Cast Adrift, #1, page 2
“The Earth Defence Force is more powerful, I think, than you realise,” he said. “The humans control most of the military installations within their system. Titan Base is the only real exception and even that installation has a major human presence. They might be able to liberate themselves, if they wished. That’s not the real problem. There are millions of humans scattered across our worlds. What will they do when they see us move to crush their dreams of equality or independence? We will find ourselves fighting a war on our homeworlds!”
“We have them under tight control,” another councillor said. His skin was blotchy, suggesting he was starting the transition from male to female. “Rig the election.”
“That’s no longer possible,” Yasuke said. “They use exit polls to gauge the electorate’s views - and votes. They’ve been strikingly accurate over the last two decades. They’d have good reason to think we rigged the election if there was a sizable discrepancy between their results and ours. And that might trigger off the insurrection we hoped to avoid.”
“You paint a grim picture,” the chairman said. “How do you propose we proceed?”
Yasuke took a breath. They weren’t going to like what he had to say. He didn’t like it himself. But there was no choice. The Empire itself was at stake. They had to make concessions now or risk an explosion that would destroy everything they’d built over the last ten thousand years. And yet ... they wouldn’t want to believe him. They had good reasons not to want to believe.
“I propose we start granting Earth, and the other human worlds, an increased level of autonomy,” he said. “There will be a steady transfer of powers, and an acknowledgement of human equality on their homeworld, over the next two decades. This will, hopefully, satisfy them without risking total collapse ...”
“Out of the question,” the first councillor snapped. “They’ll be passing judgement on us!”
Yasuke kept his face impassive, somehow. The councillor’s corporation had run into trouble, forty years ago, when a human judge had ruled against them. They’d honestly never realised that - technically - a human judge did have authority, if only because he’d studied and qualified on Capital itself. And they’d used their immense clout to not only override the judge’s decision, but insist that human judges were to have no authority over Alphans. And that had turned the most intelligent and capable human lawyers into independence and equality activists.
“On their homeworld, quite probably,” Yasuke said. “But if you treat them as Alphans, you should be fine.”
“And how do you know it will be fine?” The councillor glared at Yasuke. “What if this is just the beginning of a human takeover? Or ...”
The chairman held up a hand. “I think we must consider the issue carefully,” he said. “You ask us to fly in the face of all precedent.”
“Yes,” another councillor said. “A committee must be appointed to consider all the ramifications!”
“With all due respect,” Yasuke said, “we don’t have time for a committee.”
“Really?” The chairman didn’t sound convinced. “How long do we have?”
“The elections are due in thirteen months,” Yasuke said. The humans had a superstition about the number thirteen. He didn’t believe it himself, naturally, but he had to admit it was a disquieting omen. Thirteen months ... the committee probably couldn’t come to any conclusions in less than thirteen years. “That’s our deadline. If the Humanity League wins, they will start pressuring us for immediate independence. And then we will have to decide how far we’re willing to go to keep them in the fold.”
“We could lose the war,” the chairman said.
“Or weaken ourselves to the point one of the other third-stage races can overwhelm us,” Yasuke said. “The Pashtali, for example. They’ve already been fishing in troubled waters, using their Vultek clients as deniable assets It’s only a matter of time before they start supporting human rebels. They could win the galaxy without firing a shot.”
The chairman silently canvassed his fellows. “I believe we have no choice, but to proceed with your plan,” he said. “If nothing else, it will allow us to limit the pace of change.”
“Unless something unpredicted happens,” Yasuke warned, tightly. He knew better than to think they all supported the plan. “Here, things change very slowly. On Earth, the pace of change is a great deal quicker.”
But he knew, as he bowed his way to the exit, that they didn’t really believe him.
Chapter One
James Bond, Gammon System
Captain Thomas Anderson tried not to grimace as James Bond shuddered and groaned her way through the crossroads and back into realspace. The modified freighter had passed through so many refits that hardly anything, save perhaps for the hull and some of her bulkheads, could be said to be truly original. Her engineers had spliced components from a dozen different races into the ship, turning her into a patchwork mess that defied the best efforts of the certification board. It was a minor miracle, outsiders had noted, that James Bond was even allowed to exist. She should have been scrapped hundreds of years ago.
And we should probably work on that, Thomas thought. The display blinked, then started to fill with a handful of icons. Sooner or later, someone’s going to start wondering where we got the money to bribe the inspectors.
“I’m picking up a dozen contacts, Dad,” Lieutenant Wesley Anderson said. Thomas’s son never looked up from his console. “They’re heading in all directions!”
“I’m sure they are,” Thomas said, dryly. There was much to be said for raising a family on the tramp freighter, rather than trusting them to the schools, but there were downsides too. The crew knew what they were doing, but none of them were particularly professional. “Are any of them close enough to prove a problem?”
“I don’t think so,” Wesley said. “None of them are within weapons range.”
“Good,” Thomas said. “Sarah, set course for the planet. Best possible speed.”
Commander Sarah Anderson, his wife as well as his first officer, nodded curtly. “Yes, sir,” she said. A low shiver ran through the tramp freighter as her drives came online. “We’ll be entering orbit in roughly eight hours.”
Thomas nodded. “No hurry,” he said. “We’ll be there when we’ll be there.”
He leaned back in his chair and brought up the live feed from the sensor suite. The inspectors - if there had been any inspectors - would have raised their eyebrows if they’d seen the military-grade sensors concealed within a civilian chassis. Anyone on the far side of the border would have been seriously concerned, assuming - correctly - that James Bond was a spy ship. It would be more accurate, Thomas considered privately, to class his ship as an intelligence-gathering ship, but it would make no difference to anyone who caught them. The ship and crew would never be seen again.
The system sat on the border between the Alphan Empire and the Vultek Hegemony, itself a semi-client state of the Pashtali Consortium. Thomas didn’t pretend to understand alien politics. The Pashtali didn’t precisely rule the Vultek Hegemony, but - if the intelligence reports were accurate - they had enough influence to steer the Vulteks in whatever direction they preferred. Thomas suspected that was bad news for the Alphans - and Earth. The Second Lupine War had been incredibly costly. The Alphans were in no state to fight another war with two interstellar powers.
He frowned as he watched the ships heading in and out of the system. Gammon was technically independent, if only because the system was of limited value. Too many crossroads to be easily secured, a barely-habitable planet without a single gas giant for HE3 ... there was little in the system to interest any of the interstellar powers. There were no intelligent inhabitants, nothing that might convince someone to take the system and keep everyone else out. It was lawless, to all intents and purposes. No one, not even the Vulteks, had bothered to stake a claim to the system.
And yet, there were more ships moving in and out of the system than he’d expected. The dregs of the galaxy might have made the system their home, but ... he shook his head as more and more data flowed into the datacores. It was quite possible that the planet was seeing an influx of newcomers. Refugees from the wars, religious migrants hoping to find a homeworld well away from any of the interstellar powers, mercenaries and smugglers conducting their business ... it was someone else’s problem. As far as anyone outside the crew, and the EDF, were concerned, James Bond was a tramp freighter moving from one isolated system to another. His superiors would assess the data he brought them and decide what, if anything, should be done about it.
He unbuckled himself and stood. “Sarah, you have the bridge,” he said, calmly. “I’m going to check on our supplies.”
His wife nodded, tightly. “Have fun.”
Thomas concealed his amusement as he turned and stepped through the hatch. James Bond was surprisingly large, for a tramp freighter, but most of her bulk was devoted to cargo. The family itself lived in cramped accommodation, so cramped that he was uneasily aware that any dispute could blossom out of control very quickly. It was only a matter of time before Wesley and his siblings decided they wanted to transfer to a different ship ... something that might get awkward, if they joined the wrong crew. He reminded himself, sharply, that Wesley was a grown man. He was old enough to make his own mistakes.
And it isn’t as if you haven’t made your own mistakes, his thoughts mocked him. You fucked up your life good and proper, when you were his age.
He put the thought out of his head as he opened the hatch into the cargo hold and walked past the heavily-secured pallets. The weapons were primitive, by Galactic standards, but they were very useful. No one ever asked questions of gunrunners, in his experience; no one wanted to deter them from bringing more guns. And while there were people who would look askance at a gunrunner, they might not realise there was something more to Thomas than a man who profited from war and someone else’s misery. Better to have them look down on you for something, Thomas had always thought, than have them trying to get too close to you.
The intercom bleeped. “Captain to the bridge! Captain to the bridge!”
Thomas blinked as he hurried back through the hatch, slamming it firmly shut behind him. Sarah - like the rest of the family - enjoyed command. She wouldn’t call him to the bridge unless it was urgent. His mind raced, trying to determine what had happened. A distress call? A systems failure? James Bond was in better condition than she looked - and she looked alarmingly like a derelict from a bad horror flick - but something could easily have gone wrong. And yet ... he dismissed the thought. The alarms would have sounded if something had failed spectacularly.
And if it failed so spectacularly that the alarms failed to sound, he told himself, we’d all be dead.
He stepped onto the bridge and retook the command chair. “Report!”
“Unknown warship on approach vector,” Sarah said. Her voice was very cold. She’d never been comfortable with their work for the EDF, even though she’d grown up on a freighter herself. The risk of death might have been a constant companion, but there were limits now she was a mother herself. “She’ll be within weapons range in twenty minutes.”
Thomas nodded as he pulled up the sensor report. The warship was a light cruiser, origin unknown. That meant nothing, he reminded himself. James Bond wasn’t the only ship that had passed through dozens of hands since she’d come off the slipway. The Galactics had no qualms about selling their older and outdated ships to the younger races, who would do their level best to refit them with newer technology. The ship angling towards them might have been refitted so extensively her original builders had been lost in the mists of time. Or ... she could just be a pirate ship. Gammon played host to pirates and their fences too.
And if she was on a legitimate mission, she would have hailed us by now, he thought. A chill ran down his spine. We might be in some trouble.
“Send a standard greeting,” he ordered. “If they don’t respond, send a wide-band distress call.”
“Aye, sir,” Sarah said.
Thomas forced himself to consider their options. There weren’t many. James Bond carried two plasma cannons ... they might as well be peashooters, for all the damage they’d do to the enemy hull. She could alter course and try to evade, perhaps even double back and retreat to the crossroads ... no, that wasn’t going to work. The warship would have no trouble running them down before they could jump into multispace. They could prolong the chase, perhaps long enough to convince the enemy ship to go looking for easier prey, but it wouldn’t last very long.
“No response,” Sarah said. “And they’re picking up speed.”
“Transmit the distress signal,” Thomas said. “And then alter course to evade.”
He gritted his teeth. Pirates ... they had to be pirates. And that meant ... he hoped, grimly, they weren’t human pirates. The crew might survive long enough to be ransomed if they were captured by non-humans. Humans, on the other hand ... Sarah and his daughters would be brutally raped to death. Pirates were pathologically insane. They’d kill the males, then torture the females to death. Thomas thought cold thoughts about the ship’s self-destruct system. It would be relatively simple to lure the pirate ship into point-blank range and deactivate the antimatter containment chambers. The resulting explosion would destroy both ships. It wasn’t ideal, but what was?
“They’re angling to remain on intercept course,” Sarah said. “They’ll be within weapons range in ten minutes.”
“And no response to our distress call,” Thomas said, sourly. He wasn’t surprised. Gammon had no navy. The Galactics didn’t bother to patrol the system. And it was unlikely the mercenaries would drop everything to come to their aid. Who cared about a tramp freighter in the middle of nowhere? “Divert emergency power to the drives.”
“Aye, sir,” Sarah said, in a tone that told him she knew it was futile. He knew it too. There was no way they could do more than delay matters. “I ...”
She broke off as her console chimed. “They’re hailing us.”
“Put it through,” Thomas ordered.
He tried not to show any reaction as a bird-like alien face materialised in front of him. It wasn’t the first Vultek he’d seen, and he’d spent most of his life around non-humans, but the aliens always left him feeling a little uneasy. It was the way they looked at him, he thought; it was the way they always looked as if they were considering when and where to pounce.
“This is Captain Anderson,” he said. “I ...”
“The Vultek Hegemony has assumed control over this system,” the alien said. It spoke Galactic with a faint whistling accent. “You have intruded upon our territory without permission.”
Thomas blinked. The Vulteks hadn’t occupied Gammon ... not as far as he knew. Why would they bother? And ... they were risking a confrontation with the Alphans and at least two other powerful races. And humanity, of course. There were three human-dominated worlds bare days from Gammon, linked by the tangled thread of safe routes through multispace. Interstellar powers that had been content to leave Gammon independent would be concerned, very concerned, if one power took control and drove everyone else out. The Vulteks were risking a major conflict ...
Unless they’ve decided the Alphans are too weak to push the issue, Thomas thought, coldly. It was possible. Everyone knew the Alphans had lost hundreds of their prized warcruisers during the war. They could trash the Vulteks in a few days, if they massed their surviving ships, but at what cost? They might just get away with it.
“We were unaware of any change in power,” he said, carefully. “In any case, under the Convocations ...”
The Vultek cut him off. “You will power down your drives and prepare to be boarded,” he said. “Resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel.”
Thomas forced himself to think. The Vulteks were signatories to the standard interstellar conventions. In theory, there shouldn’t be any trouble. The ship would be searched, then returned to the crossroads or simply interned. In practice ... who knew? The courts might take years to decide if James Bond was trespassing or not, particularly if one or more interstellar powers decided to dispute the Vultek claim to the system. He shuddered as a deeper implication struck him. If the Vulteks discovered the sensor suite, they’d realise the ship’s true nature. And who knew what they’d do then?
Make us vanish, Thomas thought. We dare not let them board us.
He glanced at the display, already knowing they were trapped. They could neither outrun nor defeat their enemy. And triggering the self-destruct might start a war. The EDF - and the Alphans - wouldn’t know what had happened, but that wouldn’t stop the Vulteks from using the incident as an excuse for war. And yet ... he couldn’t let his ship fall into their hands either.
“In line with the Convocations, I cannot allow you to search my ship,” he said. “However, as a gesture of good faith, we will return to the crossroads and ...”
The display bleeped an alert. “Missile separation,” Sarah said, quietly. “They’re aiming to miss, but not by much.”
“You will power down your drives and prepare to be boarded without further delay,” the Vultek said, coldly. “Resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel.”
So you said, Thomas thought. His thoughts ran in circles. Earth couldn’t push the issue. It wasn’t clear if the Alphans would push the issue. And there’s no way out.
He keyed his console, bringing up the limited destruct program. The sensor suite could be reduced to dust with the push of a button, once he inserted his command codes. In theory, there would be no proof that James Bond had ever been anything other than a simple tramp freighter. In practice, he simply didn’t know. The Vulteks might search the ship so thoroughly they turned up proof ... if, of course, they didn’t simply destroy the ship in a bid to secure their new holdings. And if they swept the datacore ...
“We understand,” he said. “We’ll deactivate our drives as ordered.”
