Star Scrapper, page 6
After shutting the door, I carried the batteries toward the Consortium ship. As I did, I stole a glance at the Buzzard as though I would be able to see Ned hiding somewhere inside. Logically, I knew he was just a cube in a bag under a panel, I still had a hard time not expecting to see some physical form. In my experience, anything with personality had a body as well.
He said nothing, and I dragged myself toward the heavy fighter, then set the batteries down under the open panel at the side. After shifting my stepladder, I ambled up a few stairs and was startled to see the pilot’s face, mouth agape, in the cockpit. He obviously had not made it to the crew quarters and had decided instead to collapse in the first chair he saw. I wondered if the pallet was just abandoned somewhere on the ship.
Shaking my head, I pulled on my heavy work gloves before grabbing pliers and beginning to remove the damaged battery. It was a delicate process. The casing had been scorched and cracked, and any further damage could result in the melting loss of a hand. A grisly prospect I was not particularly interested in.
As seemed to keep happening, my mind drifted back to Ned. This was the kind of thing that a mechanized system would be perfect for. His computer mind could undoubtedly remove the battery with expert precision using mechanized arms that, if damaged, would cost only money. Doing this myself could result in catastrophic injury, and while I didn’t want Ned to take over my job entirely, there was a certain appeal to handing over the more hazardous jobs to someone without skin, bones, or anything else that could be permanently damaged.
These idle thoughts kept me occupied as I removed the first battery, clanged slowly down the stairs, and crossed the shop to set it in the hazardous waste box. Once every so often (that is to say, whenever the local government managed to get their act together), someone would be sent to collect these boxes and compensate the scrapper for the goods. It was a holdover from the time when Bussel was going to be an example of colonial efficiency. Now, it just meant that every scrapper had an overflowing box of dangerous waste sitting right in the center of their shop.
The pilot snorted himself awake when I reached the top of the ladder with the new battery and it caused me to nearly jump out of my skin. Doing this entire job while knowing that I had the most illegal of technologies just a few meters away was nerve-racking to say the least. I was trying to treat it like a normal job, but I knew that it wasn’t.
Reminding myself that all I had to do was get them patched up and out of here, I continued the work that I was best at. I could fight and I could fly if I had to, I was even a pretty decent cook when it came right down to it, but doing repairs like this was where my skills truly lay. Not only that, but I also loved it. Lutch had taught me to work with my hands, and it’d become the thing that soothed me the most.
Once the first battery was socketed in, I began to work on removing the other. Just after I set it in the box, I turned and nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing terrifyingly close behind me was the copilot, her face tired, the fur around her eyes wet and a single sharp tooth jutting from the side of her jowls. Despite their visual similarities to rodents, the Vekrass were true carnivores and had a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth.
“Got any coffee?” she asked, rubbing one of her eyes and swaying weakly in the way only the truly hungover can.
I nodded in the direction of the ancient slug pot. “Just that, but I could order you some.”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, her tail scraping along the ground as she made her way over to one of the chairs in my waiting area.
Heading over to the computer, I clacked away at the keyboard, putting in an order for three coffees. I figured that the pilot would want one when he woke up as well, and I knew that the anxiety I was riding would fade as soon as these two took off and I would need the caffeine.
“Order’s in,” I told the copilot, but she was already asleep again. My heart was still racing from when she had startled me.
I needed to get these two out of here as quickly as I could. My nerves couldn’t take much more.
Quickly, I got the next battery installed, and as soon as I did, I heard the systems buzzing to life. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that once I got them full of coffee, I could get paid and get them out of here.
Then, a shrill alarm pierced the air from the Hawk-class heavy fighter.
9
The sound stopped me dead, and I watched the pilot’s eyes shoot open to stare at his dash. The copilot was up too, covering her huge ears with her paws.
“What the hell is that?” she shrieked, before dropping onto all fours and rushing toward the ship. I watched her in wide-eyed horror and then looked at the pilot to see him staring at me, his mouth open.
He flipped on the external speakers and then said, “It’s the AI scanner.”
The copilot stopped running just about a meter from the bottom of the stepladder.
“Could it be malfunctioning?” she asked, and our eyes were locked on one another.
I flashed to look back up to the pilot, who was shaking his head. “No,” he stated plainly. “Scrapper Twenty-Seven is harboring enemy technology.”
There it was.
That was what I had most feared, and it hadn’t even taken a day to happen.
“I’m going to alert the Inquisition,” the pilot said.
The copilot looked at me. “By Consortium authority under Universal Law, I hereby… arrest you!” she shouted, trying to sound authoritative but obviously struggling with the ear-splitting alarm shrieking through the space.
And I had to decide, in that instant, what the rest of my life looked like.
I could go with them, allow myself to be arrested, and tell the Consortium everything. I could hope that they would show me leniency, that the Inquisition would take pity on me. But remembering that moment on the street, I had a hard time believing that if I turned myself over, the rest of my life would be anything but short and brutal.
My other choice was to run. To make a break for the Buzzard and hope that I could get away. I might get shot out of the sky or have my ship disabled and ultimately taken in any way, but I also might stand a chance of escape. I had never wanted to be a fugitive from the law and never thought that I would be faced with this kind of predicament, but as the alarm rang out and the copilot crouched to throw herself at me, I made the decision.
Whether I liked it or not, Ned and I were in it now.
Turning, I pushed up and threw myself over the handrail at the back of the stepladder as the copilot sprang forward. She crashed into the top of the stepladder, sending it toppling down to the ground behind me as I rushed toward the Buzzard. Ned already had it firing to life as I cleared the distance toward the ramp. The copilot got to her feet before collapsing again, the remnant booze coursing through her veins.
As I turned to hurry up into the Buzzard, I took one last look at my shop. I had no idea if I would see this place again or what was about to happen, but I couldn’t help but take it in one more time before rushing up. Darting through the storage space and up toward the cockpit, I avoided every jutting bolt and loose panel. I knew the Buzzard better than just about anything.
“Activate placemags,” I ordered Ned, and as I tossed myself into the pilot’s seat, I heard the magnetic clamps beneath the Consortium vessel activate, locking it in place. The clamps would not be able to withstand the thrusters' pressure, but they would slow them down. Every little bit would help now.
“Open the roof,” I commanded, but when I looked up, I saw that Ned already had. “Right,” I said in acknowledgement of what he had done.
“Thank you.” The words were spoken with genuine sincerity, and it took me a moment to register.
I had made the decision for me. I hadn’t done it for Ned, I had done it to survive. To live to see another day. But my actions had also saved him. Ned had been pleading with me to work with him, and when push came to shove, I decided my best bet was with him.
“You’re welcome,” I said as though it had been an altruistic decision and pulled the controls, activating the thrusters and sending us up and away from Bussel. As I did, I watched the Consortium fighter pull against the magnets.
I flipped the switch to activate the gyre tube but knew I had a bit of time while it warmed up. Newer spacecraft could wash into a gyre nearly instantaneously, but the Buzzard needed time to activate all the requisite systems. That time might mean the difference between life and death now.
Thinking of another advantage to having Ned here, I gave him an order that would mean one fewer thing that I had to keep an eye on. “You get us out of here the second the drive warms up.”
“Yes, sir,” Ned said, sounding for the first time like the military partner he had been designed to be.
“Scrapper Twenty-Seven.” I heard the pilot’s voice through my comms. The Consortium could override the communication system of any registered vehicle. “You are in violation of Universal Law. Turn around now and return to the planet’s surface or prepare to be fired upon.”
As the last words crackled through the speakers, I heard a loud crash and assumed that the landing gears had pulled free of my magnets.
“Don’t make us do this, Lutch,” the pilot threatened through the comms.
“Still need to change the registration,” Ned reminded me as I banked, trying to evade the fighter that I knew was somewhere behind me. The little screen displaying enemy position flickered to life, showing the sphere around the Buzzard and a dot to represent the enemy craft.
They were closing in fast. Tapping the display for the rear-facing camera, it crackled on too, showing a fuzzy grayscale image of the Consortium heavy fighter closing in on us.
Pressing the button to activate shields, I waited a moment to hear the activation of the shield array, but instead I heard Ned. “It appears that your shield generator is not functioning.”
“Right,” I cursed myself. It had been knocked out when I took off during a dust storm and dirt and debris battered the Buzzard. Another thing I needed to have fixed so it didn’t come to bite me in the ass.
On the screen, a stream of micromissiles burst from the front of the ship behind us, and I tilted the controls, sending us jerking right. The base of the frayed strap keeping me in place pulled as though it was trying to come loose. Everything about the Buzzard felt as though she was about to come apart, and with an enemy firing at us, that moment was looking to be helped along.
I plunged the nose into a dive to avoid another burst of fire and narrowly avoided the stream of missiles.
“That was close!” Ned called out.
“Didn’t get hit, did we?” I asked before adding, “I’m actually a pretty good pilot.”
“Okay,” Ned said incredulously.
“Did you just scoff?” I asked, yelling into the dash before pulling the controls and activating the bottom forward thrusters to send us hurtling vertically away from our tail.
“I mean…” he said, trailing off.
“I’m a good pilot,” I asserted again, a little less confidently. “Maybe not as good as William whoever but—”
He didn’t let me finish. “Captain William West, and no, no you are not.”
The Consortium ship was quick and light and maneuverable with many more thrusters than I had. They could make hairpin turns and were staying right on our tail.
The Buzzard rattled. A few shots burst against the exterior before I could evade. I glanced at the Tidal Drive but knew it wasn’t ready yet.
“Doesn’t this boat have guns?” Ned demanded.
“The only ones I can fire are mounted at the front. The others need gunners,” I explained, though I was sure he must have known that from the schematics and was trying to make the point that I should be returning fire.
Another volley plunked off the side before bursting and cracking pieces of the exterior hull. It wouldn’t be long before one of the micromissiles cracked all the way through and made this a really short trip.
“Since you might get us killed, mind if I take over?” Ned asked, and seeing another flash of incoming missiles, I nodded.
“Sure,” I said before feeling the thrusters begin to engage under the control of the machine mind.
In an instant, the Buzzard began to move in ways I never even realized were possible, gliding in one direction before bolting in another, and soon, we had them at a distance.
“Can you gun?” Ned asked, and I didn’t even answer. I pulled the release on my seat, and the clamp decoupled, then the chair and I rode down the track in the ship. The seat moved through the hallway before sliding right and continued along to the side where the gun nest jutted out, the weapon itself mounted just below.
The seat gear locked into place, flipping the latch and sending the gun controls swinging up into place. I gripped one in each hand and popped the covers off the triggers before rotating the controls. When I did, a grinding whir sounded. I tried the controls again, and again, I was met with the sound of rusted machinery trying to work.
It had been too long since somebody had activated the guns, and the mechanisms had all gone to rust.
“Jammed over here,” I told Ned, and within a moment, he was spinning us in a nauseating, repetitive barrel roll. The stars around me spun in space, and the contents of my stomach threatened to come spraying out before we slammed to a stop, rattling and cracking the structure around me.
“Try it now.”
It took me a minute to get my bearings. My stomach was in my throat, and I had to swallow it back down. Trying the controls, I heard a crackle and pop and thought that the gun was going to start moving but a cracking grind rang in my ears again.
I didn’t want to get spun a second time, and that’s when another thought occurred to me.
“Can you flip us under them so that the bottom of our ship is facing theirs?” I asked and then swallowed hard to keep everything in place.
“Sure can,” Ned said, and the Buzzard spun again before accelerating forward. “William used to call this ass to ass.”
“Not sure what to do with that information,” I said honestly as I watched the Consortium fighter trying to evade and blast away from the planet’s surface. Where I would’ve had to react, calculate my next move and then make it, Ned was able to simply follow them in a fluid motion. He didn’t have to worry about reaction time and hand-eye coordination, he just made the calculation and did it instantaneously.
Experiencing the way the Buzzard moved under his control was like nothing I had ever known before. I was a good pilot, and Lutch had been a great pilot, but neither of us were anything compared to this. And, for as much training as the Consortium had given our opponents, there was no way they could evade us as long as Ned was in command.
Where they had me on my heels, doing little more than escaping their shots and waiting to get blasted out of the sky, Ned was turning the tables and hunting them.
They tried to escape us once again, shifting and pivoting out of the way, but Ned kept the Buzzard exactly parallel to them, getting closer and closer with every move. I reached out to the wall, pulled the heavy control lever, and heard the clang and thud from within the ship. Through the glass above me, I saw one of the robotic arms begin to extend, feeling it work perfectly.
The Buzzard was a dual-purpose craft. Though it had weapons and other combat capabilities, it was designed for the collection and hauling of scrap. So, for every weapon or armament, there were two practical features that a Scrapper might require. In this case, a mechanical arm which I could operate from one of the gun batteries. Having used it more recently, it wasn’t rusted out, and reacted immediately to my controls.
It wasn’t a particularly strong mechanism, but it would do the trick. As we closed in on the open plate that I hadn’t had time to repair, I saw the batteries. All that time thinking about how it would’ve been advantageous to have a machine install the batteries had given me this idea.
One more time, the Consortium fighter tried to move away, but Ned stayed right beside them like two Redbacked Bussel Birds in a mating dance. This time, when we leveled out, I extended the arm, clamping it down around the battery and retracting it immediately. Wiring and cables pulled free and snapped, electricity arcing into space before their engines died.
“Keep us steady,” I ordered, and Ned kept us on them. We were now far enough from the planet that its gravity would take far too long to slow the ship, so after I released the batteries in space, I clamped onto one of their torn landing gears and pulled.
Ned reacted, slowing our own ship as theirs slowed to a stop. I gave it a little yank for good measure, causing them to flip and twist in space before telling Ned to get us away from them.
They might have been trying to kill me, but in their own way, they were just doing their jobs. I didn’t want to send them crashing to the surface of the planet, nor did I want them to die of starvation as they careened through the vacuum of space ad infinitum. Instead, I would let them spin until backup arrived. Hungover as they were, I expected that this would be punishment enough for trying to shoot me out of the sky.
“Tidal Drive ready,” Ned informed me. “I know you told me to activate the moment it was available, but I figured I would ask what coordinates since we have defeated our enemies.”
“Coordinates…” I said and thought about it as I watched the Consortium fighter continue to flip end over end in space. “How about away from here without using too much fuel.”
Ned answered immediately. “I know just the place.”
10
The interstellar gyre tube through which the Buzzard passed swirled a light blue around outside. White streaks flowed in ribbons around the tube before dissipating in bursts. It was said that the scientists who first harnessed the negative matter to create these passages between points in the universe thought that they looked like the inside of ocean waves. That was why all the terminology was oceanic in nature.
