Pilot’s Forge
Pilot’s Forge
Patrice Sarath
Raiders had likely cleaned her out and taken the crew as captives for ransom.
“So why didn’t they tow the boat in for salvage?
” he said out loud. He was the only one on board the Crane, but it didn’t stop him from talking.
He thought better that way and, right now, he had a puzzle.
The ship had been left to drift when arguably she was the biggest prize of all.
He flipped back to the datastream, sat back in his chair and considered.
He could tow the freighter into Crowe’s World, one of their notorious chop shops, or play it the other way, tow her into Hatch station for the reward or stake a salvage claim.
All without firing a shot. He let himself dream for a bit.
If the ship were still sound, he could set himself up as a skipper, hire a crew, and get ahead of sector police.
“You know, go straight,” he told the datastream, running in heads-up display in front of him.
“Settle down somewhere.” Make the family proud.
It was a nice dream. He indulged it for a few seconds more, then turned down the datastream. More likely, if he towed that ship in, he’d find sector cops just waiting to bust him one more time and he would never see space again.
The Godolphin would have to continue her solitary journey through the galaxy’s spiral arm, and Merritt would be the last one to see her.
That didn’t mean he shouldn’t at least board her and confirm she was derelict.
It was the charitable thing to do. And if he happened to pick up anything of value that might have been left over, well, even a good Samaritan deserved something for his trouble. He went to suit up.
He was surprised to see that the Godolphin still had atmosphere when the airlock whooshed and opened up for him, but with a hull breach the ship could vent at any time, so Merritt left his faceplate closed.
His breathing was loud in the confined space of his helmet, and for a moment his readouts showed that he had elevated pulse and respiration.
The ship’s interior was dark and his headlamp flashed through the smoky darkness.
He needed to get some lights working on the old girl.
That was confirmed when he tripped over the first body.
She had been killed with a pulse weapon.
The woman’s uniform had the Beauchamps logo on it.
Beauchamps – one of the smaller merchant clans.
Merritt’s own clan was Crane, though he was only a distant relative of the great family and he didn’t doubt they had as little care for him as he did for them.
A Crane ship would not have been attacked.
Raiders were smart enough to go for easier meat.
He counted three more bodies, scanning slowly. There had been a running gunfight, and there was plenty of scarring along the bulkhead.
Merritt tamped down his sudden desire to get the hell out of there.
His suit sensors kept up a data feed, along with a ship schematic, which it displayed on the inside of his helmet.
The hatch to the bridge was down the corridor, and Merritt headed that way, sidestepping the dead.
There’s not gonna be any salvage, he told himself, but he kept going anyway, knowing it was sheer stubbornness that drove him on.
His helmet readout flashed a single dot, signifying his position along the schematic, and then, faintly, another dot flashed out of the corner of his eye.
There was someone else alive on the Godolphin.
Merritt stopped. With great care he thumbed the button on his suit to replay.
The dot flashed again, flickered, came back.
With his other hand he unholstered his pistol.
Whoever it was might be dying, might not be human, might be trying to shield from his suit.
He got a lock on the other dot and saw that it was on the bridge.
There was a hatch about twenty metres ahead.
He found it, and climbed up, his boots clicking on the rungs.
He was sweating by the time he got into the control room, and he found the body, suited up with the helmet latched.
He muscled between overturned chairs and broken panels and knelt stiffly next to it.
The man opened his eyes and muttered something that Merritt couldn’t catch.
Under his faceplate, blood crusted around the man’s mouth and nose.
“What happened?” Merritt said, hardly expecting an answer. “Raiders?”
The Beauchamps captain moved his head slightly inside the helmet. Yes.
Merritt’s suit beeped, letting him know he was running low on air. “I need to get you to my ship,” he said. “I can’t carry you. Is there a float?”
The captain shook his head again. He tried to say something, spoke hoarsely. “Get off my ship.”
Merritt kept from rolling his eyes. Man’s dying and he’s still pushy. “Sorry, captain. Looks like this is a rescue.”
“Damn fool,” the Beauchamps captain said, and that came through clearly.
“You. Are. In. Danger.” He grabbed Merritt’s arm, his bloody fingers leaving prints.
“Jumped by raiders, and disabled. But they hit the D-space navigator.” He stopped, gulped a lot of air.
“We’ve been cycling in and out of space-time, each time it’s getting worse.
We’re due for another cycle any second, and if you don’t get out of here, you’re dead too. ”
Merritt’s status sensors told him what he already suspected – respiration, heart rate, adrenal glands: all pouring forth accelerated data.
He holstered his gun again and knelt, trying to lift the Beauchamps captain.
He grunted under the effort; his suit didn’t make things easy. “Then I guess we better be going.”
Beauchamps cried out in agony. “No time. I’m cycling too.”
Merritt looked down and almost dropped him.
Beauchamps was fading. D-space was happening all around them.
Great for getting from place to place without having to take, say, 100 years to make the next star; not so great when a wormhole opened up inside you.
Beauchamps got a lot heavier and Merritt saw that he was dead.
He set the man down and backed away, then ran for the ladder. He slid rather than climbed down.
The ship shook all around him, coming in and out of reality.
The central corridor seemed longer this time, even though he was sprinting.
His heads-up display flared and shook, transmitting streams of unintelligible data.
Merritt kept running, hit the controls for the airlock, and froze.
The door had changed. It was now made of wood and iron and had an old-fashioned doorknob.
Tentative, he touched the knob and the door whooshed open, an airlock once again.
He stepped in and reflexively slapped at the side of the door to close it.
His glove hit wood and something fell to the floor.
An old-fashioned key – an iron skeleton key – lay at his feet.
It’s not really there, he told himself. It was a ghost of the D-space nav malfunction.
His brain was making sense of what it couldn’t understand, creating familiar images out of multispace.
The ship was coming apart at the subatomic level, and so would he.
He saw the great gathering darkness rushing towards him, pulling him into the wormhole that gathered at the bow of the ship.
Breathing hard, Merritt pulled the door closed.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered, sweat slicking down his back.
Would the airlock work, or would he be trapped inside the wormhole for ever?
With agonizing slowness the rising whine indicated that the airlock had began to pressurize.
Merritt heard a noise and looked out of the tiny window in the wooden door.
A face filled it, a face contorted in hatred and fear.
“Shit!” Merritt flung himself backwards, fumbling to pull up his weapon. The man was snarling, his teeth showing like spikes through his beard. That’s not the captain, he thought crazily. What the hell was going on?
The power whine stopped and the airlock stopped pressurizing.
The man continued to snarl like an animal, and he was trying to pull the door open.
Shit shit shit. Merritt knelt and scrabbled for the key, fumbling in his panic and haste.
He held the door closed, desperation giving him strength, and pushed the key in the lock, then turned it.
The door locked with a click. Again the slow rising whine, again the long wait as the airlock pressurized.
The face dropped away and Merritt allowed himself a slow breath.
Then with a shuddering crash the man threw himself against the door, teeth bared, eyes bulging.
The small compartment was rocked again and again as the creature threw itself at him.
Merritt drew his gun, faced the door, and waited for the moment when the creature burst through.
If the explosive decompression didn’t get him, he might survive.
A polite chime sounded, signalling the atmosphere had stabilized. The airlock opened behind him.
Billy’s was crowded that night, the little roadhouse bar spilling music and laughter out into the parking lot.
Edith parked her battered old work truck, with ‘Crane Farrier and Blacksmithing’ stencilled on the side, at the end of the parking lot, got out and stretched.
It had been a long day. She had shoed five horses that day.
Her business was picking up, but it meant that she had spent a lot of time bent over double, and some horses were lazy about supporting their own weight.
“Edith Crane!” shouted Melissa Andrews from over by the front deck with a bunch of friends. “’Bout time you got here!”
Edith made her way over to the group and slid into an empty space on the bench. Melissa poured her a beer from the pitcher and Edith sipped and relaxed.