almost the only humans left … apart from the refugees manning the stalls. Cheap, flickery holo greeters in front of the stalls touted deep discounts, and desperation tinged the patter of the salesfolk.

  “I need one of those,” Dolph said through the bandanna covering his nose and mouth. I followed his gaze to a stall selling knives. Big, little, electrified, poison-tipped, auto-barbed, with grips made for hands that had five fingers, four, eight, or none. This place really did have everything. You wouldn’t take it for a refugee camp, but that’s what it was. The people manning the knife stall were as human as we were, probably more so. The eldest looked about sixteen. The youngest was no bigger than my own daughter. Some years ago, a human colony had fled a war on the far side of the Cluster, wound up here—and here they had stayed, and multiplied. The natives were signatories of the Sapient Refugee Convention, jointly formulated by humanity and the Eks, and co-signed by all other biologicals, whether they liked it or not. They may not have appreciated being told to turn over a piece of their planet to several thousand homeless humans, but it had paid off for them. With typical human ingenuity, the refugees had transformed this barren coast into a shopping mall.

  “Yo, big guy,” the teenager at the knife stall called out. “Wanna put some steel in your holster?”