Chapter 3: Pirates

The textbook definition of piracy was robbery or violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship. On Earth, piracy had occurred for thousands of years. The first recorded instances were when the ‘Sea Peoples’, a generic group of Bronze Age tribes, attacked Aegean and Mediterranean ships in the 14th Century BC. Ever since, as long as people were shipping goods by ship, other people with ships were trying to take it away from them.

The ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ was roughly an eighty-year period from the mid-17^th Century through the early-18^th Century. It was highly romanticized at the time, with books and magazine articles glossing over the nasty parts and taking the side of the pirates fighting for freedom against tyrannical kings. Some of the glamor subsided in the 19^th Century, but when movies were invented in the 20^th Century, pirate movies became a staple.

Piracy tended to happen in areas where there were geographic features that made pirate attacks easy, such as straits and island archipelagos, where pirates could hide and then swoop in on a target before hiding again following an attack. Just as important, however, was a need for weak local governments that couldn’t protect their waters or provide basic services to the people committing the piracy. In the Caribbean there was a significant period when three different warring European nations - France, Spain, and England - had ports and colonies throughout the area. The same happened near the Horn of Africa, and throughout the Indonesian and Philippine Archipelagos, plagued with weak or fractured governments and large numbers of high value cargos travelling through.

Probably the most underreported aspect of piracy was that it required more than pirates and pirate ships, and target ships. A third requirement was a place to sell the cargos the pirates stole. They needed merchants to buy their stolen goods and corrupt local politicians to allow them free rein for a cut of the take. Even in the 23^rd Century, piracy occurred in the Caribbean and Pacific archipelagos, especially in areas where WestHem and EastHem butted up against each other. Piracy was a business, and after almost four millennia, it was still around on Earth.

The one place that didn’t have pirates was outer space, despite the huge number of stories written about space pirates. Ever since the early 20^th Century, when space travel was first considered possible, pirate stories were written, movies were made, and television shows were produced. By the 23^rd Century they were very popular in both WestHem and EastHem. In WestHem the pirates were either Martians or rogue EastHem sailors or both; in East Hem it was Martians or WestHem naval vessels or both.

The biggest problem was that traveling on Earth’s seas was not the same as interplanetary travel. You couldn’t just change course, you couldn’t breathe, eat, or drink vacuum, and you couldn’t just sail into a convenient port. Nobody was going to go sailing around, hoping to see sails on the horizon. Orbital mechanics ruled, and there was an extremely limited number of ports.

What Executive Decisions Group was trying to do was introduce piracy to the Solar System. If they got lucky, maybe they could make some money!

Bridge

Ship 1 (ex-Eagle)

Thursday, January 15, 2235

Alex Rodriguez sat in the captain’s chair on the Bridge of Ship 1 looking over the navigation and sensor screens. He had a wry smile whenever he sat there, since it had never been an option when he was Lieutenant Rodriguez of the WestHem Navy. For a non-Caucasian, lieutenant was about the highest rank ever obtained, and before he was forcibly retired, his career had peaked as a navigator on a Rattler. His retirement had come about when funds earmarked for his captain’s pocket were ‘misappropriated’ and found their way into Rodriguez’ bank account; the captain was a scion of a wealthy WestHem family so his financial peccadillos couldn’t be brought up at Rodriguez’ trial. Instead, Rodriguez had been kicked out ‘for the good of the service’.

The rest of the crew was of the same general moral character. They totaled forty-eight, and included murderers, rapists, thieves, drunks, and drug addicts. All had served in the WestHem Navy at some point before being found unsuitable for the august character of that body. The chief engineer had been convicted of raping a series of low-level enlisted women; the assistant engineer had been convicted of raping an enlisted man. Several of the officers and enlisted had been released from the Butte Military Detention Facility in order to fill critical slots in the ship’s crew.

There had been a forty-ninth crew member, but he had been such an uncontrollable mad dog that Rodriguez had to shoot him in the crew mess, when he attacked a cook who had served him cold coffee. The cook was still recovering from a broken arm, and Rodriguez now wore a pistol constantly.

Alexander Santiago of Executive Decisions Group had sent Rodriguez and Ship 1 on a path towards Mars. Santiago was tied in with WestHem Intelligence and had what was considered a viable strategy for making money. They would intercept Martian freighters and transports travelling between Mars and Saturn, capture them, and then bring them back to Earth orbit for disposal.

The target for Ship 1 was MSS Fart Locker, a gigantic globular tanker that travelled back and forth between Saturn and Mars. She would be loaded with hydrogen at the Rhea gas mine near Whiting City, the huge center of the Saturn colony. Then she would head into the inner system, to dock at Triad City and disgorge her cargo. After a few days for her crew to commit a few sins planet-side, she would return empty to Saturn for more hydrogen.