Chapter 1: Silent Running

Eriksen was jolted back to consciousness by blaring alarms. The console in front of his seat blinked with red warning lights that burned into his retinas as he struggled to get his bearings, leaving ghostly trails in his eyes as he tried in vain to blink them away. Where was he? He felt almost drunk, like his brain couldn’t process his surroundings properly. Every nerve in his damned body stung as if he had been tagged by a riot grenade.

There was something in his mouth ... hard plastic, and he spat it out onto the deck at his feet as he struggled to unfasten the harness that had him strapped tightly to the chair. Wait ... it was a bit, to stop him from biting his tongue off during superlight travel. Yes, he remembered now. He was the pilot of this ship, no, a freighter. He must have just landed on the outskirts of his destination system. That or a problem had interrupted his jump, what the hell was going on?

He unfastened the clasp on the harness and rose to his feet unsteadily, stretching his limbs as his mind unfogged and everything came into focus again. He was no stranger to the wracking energies of superlight travel, but although frequent exposure to the higher dimensions of spacetime made such jumps easier, it never made them ... easy.

“Now what the fuck is the problem?” Eriksen muttered to himself as he examined the pilot’s console. Proximity warning, that couldn’t be right. He should have come out well on the near side of the star’s Oort cloud, there shouldn’t be anything out this far. He turned his attention to a nearby monitor and tapped at it incredulously, his eyes narrowing as he examined the readout. The scanner did indeed appear to show a small object directly in the freighter’s path, the behemoth’s onboard computer had already initiated an evasive burn in an attempt to avoid it.

Couldn’t be an asteroid, too small, so what...

His blood ran cold, his heart stopping in his chest as he came to the only logical conclusion. Pirates.

He scrambled to zip up his pressure suit, securing the flexible hood that would serve as an impromptu helmet in the case of a sudden decompression, checking the computer display on his wrist to make sure there were no leaks. He typed furiously at his console, trying to activate the ship’s distress beacon, but his comms were being jammed. Damned pirates must have an EWAR package, that didn’t bode well. They must be professionals.

He had a small caliber pistol stowed where regulations stated that the cockpit’s fire extinguisher was supposed to be, a nine-millimeter Walther. It wasn’t exactly military grade, but you couldn’t go around firing railguns inside a civilian ship. You might be able to blow a fist-sized hole in an intruder, but you’d also be blowing a fist-sized hole in anything that was directly behind him, in this case a damned spaceship hull. It was better than nothing, however. He popped open the glass case to retrieve the handgun, checking the magazine and then pocketing it. He dashed out of the cockpit section of the freighter and into the hab module, trying to come up with a plan, his heart racing as he considered his options.

There had been reports of pirates near the outer colonies, but not this far into UNN controlled space. Whoever would take a risk like this was going to be a real hardcase. That or they were completely fucking unhinged, which with pirates was just as likely a prospect.

This vessel was big and slow, fast in the long term, but it took time to build up speed in realspace. It was completely incapable of outrunning or outmaneuvering a smaller and more agile vessel in the short term. He couldn’t evade them, and as a civilian freighter owned by a shipping company, he had no shipboard weapons. The freighter was a long, thin scaffold upon which dozens of massive shipping containers were secured, skeletal and fragile. There was a cockpit and a habitation module on the front of the structure, while the engines along with their generators were down at the bottom end, giving the vessel the appearance of a giant cotton swab from a distance.

If they wanted control of the ship in order to secure the cargo, then they would have to board it, and they could attempt that in one of two places. They could either storm the hab module in order to access the cockpit and wrest control of the ship from him, or they could try to take the engines down, leaving him dead in the water. They wouldn’t use ship-to-ship weapons, assuming that they had any. The reactors that powered the superlight drive were nuclear, and there was no black market for irradiated slag.

The easiest way to board the ship was through the small hangar just behind the hab module, it was large enough to house two shuttles if they were docked close together and it was open to space save for a forcefield that kept the air inside. From there they could either make their way to the cockpit or go aft down the maintenance tunnel that ran along the spine of the vessel, towards the engines.

He could seal himself inside the cockpit, and they would have a hard time getting to him. Perhaps it would stall them for long enough that another ship might happen upon him and raise the alarm. This was a commercial shipping route after all. The problem with that plan was that they’d still have free reign of the engines. There was a radiation-proof bulkhead that could be sealed in the event of a core breach, they’d never cut through that, but that would also activate the emergency mode and shut down the generators. Without power, he’d lose life support, and they’d only have to wait him out until he opened the doors of his own volition.

No, he was going to have to be smart about this, what he needed was a plan.

“Civilian freighter, this is the captain of the Black Claw. Surrender and prepare to be boarded. Relinquish control of your vessel, and you will not be harmed...”

Eriksen didn’t recognize the accent, they must be from some remote backwater colony. As he watched their ship close on him through the viewport, it became clear that something didn’t add up. This wasn’t some hand-me-down skiff launched from a nearby asteroid base, it looked almost like a retired UNN Warden. They were Navy patrol vessels, commonly deployed on long realspace patrols to monitor activity in UNN controlled systems. They could house a small crew over long periods of time, and they could even make short-range superlight jumps. They were far from small, about the size of the average yacht, and they could carry boarding craft to be used during impromptu customs inspections.

How the hell would pirates have gotten their hands on a Warden? It made perfect sense, they were designed for long deployments in deep space, and they had capabilities that were perfectly suited to piracy. But any such vessels should have been sold off for scrap metal once retired from service. Perhaps some unscrupulous scrap dealer had been selling them on? Still, it would have taken a pretty penny to buy even a completely totaled Warden and just as much to make it spaceworthy again.

As it drew closer and its black-painted hull was illuminated by his freighter’s floodlights, he noticed that it was covered in frankly shoddy repairs, as if someone had welded scrap metal to its airframe with no real idea of what it was originally supposed to look like. Some kind of mentally unstable mechanic had welded armor all over its hull that ruined its usually sleek profile, and it had spikes jutting out in front of it at odd angles as if they were expecting to do some ramming. Normally Wardens could make planetfall, but this thing looked as if it would break apart like it was made of plywood if exposed to the stress of reentry. Just who the hell was he dealing with here? Mad pirates with a lot of money and no sense?

He watched as a smaller shuttle broke away from the misshapen Warden, its thrusters flaring as it maneuvered towards the freighter’s hangar bay. Ensuring that the comforting weight of the handgun was still present in his pocket, he steeled himself and left the hab module, walking down the narrow corridor towards the bay.

The shuttle settled on the deck, its landing gear bouncing as it absorbed the impact, the engines glowing orange with excess heat that he could feel from across the room as they cooled. The shuttle was odd too, far older than the Warden, he wasn’t even sure that it was of UNN origin.

He bristled as the access ramp to the rear of the lander began to lower with a hydraulic hiss, what sounded like heavy boots scraping against metal echoing in the hangar as the crew descended. Something about them seemed off, were they wearing some kind of powered exosuits? Their gait was strange, they were too tall, and...

Eriksen had to fight the overpowering urge to flee, to turn on his heels and sprint back to the cockpit, locking every door between him and these pirates and damn the consequences. He felt a deep, primal dread that transcended simple fear, as if some ancient predator was staring him down and licking its chops hungrily in anticipation of making a meal of him. Those weren’t boots scraping against the deck, they were hooked claws. These were Borealans.

Known colloquially as Mad Cats, they were the prized alien shock troopers of the UNN, eight feet of muscle and death all wrapped up in the savage appearance of a bipedal tiger. They walked on two digitigrade legs, basically humanoid if not for the claws and tail, their faces strangely uncanny with the flat brow of a cat and a pink feline nose. Their bodies were mostly clean of fur much like a human, besides for their arms below the elbow and their legs below the knee, along with the round ears that protruded from their hair and their long tails that trailed behind them.

These were not UNN personnel, however, not even close. Whenever Eriksen had seen pictures of them, they had been wearing either standard-issue Navy blue jumpsuits or the black combat armor that was favored by the Marines, humanity’s crack commandos. The dress sense of these pirates might have been funny under circumstances where his life wasn’t in immediate danger. It was all leather, they looked like a damned biker gang. Upon closer inspection, it was actually quite elaborate. It didn’t look like anything that he had ever seen before, it almost looked as if they had tanned the hide and tailored the clothing themselves. By that he meant that it looked handcrafted, it wasn’t a complaint about the quality by any means, everything had little personal touches and quirks that one just didn’t see in mass-produced gear. There were designs pressed into the jackets that almost looked like hunting scenes, elaborately decorated buttons and clasps, no two items of clothing were the same. It was odd the things you noticed when you were on the verge of pissing your overalls in terror.

Chapter 2 »