Vagabond, page 20
part #1 of Guild Series
“Any of you who wish to join me are welcome. Those who wish to leave the ship as soon as we reach Luna are free to do so with no recriminations from me.” He stopped, and looked at each occupant of the room. “Tom, Mira and Jen, I would be honored if you would join our crew and become a part of the Vagabond family.”
“We’d be happy to be part of your crew, captain,” Mira said. Tom and Jen added in their own assent.
“Excellent. Now, for the first order of business. Fynn, how do we go about mounting those undelivered railguns to give our freighter some bite?”
Erik was making his way through the messages that had been intercepted before the destruction of Interamnia, reading a handful each evening before exhaustion tossed him into sleep. He filed some away as reminders of the atrocity, and deleted others that were too hard to ever watch again. Midway through the list, he found a message from Robert.
Erik, it read, I know that we may not have long here before the cruiser arrives. In the event that the worst comes to pass, I am entrusting to you all of my research and notes for fusion reactors. I have had a few breakthroughs since we last spoke, but there is still much research to be completed before this can become reality. Make sure that someone continues the work, and put the end result to good use. Robert.
He chuckled as he read the note, looking at the dozens of attachments that were included, containing hundreds of gigabytes of data. He reminisced about the time he had spent listening to the inventor detail all the wonderful applications of the more powerful energy generating devices.
The smile slipped as his mind wandered to other uses for such devices. Uses that could give his ship and other guild freighters an edge over the Syndicate destroyer, and might provide a beacon of hope. He created a new video message, preparing to pass the information along to Dex so she could find trusted scientists to continue developing the new technology.
Vagabond was burning hard for the inner system, hoping to reach Earth before the Syndicate cruiser. Mira had reported that the ship seemed to be veering off to approach Mars first, despite the two planets drifting farther apart every day in their current orbits. Such a detour should give the freighter the time it needed to reach the home world before the cruiser.
Erik didn’t like to think about what it could mean for the several hundred people living in the small facility on Deimos or working out of scientific outposts on the surface. He could only hope that the Coalition would send ships to try and protect those people, but the reactions so far hadn’t been promising. In the meantime, he was intent on working with the Transport Guild to do everything they could to help.
After two decades of sparring with words, the system was truly at war.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Bethany Wright for being a fantastic editor. She helped me identify the weak points in the early story, and gave me a ton of feedback on how I could improve the manuscript. This is my first book, and I know that it is ten times better than it was because of her assistance.
I'd also like to thank my family for putting up with my dreaming about being a writer for thirty years before actually sitting down and putting the first one down on paper.
About The Author
Tim has been a dreamer since he was a small boy, and is finally putting all his wild imaginings onto paper. During the day, he is an IT support technician for a nationwide bank. At night, he bangs away on his keyboard and often obsesses over the proper word to express an idea or feeling.
Guild Series
Vagabond March 2020
Indomitable coming May 2020
Waterloo coming July 2020
Tim Rangnow, Vagabond
