“Are they in suits?” asked Captain Hyde.
“No, Captain.”
“Space ’em.”
Cormac tapped once on his tablet. “Done.”
An alarm chimed in Victor’s helmet as the pressure dropped. Within minutes, the blood floating around the bridge boiled, and the interior of the ship became a hard vacuum.
“All right,” Gaz said. “Cleanup duty.” He pointed at Victor. “That means you, new guy. I’ll take care of Dom.”
***
Victor spent the rest of the day collecting the bodies of dead pirates and throwing them out the airlock. The pirates who had died from vacuum exposure looked relatively peaceful compared to the ones who had died from gunshot wounds.
After hours of pushing the deceased into space, the
Fortune
and her prize were surrounded by a small satellite system of dead bodies.
With the bodies gone, the pirate vessel was repressurized. Victor lifted up the visor of his pressure suit and breathed in the stale air of the ship’s atmosphere processors.
While Cormac and members of the engineering crew worked on the pirate vessel, Victor returned to the
Fortune
to rest, where he found Gaz clearing out Dom’s pod.
The tattooed man looked up at Victor. “Here, catch.” He threw a gun toward Victor. It was Dom’s, an automatic carbine of some kind. “Oughta be more useful for you than that pump-shotty you tried to use back there.”
Victor examined the carbine before depositing it and his dubiously useful shotgun in his sleeping pod. “What’re we sending back to her next of kin?”
“Next of kin? You’re shitting me, right?” Gaz laughed, exposing his sharpened teeth. “There ain’t no next of kin with our kind, new guy. Excuse me, I mean
Victor
. You’re broken in.”
“Broken in?”
“You survived. Sucks Dom died. Means we need to get another new guy, but at least you got bloodied and showed you’re not completely useless. Though you’re gonna have to lose some of that queasiness you have about shootin’ down pirates. I don’t know where you came from, but that ain’t gonna fly on this boat.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Victor said.
Gaz pulled out a flask and took a draw from it before handing it to Victor. He accepted it and took a sip of it, almost gagging from the taste.
“Good shit, huh?”
“Some kind of shit, that’s for sure,” Victor said, returning the flask and its wretched contents to Gaz.
Gaz chuckled. “It’s a ’quired taste. You should get some rest, Cap’s gonna undock us from the pirate ship and take us to examine the freighter. We’re gonna see if there’re any survivors. More important, we’re gonna tag it for salvage.” His smile broadened, showing that row of spiky white teeth of his. “We’re all gonna get a share of the prize. That includes you.”
“It’ll be nice to have some walking-around money,” Victor said.
Gaz chuckled again. “I ain’t gonna use that money for walking after we touch back down on Mustang.”
The
Fortune
undocked from the captured pirate vessel, leaving Cormac and his salvage team to do repairs.
Hours later Victor was back in his suit, waiting in the airlock with his new carbine while Captain Hyde docked with the freighter.
It was a midsize starfreighter, about a kilometer long. Far larger than the
Fortune
but with a small pressure hull. It didn’t take long for Victor and the boarding specialists to clear the ship’s interior.
There they found the bodies of the freighter’s twelve crew, all shot to death in the freighter’s galley.
Chapter 8
The commercial convoy from Mustang arrived a day later. It comprised six megafreighters carrying two weeks of the total output of the Mustang system to the Tabor system, another major center for trade in the Free Worlds.
The convoy had a heavy escort: a dozen destroyers, four cruisers, and a multimegaton battleship.
When the battleship was identified as the
Gryphon
, everyone on the bridge collectively gasped in surprise. Everyone except Victor. He didn’t understand the significance of the ship’s name.
“That’s Holace Quill’s personal starship!” Captain Hyde said to Fowler in disbelief.
“Why do you think he’d be escorting the convoy?” Fowler asked.
“No idea. It may be why we were hired to clear this system. Speaking of which, time to send the all-clear signal.” Warwick composed a quick audio message and sent it to the convoy. With the
Fortune
and her two prizes loitering a million kilometers from the jump point, it would only take just over three seconds for the message to make its journey.
Ten seconds later, the
Fortune
received a reply from Holace Quill himself.
“That’s good to hear, Captain Hyde,” said Mustang’s wealthiest and most powerful citizen. He had a lined face and dark hair graying at the temple. “It would please me to have your ship dock with mine. I would like to discuss business with you and your crew personally.”
Warwick let out a long whistle. “Well, this was unexpected.”
Fowler nodded. “My guess is that he has another job for us, Captain.”
“He may. He may also want to buy the goods off the freighter we picked up,” Captain Hyde said.
Victor remained quiet, recalling what he knew of Holace Quill. His family controlled Mustang’s starship-building industry. And since interstellar trade was the basis of the planet’s economy, that had made them exceedingly rich.
The top ten wealthiest people in Mustang sat on the Council of Ten, which ruled the system. Holace Quill, being the wealthiest of the ten, was also their de facto leader. Which made him the ruler of Mustang, by extension.
Captain Hyde ordered the
Fortune
to set an intercept course for the
Gryphon
. It took ninety minutes for the ship to reach the battleship and request permission to dock.
The
Gryphon
was two thousand meters long, easily large enough to house the
Fortune
in its cavernous hangar. It made for an easy docking procedure. The ship just had to fly inside, lower her landing struts, and then set down on the deck.
A docking tube attached to the
Fortune
’s forward airlock almost as soon as the ship’s engines powered down. Most of the crew, including Victor, disembarked. Only Cormac and a skeleton crew remained aboard.
The first thing that struck Victor about the
Gryphon
was the subtle scent of vanilla wafting through the air. A stark change from the oily, sweaty smell of the
Fortune
.
Even the
Spear of Lacano
, the Lysandran emperor’s personal flagship, only had the industrial scents of an immaculately clean warship. And its interior was far less lavish and colder.
A thick red carpet decorated with golden embroidered horses covered the deck of the main corridor. Gilding covered the bulkheads, and the chandeliers hanging from above cast warm light. Every set of double doors they passed through had matching black marble reliefs of rearing horses. The
Gryphon
’s interior was more like that of a luxury starliner than a battleship.
Victor's breath caught in his throat when they reached the large dining room. It was somehow even more lavish than the main corridor. A long covered table occupied the center of the room, with food, cups, and cutlery already set out. The tableware looked like it was made from real silver. Paintings adorned the walls, and another deep red carpet—of the same pattern as the one in the corridor—lay on the floor here, and many pillars of polished gray stone were about.
Apparently Holace Quill liked to show off just how rich he was.
After being told the food and drinks were free, the mercenaries sat down and ate.
Victor sat between Toren and Gaz as they tore their way through the cultured meat and fresh vegetables.
Gaz, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a messy eater with his sharpened teeth, which he used to rip chunks of meat off his knife before chewing loudly and swallowing, grease running down his chin as he did.
Toren wasn’t exactly delicate with his food either. But at least everything that went in his mouth stayed there.
Victor sighed and ate his own food. There were worse things in life than eating free food with messy tablemates.
He picked up a fork—the heft confirming it was, indeed, made of silver—and ate an unfamiliar cubed-meat dish.
It was good, really good. Tender and savory. Victor had forgotten what good food tasted like. He hadn’t had a meal this good since…before Savannah was destroyed.
Victor’s chewing slowed, but his appetite didn’t disappear. Not completely at least.
All the eating stopped when Holace Quill walked in through the ornate double doors of the dining room. Even Gaz took a moment to wipe his face.
Quill wore an expensive but not elaborate suit of dark gray fabric, cut perfectly for his small, lean frame. He looked every inch the patrician.
He stopped in front of Captain Hyde, who stood to shake the man’s hand.
“Welcome aboard the
Gryphon
, Captain Hyde. I assume you and your crew are enjoying my hospitality?”
Warwick smiled. “Why, yes, sir. We are.”
“Good.” Quill gave Warwick a warm smile, though Victor couldn’t help but notice how cold the man’s eyes were, with no affection in them. “In that case, I’d like to get down to business.”
“Of course, sir,” Warwick said.
Quill nodded, his warm smile and cold eyes unchanged. “First, on top of your payment, I would like to purchase the freighter you liberated, along with its cargo. Say, a million credits for the prize. That ought to cover your expenses for a while.”
Warwick nodded. “That it would, sir.”
“Good. You can sign the required paperwork before you leave my ship.” The way Quill said it made it sound more like a polite command than a request.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Quill continued. “I noticed you captured a pirate vessel.”
Warwick smiled. “We did, sir. Did you also want to buy it?”
Quill shook his head. “Oh, no. I had something else in mind. Have you ever heard of a Trojan horse?”
Warwick looked confused. “No.”
“It’s a legend from the early First Civilization,” Victor said, “long before they ventured into space. Long before they had any technology really.”
Warwick shot him a hard look, annoyed at the interruption, but Quill looked impressed. That earned Victor another irritated stare from Warwick.
“Continue, please,” Quill said to Victor.
He nodded. “After a decade-long siege of the city of Troy, the Greeks built a giant wooden horse and hid soldiers inside. The Trojans thought it was a gift from the gods and brought it inside the city gates. That night, a small group of Greek soldiers snuck from the horse and opened the gates of Troy for their army. The Greeks razed Troy to the ground and won the war.”
Quill smiled. “I can appreciate a man who knows First Civilization mythology. What is your name?”
“Victor, sir.”
“And what’s your job on Captain Hyde’s vessel?”
“I’m part of the boarding party, sir,” Victor said.
Quill’s eyebrows shot up. “Boarding party? That’s even more surprising. You don’t often find educated men in such…hazardous jobs. Captain Hyde, where did you get this man?”
Warwick fidgeted in his seat a bit before answering. “I recruited him in a bar back on Mustang. He was looking for mercenary work.”
“Ah, interesting.” Quill nodded to Victor and then returned his attention to Warwick. “As you may have guessed, I think the pirate vessel you captured could be put to a similar role as the legendary Trojan horse.”
Warwick cocked his head to one side. “How?”
“There’s a pirate base two jumps from here. Built into a crater on a dwarf planet orbiting a red star. It’s possible the pirate vessel you captured came from there,” Quill said. “I want to offer you the job to infiltrate and destroy the base.”
“Infiltrate and destroy? With respect, sir, why not send your fleet in to destroy the base?” asked Warwick.
“Because the system that base is located in is claimed by the Kingdom of Mohawk. If I sent a fleet there, it would start a war which I do not wish to wage. However, an accidental munition explosion or sabotage by a rival group of pirates? That would get rid of that base just the same, without having to worry about King Marsh declaring war against Mustang.”
“How much would we be paid for this?” asked Warwick.
“Five million credits.”
Warwick’s eyes lit up with greed. “Done.”
“Good.” Quill smiled. “I’ll have the base’s location uploaded to your map as well as a warhead large enough to do the job delivered to your ship. All complimentary of course.”
***
After the convoy from Mustang departed, Warwick got to work preparing for the very lucrative, and also very dangerous, mission Holace Quill had hired him and his crew for.