NASTRAGULL: Pirates (33 page)

Aboard the
Endeavor 4
, Lt. Admiral Busch gazed at the monitor displaying the positions of all his ships and probes with a look of satisfaction. Before long, they'd have every single nook and cranny of this sector covered. The hunt was on.

Hadrian Cook's face bore its own look of satisfaction as his command chair was pulled back into an adjacent room through a pair of hidden doors. The last thing Busch heard in his earbug through the link was, "The fleet is yours."

Busch thought,
Rest, my friend. Something tells me you're going to need it before this mission is over.
He directed his own command chair to a higher position on the command deck, just as his monitor bleeped and presented him with an urgent new message. Sighing deeply, he reluctantly contacted Admiral Cook.

Cook had just removed his jacket and was lying down when Busch called. "What is it?" he growled.

"Good news, Admiral," Busch announced, triumph in his voice.

Cook grinned, his fatigue forgotten. "I'll be right there."

***

On the opposite side of the inhabited universe sat another person with a much less-satisfied expression, a person who most people thought—or rather
hoped
—was a myth. And of those who know of his existence—from rich to poor, citizen to leader—most would deny his very existence. He was the very personification of malice. Soldiers from both Nastasturus and Florencia used his name when referring to attacking each other: "Let's drop a
Horsa
on them…" or "Let's go
Horsa
on their asses." He was the most feared pirate in the known universe.

Horsa was Zuzack the Cannibal's older brother.

He sat in his ornate chair—he refused to call it a throne—facing his "family." He was an impressively tall man who appeared to be thin because of the long coat; but all who knew him realized that he was as muscular as he was smart, which was to say
very
on both scores. Not an ounce of his weight was fat, unlike his brother Zuzack. He was an intelligent, lethal killing machine with the perfectly-shaped body of a young man in his prime, which was especially remarkable given that he was almost three hundred standard years old. His skin, once a lustrous black, was now a pale-gray from lack of real sunlight, and his long blond hair was braided and dreaded, and wrapped around his body in strange patterns. His fangs were coated with a thin layer of hard tritonium silver, and at the moment his long, thin fingers were combing through the thick mustache that graded into his long, white beard. On his surcoat was embroidered his clan's crest, an exploding planet. The clan was called
Wulsatures
, which meant "Armageddon" in a long-dead language.

Horsa had taken Zuzack under his wing when their parents had been killed a long time before. Their brothers and sisters in the Clan had wanted nothing to do Zuzack, because his mother was not theirs; this angered Horsa, and he had them summarily executed for discrimination and greed. He had taken it upon himself to act as father to  his infant brother, and it was he who had named Zuzack.

Horsa had trained and formed Zuzack into the perfect loyal killing machine. In the decades since, Zuzack had won fame as a pirate leader almost equal to Horsa himself. Meanwhile, Horsa ruled his clan with the skill of a politician and with the strength of a dictator. His love for his clan superseded anything, and he considered all its members to be his family. But the only one among them that he could trust was Zuzack himself.

Horsa preferred to keep the male pirates working separately from the females, but each Captain was allowed to make his or her own decision on that matter. Today, this was a policy Horsa regretted. There were nothing but problems when the sexes came together, in his opinion; hence, marriages.

He glared at the message on the monitor in front of him in cold disbelief. The message had been sent encoded by means of a highly-advanced algorithm, making it next to impossible to decrypt by anyone who might intercept it. Only he and Zuzack had the key.

Horsa trembled as he read the message again, and his trembling increased, the rage threatening to overwhelm his self-control, as he read it yet again. His pale eyes concealed his thoughts, but his body language could no longer conceal what he was thinking to his lieutenants, who were sitting against the far wall of the semicircular room, facing him in the center. Normally, Horsa kept iron rein on his emotions until it would most benefit him to release them; that made him extremely unpredictable to any friend or foe. The fact that he was visibly losing control at the moment frightened some of his officers almost to the point of fainting.

Horsa read the message one more time:

H.

Good news: Went and picked up our package. The map was real. I succeeded in making a first pick-up; many more to come. Everything was there.

Bad news: I have suffered mutiny (Myra's crew) and need your assistance; also, someone stole the pick-up.

I will be at New Frontier 16 in a few weeks.

Your brother, by our blood and for our blood.

Z.

PS. They also stole the map.

Horsa was just about to explode when he realized how quiet the room had gotten. With an exaggerated gesture, he snapped off the monitor and sat brooding for a long moment.
The loss of the package is bad, but the loss of the map is far worse
, he mused, as he shifted in the uncomfortable chair, which was upholstered with the skins of his enemies. He ground his teeth together, thinking about the content of the message, and drummed his thin fingers on the seat's arms, beating out the tattoo of an ages-old battle call. His love for his brother was the highest emotion Horsa knew, yet he cursed himself for not going with Zuzack when he retrieved the map and tested its veracity. Then again, there were so many false treasure maps out there... who would have known that this one was real? The
Black Moon
's cargo was the biggest lost treasure in history.

The
Black Moon
was a Croll Battle Cruiser, from a past age when Marengo had been the capitol of what was then the largest superpower in the known universe. The ship's true name was unknown; "Black Moon" had actually been a code name for a large convoy of over four hundred battle cruisers that had vanished between two jumpgates thousands of years previously.

The primary mission of the convoy had been to escort several tons of tritonium silver and countless other megatons of loot to the treasure vaults of the Marengan system. The materiel was plunder that Marengan armies had liberated from hundreds of systems during the Second Universal War, which was just then winding down. Ever since, there had been thousands of rumors of what might have happened to the Black Moon fleet, but they were only speculations: natural disaster, mutiny among the crews, a meteor storm, alien attack, and hijacking. In any case, the ships and the millions of people who crewed them had never been seen again. In time the loss of all that treasure, which would have served to replenish the depleted coffers of a nation wearied by war, had led to the downfall and dissolution of the Marengan Empire. Marengo became just another backwater, renowned only for its Oman chattel.

There were as many false maps purporting to lead to the Black Moon treasure as there were rumors, and annually thousands of treasure seekers were swindled out of their savings by con artists and grifters plying their trade. This was especially the case whenever a new species entered the intergalactic community. Millions of people had looked for the treasure, and millions more would do so in the future. Governments large and small had thousands of scientists and treasure hunters on the job at all times, scanning the universe for the long-lost treasure which, if the original tallies were right, might be enough to buy half a galaxy.

Horsa was the only living creature who knew what had really happened to the Black Moon convoy, and he had secretly sworn that he would take that secret with him to his grave. Not even Zuzack knew; all that Horsa had taught Zuzack was how to retrieve parts of the treasure from time to time—assuming the latest map they had acquired was real.

The map itself had been constructed by a mad genius. The treasure was apparently spread across numerous systems in the various inhabited galaxies, and the coordinates changed occasionally. The map provided a new set of coordinates whenever a cache was located, but one had to go to that specific location and collect the treasure to receive it the coordinates to the next cache.

When Horsa himself had seen this map for the first time he had had his doubts—but he and others had studied for hundreds of years, and once in a while he or his brother would travel and search for the treasure. Horsa had not expected that it was the real thing. He wished now that he had made a copy, but the catch was that it had been impossible to copy completely. Anyone could copy the
appearance
of the map, but not the advanced holographic functions and computer programs, at least not without activating a virus that would render the map useless.

Horsa had recently been too busy ruling his huge clan to bother with the map, and lately matters had become worse, in the form of a fierce rival clan led by a woman called Ogstafa. That's why he'd stayed home and let Zuzack go a-Viking alone.

He snorted in disgust.
My brother should never have intermixed the sexes within his crew
, Horsa thought.
It never works, and now my map might be in the hands of
females. Now he had to lead a damned rescue mission, at a time when he didn't care to leave the clan leaderless for a second.

In normal circumstances, a specially-built probe would launch the map and the other special treasures back to Horsa's stronghold if it happened that Zuzack's ship was boarded. Over the decades, this had happened several times when the two large federations cracked down on piracy, and more than once the greedy Brakks of the Federated Merchants and the Commercial Traders had attacked as well. But Horsa had been forced to come to his brother's aid only once, when the Marengan pirate hunters the pirates called "Predators" had struck. The Predators were the most
feared and effective pirate hunters in known space, as impossible to bribe as flying through the core of a sun.

What Zuzack didn't know, and Horsa did, was that a Predator was hidden somewhere onboard New Frontier 16. This was something Horsa's intelligence crew had known for a while, and they kept a close eye on the quiescent Predator while reporting to Horsa alone. The pirate chief received the messages by a transceiver implanted in his skull, but never sent the replies from his headquarters. He was all too concerned that someone might pick up his clan's present location if he did—and besides, as much as he loved his clanmates, he didn't trust them. They were pirates, after all. Instead of breaking his transmission black-out, he did what most military organizations did when they wanted to maintain true secrecy: he used scouts and couriers.

Horsa's closest followers were all within the same age cohort as Horsa, more or less, but they were from many different worlds. Male, female, and otherwise, all were as physically scarred and bedraggled as only centuries of regular battles could make them—and all looked up to Horsa with the same respect as children look up to their parents or a hero, as a leader whom they worshiped above all else.

This day, they were silent as Horsa stood up abruptly, looked them over with fierce pride, and proclaimed in a voice like basso thunder, "Gather the Clan. We are going to war!"

Chapter 21

That evening, Lady Fuzza took Alec on a tour of the enormous New Frontier 16. Alec was overwhelmed and occasionally baffled by what they saw. While he'd become accustomed to the huge spacecraft bays down below, he hadn't expected the station proper to be dominated by a huge, hollow space built thickly with skyscrapers, where millions of people lived, worked, and played. The artificial skyline, with the pale sky arching above, made it seem as if they were outdoors on the surface of a planet. Alec was impressed; he'd never seen anything like it before.

By then, it was clear that Lady Fuzza was taking a liking to Alec, and treated him almost like a favored child. She seemed surprised at how naïve Alec was in some ways, despite his exalted background, and was curious about his past; but whenever she moved in on the subject, Alec always found a way to change it. After several attempts, she gave up on her quest to find out more—at least for the present.

During their ambling, they entered a large mall crowded with all types of businesses, markets, food courts, restaurants, entertainment areas, theaters, magical shows, small casinos and so on. They encountered beings from hundreds of worlds: some Oman and omanoid, a variety of recognizable transgenics, and many beings more alien in shape; some walking, others running, a few flying. Most seemed to be enjoying themselves, laughing and otherwise displaying their pleasure. There was a general air of jollity. There weren't many blatant police or security personnel visible, but Alec did notice several metallic orbs gliding high above the crowd, their sensors no doubt recording everything.

Lady Fuzza paused before a bistro and invited Alec to share breakfast with her, while they worked on a strategy to hire—or, if absolutely necessary, purchase—pilots and able spacers. While they waited on their food, she educated Alec about the space station they found themselves resident on, which she had visited numerous times in the past. It turned out to be more than just a space station: it and its attendant substations were more of a fleet of traveling arks. Twelve million citizens and investors had been traveling for over twenty years at sub-light velocity toward a new system in the neutral zone between the Florencian and Nastasturus Federations; when they arrived, they would settle the system's uninhabited worlds and start their new lives. Even though Alec had read all this before, he listened to the Lady intently; he enjoyed hearing her singsong voice.