Chapter 20

It took me almost ten hours to recover the men from the wrecks and search them. I had to suit up in a pressure suit and enter the each ship using an emergency cable strung between ships. Using a battery pack, I established contact with the men on the bridge through their comm systems and made sure they understood that I could leave them behind if they did anything stupid, and that it would take almost two weeks for help to arrive. They promised to be good.

They would have to depressurize the bridges because the sections behind them were holed. I made sure they all had pressure suits and made sure that they took out any weapons, they'd be scanned before entering the ship proper. I had to use special tools to open the bridge doors and when I got them started I pulled back and covered the door with a solid projectile machine gun and let them open it the rest of the way. Once out and with hands raised I led them to the airlocks going first back to my ship and locking through, then having both of them come over.

Once in the lock, Sam scanned and confirmed their lack of weapons and let them in. Mari was with me, carrying a machine pistol, and we led them back to the hold. There I led them to a spot in a back corner that was designed for this. Once in the corner, I told them to strip the pressure suits off and throw them to me, then to strip down to their skivvies. They looked at Mari.

"Oh, please. Don't get bashful on me, boys. I'm already irritated and if I have to strip you, she'll be the least of your worries," I told them.

Once they were down to their underwear, I did a quick frisk then stood back. An inhibitor field activated on two sides and boxed them into the corner. There was a shower closet built into the corner and a cabinet with air mattresses for them to use. The only thing I'd need to do is feed and water them.

I went back to the wreck bringing Katherine with me in her pressure suit and started cracking open the personal quarters. Once they were open, I had her do a quick search for personal comms, tablets, anything that could hold data, while I searched the bridge. I found an AIA unit but could tell right off it was a cheap model, probably just used for the ships systems. I grabbed it anyway and kept searching. I didn't find much more and I didn't want to spend the time looking for a hardened vault. I met up with Katherine and we headed back with the stuff we'd found.

We did the same with the other wreck, securing the men, searching for any personal electronics, and then headed back. I needed to get the ships out of the area as they were a collision hazard but I also wanted them gone.

So we harpooned them. The harpoons are huge metal rods with a one-time-fire plasma torch that can penetrate up to three meters deep into a hull. When it stops, spikes extend from the rod and into the molten metal. When the metal cools, the harpoon is set and ready for the cable. We punched three harpoons into each ship in the front end. A cable was extended from the back underside of my ship and was attached to the harpoon using drones.

It's a pain in the ass and took another 10 hours to accomplish because the ships were moving in different directions, and hauling that much mass around requires a lot of maneuvering. We finally got both ships moving in the right direction, got up some good speed, and released them in the direction of the sun. It'd take years for them to reach it but I didn't care.

After that I slept for six hours and then we resumed the transit around Hela. It took another six hours to reach the transit point and then we jumped to Hawking.

Hawking was another crowded system.

I sent a coded message to Privateer HQ on Hawking Station1 that I'd need repairs, sending them a damage report, and a request for prisoner pickup, preferably by privateer escort. It might piss off station security but I had my reasons. Hawking Station1 had full docks and I thought I'd have to wait for repairs.

"'Shivari', Station1 Control. You're to activate automated docking for interior repair facility."

Wow. This would be my first time taking 'Shivari' inside a space station. "Roger, Station1. Activating automated docking." The next thing I knew my ship was under control of the space station and we were headed for the dome atop it.

Around the dome are six massive hatches that lead into shafts built through to the ceiling of the upper level. We were maneuvered to one hatch that was already open and slowly lowered in until we were at a full stop. There was no gravity in this area so we just floated while the hatch above us closed and the interior of the shaft was filled with air. Once the pressure equalized, the hatch below us opened and we started to descend. Repulsor beams and inhibitor fields took over and we were lowered to the deck below.

I did my shutdown checks and opened the airlock. A set of mobile stairs was positioned and six men trooped up. A man of medium build with blonde hair came up to me.

"David Brawn, senior privateer. Welcome to Hawking. You're a day late. We were about to launch a couple of ships to look for you. I take it you had some trouble and had to change plans."

"Yeah, a couple of ships tried to ambush us in Hela," I told him as I started leading him and the other escort back to the hold.

"Pirates?"

"Not unless they started using Brigantines and I didn't get the memo."

"Seriously?"

"Yup." We got to the hold and I pointed the prisoners out. We stayed at the forward end as I briefed him.

"Their ships?"

"Currently in transit to the warm embrace of Hela."

"Oh, that's going to piss them off."

"I call it a fair trade. They scratched the paint on my ship."

That got a good chuckle from all the privateers. "Damn straight," one of them said. To privateers, our ships are our home.

"You talk to them?"

"No, all I've done is play farmer; fed and watered 'em. I'm not trained for interrogation and I don't have any facilities. Besides, I tend to break things when I'm pissed and they pissed me off."

David nodded. "Yeah, we saw the footage and report of Amethyst."

"What the fuck? Has everybody seen that?" I asked incredulously.

"Oh hell yeah. Philippe thinks it's one of the greatest hits of all times."

"Whatever. Besides, I wasn't pissed, I was only annoyed."

David and his crew just looked at me. David shook his head after a moment and asked "OK, so why don't you want to turn these guys over to station security?"

"Let me ask you a question: Where's the shortest jump to Hela?"

"Fuck," David said. Then with a sour face he said "Hawking."

"Bingo. Someone on Euripides must have recognized us. I fucked up and weren't hiding."

"Everyone fucked up then. If we'd known that something like this could happen we'd have taken precautions. Don't beat yourself up. Go on, I want to see if I can poke holes in your theory."

"So, someone recognized us and saw we were going to the Hela transit point. Two days to the transit point plus five days jump, one week to Hela. There's only two other transit points into Hela besides the one we came through and Euripides is the only connection from there. One transit point is to another uninhabited system, so unless it got a FTL setup recently and there's people are based there, that one's out."

"OK," David said. "Keep going."

"The transit point from Hawking also connects to Rambling. The transit is two days longer which is six days plus the system transit which is another two days without a micro-jump drive, that comes to eight days, so that won't work."

"This leaves a day and a half system transit here if these guys were on standby, three days jump, and two days system transit comes to six and a half days, the only place they could've made it from," David concluded.

"Right, and you can't park two ships at a transit point in an uninhabited system for long durations. Too much risk of discovery."

"Agreed."

"Yeah. Now that we've established that, these guys would be taking a huge risk. You know I'm coming. You'll be sending out a search team when I'm late. You'll see I'm most likely dead. You start doing everything you can to find out who did this, starting in this system."

"We'd check all incoming and outgoing ships and trace it to them eventually."

"Right. They can't be stupid enough to think they'd get away with it."

"Unless they had help here," said David. "The transit point to Hela is only covered by an automated satellite. They'd just need the override codes to make it ignore them. Someone in System Control erases them from their computers, probably the same person who gave them the overrides. They got the info from Euripides that you're coming; they may have contacts there to help them to cover their tracks even further."

"You're heading to Prime, right?" asked one of the privateers. When I nodded, she went on, "I'm wondering how many other systems a jump or two out of Prime have crews like these."

"Good point," David said and I agreed with.

"So at the moment, I can only trust the Privateers. I don't know who else to trust," I told them. I had been over everything with Anna, Katherine, Mari, and Sam and had worked every angle while in jump. We had spent days thinking about the situation and these were the only conclusions that any of us could come up with.

"Fuck, this is huge," was a comment from the privateers.

"Tell me about it," I said bitterly. "I'm too young to be dealing with this conspiracy shit."

David placed a hand on my shoulder. "You may be young, Max, but you're doing great. You're a damn fine Privateer." The others all nodded.

"Thanks, I appreciate that." And I did.

We transferred the prisoners and all the personal electronics that we recovered to a van with the five privateers and it took off to Privateer HQ. I gathered up the ladies, Sam, overnight bags and we left with David, showing us to HQ. There, he sat us in a conference room and gave us something to drink. I'm guessing Kimiko gave him our preferences because I had a Ganymede Porter. David then had me do an after action report of the fight in Hela. It was required for all actions.

It took two days for the repairs to my ship to be completed. The damaged hull plates were removed the day we got there and replaced. What took the longest was the integration of the new plate's coating with the old coating on the ship. That took the longest time but when it was done, you couldn't even tell the new from the old.

While we waited I asked David how he could stand being on such a crowded station. "There are two senior Privateers here. Every four weeks we swap out. Believe me, if I had to stay here any longer, I'd go bonkers."

When we left, we had an escort of another privateer with us. "You can expect another in Prime," I was told.

The jump to Prime system was only three days and the transit to the planet Prime was two days. Anna, Katherine, Mari, Sam, and I spent a lot of time together during that transit. We weren't sure what was going to happen once we reached there. Anna vowed to make sure that we would be all together, even if she had to take up residence on my ship, and if she did, so did Katherine and Mari even though they had the same idea.

Our escort in system peeled off when we hit Prime's planetary control.

"Prime Station Control, 'Shivari'. Requesting docking instructions."

"Standby, 'Shivari'," was the response I got which isn't unusual in a crowded system as they looked for a free dock on all the stations. What freaked me out was they told me to do. "'Shivari', you are to proceed to New Babylon Spaceport. Switch to New Babylon Control."