“It’s all fine and dandy to rip off cargo haulers and stick it to the BG and the Fed,” said Katy. “But that world left us a few seconds ago. Those black bastards intend to wipe out not just the Feds, but all humans. I don’t think this is a Fed issue. It’s us or them. The humans they do keep around will be used on work planets. Time to take a side, Jolo. Barthelme saved you for a reason.”
“For what?” Jolo screamed, his face red and his fists clenched. “To save Merthon?”
“No,” said Merthon. “Merthon saved you to save Merthon. Which you did. Barthelme did what he did of his own accord. He thought you might one day save his world. You choose your own path now. You are beholden to no one.”
These people are crazy, thought Jolo. They’ve all lost their minds. “That’s right! No one!” he screamed. “I’m leaving this death trap of a planet. If you in then come now. There’s a hauler coming through Vesper tomorrow and I’m gonna be there.”
“I’m in,” said Greeley.
“Me too,” said Hurley. They both stood next to Jolo. Koba took a deep breath and stared at the floor. Then he shuffled over to Jolo’s end of the table without saying anything.
Jolo stormed out of the library, his mind already working on the preparations for the ship. He’d have to check to make sure the repairs had been done, and the food supply on board was adequate, and who’d pilot the ship now that Katy was out.
Katy was out. That was worse than the BG coming to blow up the planet.
Pirate Run
In orbit above Vesper in Federation space
42 days left
The Argossy lifted up into the bright afternoon Duval sky, puffy white clouds against a wide stretch of light blue, the only bit of gray a hint of rain off to the west. Koba sat in Katy’s seat and fought with the controls, nearly clipping the edge of the cliff face on the way up. Jolo stood on the bridge and stared at the planet’s surface on screen, red clay extending out from either end of the ravine that hid Marco’s place. As the ship gained altitude, the view widened and the red turned to orange, and a brown and gray patch came into view that Jolo knew was Jaxxon, beyond that the smaller settlements Hilder and Raypatch. They’d all have to go he thought. Most were pirates or had pirate blood. They knew how to survive. Jolo imagined Marco on the radio to Bertha, then she to Granly in Hilder, and so on. And soon the whole planet would know, via an ancient, old-Earth technology neither the BG nor the Fed had bothered to monitor, that the end was near. But Jolo also knew that no amount of old-Earth tech, no amount of stolen Fed guns, no rag-tag fleet of pirates, could stop the black ships. He just hoped they had sense to realize it.
“Katy,” said Jolo. “Take us—” and then he stopped. Koba, glasses and dark hair, thin little arms, stared up at him. Jolo didn’t say he was sorry, he just shook his head.
“It’s not my fault,” said Koba. “She didn’t want to come, remember?”
Jolo watched as the bright picture of the planet faded and the screen went dark as the ship broke out of the atmosphere. How could he go without her? She’d been on all of his adventures.
“Captain,” said Greeley, “if it makes you feel any better, Katy was asking about your parts the other day.”
“What parts?” said Jolo.
“You know,” he said, grabbing his crotch.
“What’d you say?”
“Well, I said unfortunately Merthon didn’t have time to finish the job but he was growing a big one in a tank right now.” Greeley and Koba started laughing.
Jolo forced a smile.
Vesper was the closest Jolo had been to the heart of Fed space in some time. But the risk would be worth it. Early on Jolo and the crew had learned the key to taking a freighter was not the actual taking of the freighter. That was a dangerous bit of work, for sure, but the real tricky part was knowing which hauler to target. Jolo had heard of pirates disabling haulers only to find their cargo holds full of shit, literally. The Fed called it HWC, or human waste compost. In the right part of the galaxy a hauler full of HWC would fetch a fine price, but that particular outfit had jumped the freighter near a bunch of green planets that had no use for it. Jolo knew he had to be a little more strategic or the odds would catch up to him and he’d end up getting caught and everyone sent to a work planet.
And that’s where Marco came through again. He had a contact on the core planet Dolbi who worked at the Federation Freight Inspection station. All commercial freighters originating from one of the core Federation planets had to pass inspection there on the Dolbi station before departure. So after a month of hit and miss freighter raids where one day they’d score military hardware they could sell quick and the next they’d get a giant hauler full of tiny plastic toys: cute little hovercraft that Greeley liked but you couldn’t sell anywhere; they started getting reports from Dolbi. And that’s how Jolo knew the Fortinbras had Fed rations, and that the hauler they were going to visit, the Derbinster UCC headed through Vesper, had a boat
