Here Be Monsters - Chapter 8

    Rollie found himself wandering around the Lowtown disc of New Detroit after a very satisfactory hour of high priced love, well, not 'love' exactly, but a talented facsimile thereof.  He had long ago accepted that his soul didn't have the most physically attractive packaging.  He was, at 166 centimeters, on the short and thin side of normal, he had large, slightly protruding brown eyes, a face somewhat too narrow across the cheekbones, his lower lip was a bit oversized, and he had a prominent forehead  He had a good nose, though; it was well proportioned to his face, and a doctor had once said that it was a "textbook proboscis".  All in all, he wasn't hideous, but he was also extremely pale, all of which, when combined, tended to put off members of the opposite sex - well, everyone, really, but the opposite sex was what he'd been seeking today.  He didn't waste a lot of time worrying about it, however, he just found ways of adapting to circumstances as they were, and Lowtown had a highly enterprising 'escort services' industry.
     Actually, Lowtown had every vice imaginable on tap, and a few that took more than imagination.  The area of Lowtown he was in was like the warren of a robotic ferret.  The original open areas had been built up and divided, then subdivided, and then people had just walled off corridors to make places to do business, or a home.  In spite of the seeming lack of planning involved in how it was all laid out, he could see all of the telltale signs of exactly how and where people would go in an emergency.  He was as comfortable here, in the most congested area of Lowtown, as any dirtsider was on his home planet.  Small shops and food stands fronted on the narrow arcade, their owners living, more often than not, on the premises to the rear, or in apartments above, or below.  Rollie saw a patron at a small Japanese noodle stand vacating his stool in front of the counter, and he made a dash to reach it before someone else decided they wanted it.  The smell of noodles being prepared made his mouth water in anticipation, and he was quick to place his order.
     His com badge started chirping the second his bowl and chopsticks were placed in front of him.  He checked the card sized display to see who was calling before he put the call though; he activated the personal communications device plugged into the cranial interface port behind his right ear, and rerouted the call form his ship's com badge for the sake of privacy.
     "Dirk, you got a lousy sense of timing, I was just about to eat, can it wait?" He asked testily.
     "Actually, I'm on my way to your location, there's something we need to talk about, but I need to do it in person.  Trust me, when you hear why, you'll understand."  Was his cryptic reply.
     Rollie took a bite of noodles, reflecting on the fact that circumspection and indirectness were not in Dirk's repertoire, and it worried him when he acted this way.
     "OK, I'm sending you my current location, but hurry up would ya?  I was hoping to get some last minute purchases made before we left port."  He paused to continue eating, giving his friend a chance to respond.
     "Not to worry Rollie, I pinged your ship badge's locator already; which is why I called you now, instead of while you were in the middle of some gratuitous act of passion."  He said jokingly, and continued, "By the time I get there, you should be paying your bill."
     The connection cut off before Rollie could say anything else.  He hated it when Dirk did things like that; it was technically a minor offense to ping someone's location without their approval, but Dirk had a military grade cranial interface with its override protocols still in place, and he could find just about anyone, at any time, as long as the communications network used Alliance standard network protocols.  How he had managed to get out of the Marine Corps with his interface port's overrides still in place was probably the result of either ineptitude or bribery, not that Rollie really cared enough to complain; that sort of thing could come in handy someday.
     Rollie had finished paying for his food, and vacated his seat to allow a new patron to sit down when he spotted Dirk headed his way through the crowd of shoppers, laborers, commuters, and various other residents of this area of the station.  Dirk, as always, cut an impressive figure, with 187 centimeters of excellent posture, and 97 kilos of extremely well-toned mass, he could have been as ugly as an engine block, and been thought attractive to some.  Instead, he had the bad grace to have been born with a straight, sharp nose; high, angular cheekbones; a classic square jaw; and bright green eyes under his strong brow.  The only thing unremarkable about him was his hair, which, while thick and well maintained, was an unremarkable dark sand color.  All in all, he was an Anglo-Saxon atavism, and he walked through the press of humanity around him with an easy arrogance that one saw frequently with both current and former Alliance Marines.  He was dressed casually, but functionally, and Rollie could just make out the tell-tale bulge of a concealed firearm under Dirk's vintage leather motorcycle jacket.  The weapon was simply precautionary, Rollie knew, and he would only draw it from its holster if there was no other alternative.  Dirk wasn't the sort of person, at least in Rollie's experience, who wanted to escalate a fight to the point of lethal response.
     Rollie met up with Dirk just as he was brushing off one of the district's cheap hustlers, and he felt compelled to offer some unneeded advice.
     "You might want to at least hear her out D.  You never know, but she might be able to teach you something to add to your rep."  He waved his hand to indicate the aging prostitute wandering away unsteadily through the crowd.
     "I doubt that," he replied confidently, while steering them through the crowds toward one of the arcade's exits, "since she had the glazed look of a steady Kif user, and besides, I'm pretty sure 'she' used to be a man."
     "Fair enough.  So what has you so jittery that you had to have this meeting in person?" asked Rollie, as they entered another arcade lined with commercial spaces, interspersed with small shops, cafes, and restaurants.
     "First things first." he responded, as he lead the way to a small alcove where they could carry on a conversation without much risk of being overheard.  "I found a source for some new SPC lines to get the main guns up and running, but I had to get an old friend from the Corps to broker the deal."
     "That's risky, granted, but why is that so hush-hush?  I get that it might look bad if the Corps found out, but we work on a privateer, D.  It's not like they'll care that much."  Rollie was beginning to suspect that his friend was being unreasonably paranoid when he answered.
     "True, the Corps isn't the problem, it's the source of the parts:  They're on the Ocelot, Jayne's ship."  He said gravely.
     "Saint's balls, Dirk!  You'd almost be better off paying the money to buy new from the manufacturer, than to risk getting caught dealing with her.  The old man would lose his shit if he found out, and if Jayne finds out who you work for, she'll cut you off at the knees out of spite."  Rollie could understand the need for caution now.  Their ship's communication badges, because their transmissions were routed back through the Jester's internal com array, automatically had any conversation they carried recorded in the ship's archives.
     "Look, I know it's a risk -"
     "- Risk, hell!" He interrupted quickly.  "If you get caught dealing with the Ex for anything, you could find yerself looking for a new job; and that's if yer lucky!"
     Rollie was beginning suspect that there was a malicious god out there that was looking to be entertained by his suffering.  There weren't a lot of things - aside from being planetside - that worried him, as a general rule, but the antipathy that existed between the Captain and Jayne Powers, his ex-wife, was like a deep river of acid.  If you found yourself in the middle of it, the result wasn't pretty.  Now, his friend had decided to move between those metaphoric shores, and he just had to hope that the boat didn't leak.  It wasn't that Jayne was a bad person, but she had nearly cost Cameron his ship in the divorce, and that had been the one thing that he couldn't forgive.
     "Look, Rollie, I understand your concern - I really do - but I'm insulated from her on this; my friend is just supposed to mention that there's a buyer, not who it is.  Kanjira is one of the few people I trust implicitly, and she won't Judas me out.  Well, not cheap anyways."  Dirk said reassuringly, and continued.  "Kanji gets me a price; if it's too high, I say no; if its good, then she acts as my go-between and handles the transfer - for a small fee.  See?  Minimal risk."
     Rollie considered to risk to be more than minimal, but he could see that the likelihood of being discovered was smaller than he'd thought.
     "So, assuming that you can swing a deal that the Captain will go for, how do you plan to handle physically getting the lines from her ship to ours?"  He inquired, as a way to point out the one aspect not yet considered.
     "Simple:  I hire a cargo handling company here to do the pick up and delivery; if I get a non-disclosure contract, Jayne can't ask, and they won't tell."  He answered with a cocky grin, and continued.  "Like I said, were insulated, and we can pull this off.  That, or we start shopping retail."
     Rollie looked back at his friend's expression of self-confidence, and shrugged his shoulders, indicating that he was ready to accept whatever fate threw their way.  They walked back to the station's public transit lift together, discussing other, less troublesome, topics on the way back to the ship.

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 7

     The Humanist Interstellar Alliance spanned over a dozen systems throughout the Known Sphere, and New Detroit was no exception; this was a relationship of convenience, as it gave the station full time system security without the expense of maintaining a fleet of their own.  The Alliance legation was located on the uppermost decks of the station's 'axle' where it joined the base of Topside, giving them the ability to observe the transient population flowing to and from the docks and the station's most critical areas.  The Alliance didn't screen anyone arriving on the station; New Detroit Public Safety was responsible for ensuring that all new arrivals were processed in accordance with USITC regulations.  Dirk had been through NDPS' processing already, and as such he only needed his transient ID to go back on-station.
     He wasn't liking his odds of finding the hardware he needed to get the ship's armament up and running, but he had several promising leads here on the station, as well as a ship newly arrived insystem.  He knew that the Alliance's legation personnel could no doubt tell him exactly to whom the navy had sold their surplus inventory; there was no way they would ever give that information out without some kind of quid pro quo, however, and he didn't have anything good to barter with.  That meant he would have to use a back channel approach to his problem; luckily for him, he knew where to find the local quartermaster for the Alliance's Marine contingent on the station, and Kanjira Nahid was an old friend.
     There was a mag-lev railway that ran the 7.8 kilometer circumference of the station Topside, and two figure-eight tracks that made a sort of four leaf clover, neatly dividing Topside into four quadrants; each of which was named after the four cardinal points of the compass.  Dirk decided to walk from the middle of the station to the South quarter where he was supposed to meet his old friend for drinks.  He rarely came Topside on New Detroit, but he had to admit that it was a lot nicer than Lowtown.  Topside had the virtue of having a lot more room to live in, and the amenities it offered were definitely first rate.  Even here in the South quad of the station, where most of the activity was commercial in nature, the various structures had a very neat appearance which blended into the overall aesthetic of Topside's architecture.  The station had an open area in each quarter which had a small green patch of grass and other vegetation, and there were always people there.  The small park made for a pleasant diversion on the way to his meeting with Kanjira; being cooped up on a ship in space for protracted periods of time made it difficult to remember what grass and shrubbery smelled like.
     With just shy of 225,000 permanent residents, the station was one of the most densely populated places known to exist.  Like a major metropolitan city, New Detroit never stopped; day cycle or night cycle, the station's streets were never empty.  The street in the area of the quadrant to which he was headed was relatively quiet, but even so Dirk remained acutely aware of his surroundings.  He was always on the lookout for potential encounters of an antisocial nature; the NDPS was noted for its occasional willingness to simply place everyone involved in an altercation into custody, and the last thing Dirk wanted was to see the inside of New Detroit's criminal detention center.
     The establishment that Kanjira had chosen was called the Greenstreet Grill; it had little to recommend it to any passersby, as there was only a slightly curved brass plate, about 45 centimeters wide, above a door that appeared to be made of some kind of dark hardwood.  The door pushed open easily and he stepped in; sandwiched as it was, between between two larger commercial properties, the Greenstreet was narrow to the point of absurdity.  Dirk figured that the total width of the place was about maybe five meters, the entryway was an open space between the doorway and the bar, which ran along the wall on his left for about a third if its length.  The area beyond the bar consisted of just a few tables and chairs capable of seating twenty very friendly people.  The bar was a bit of a throwback, in that it had a live bartender, and actual bottles of liquor lined up on the shelves behind the bar.  The barman was a middle aged man who looked like he'd been there, done that, and seen it all; his black eyes gave Dirk a very thorough appraisal, and he gave a single quick nod of his head by way of greeting.  Making his way towards the back of the bar, he couldn't help but notice that Kanjira was the only person seated at a table.
     "What did you do Kanji?  Rent out the whole slopchute for the sake of privacy?"  Dirk said jokingly.
     "Saul over there," she said, nodding her head in the direction of the bar, "is an old soldier who understands the occasional need for discretion."
     "And he's not old.  Or deaf."  Said Saul from behind his mahogany topped counter.
     Dirk sat down across from his friend and former First Sargent, positioning himself so that he could keep the entryway and kitchen doors in his peripheral vision.  It wasn't that he didn't trust her, but he hadn't seen Kanjira Nahid in almost five years.  Not that she looked any older for it.  She had the dark skin common to the people of the Indian subcontinent, but weathered from half a lifetime spent conducting ground actions planetside.  Her teeth were white as new snow, and she had hair like fibers of coal.  Her eyes, however, were artificial, and had obviously not been cheap; the Zeiss-Resodyne logo was a thin gold band between her new eyes' cornflower blue iris and the pupils of the implanted optics.  Z-R made the best cybernetic optic replacements that money could buy, and hers appeared to be very high-end indeed.
     "Looks like someone decided to splurge on new peepers.  How you managed those on a Marine's salary is beyond me."  He  observed casually, while tapping in an order on the table console.  "I'm not judging, mind you."
     "I'm glad to hear that, Dirk, since you're the last person who should."  Kanjira told him sternly.  "You haven't forgotten about Scatha, have you?"
     Dirk wished he could.  Scatha was the name that some pretentious literary joker had given the area controlled by the separatist faction on Draconis; the fighting had been brutal in its intensity, and the rebels had been very effective fighters.  That was undoubtedly due to the fact that the Darkaellan Imperium had infiltrated members of its Imperial Army Special Operations Group into Scatha as 'advisors' to the locals.  The Marine company he had served in as a designated marksman had the distinction of being the only one that had fought an engagement with an 'Advisory Unit' and survived mostly intact; previous engagements had resulted in a retreat, a rout, or an all out defeat.  During the after action mop-up, he had come upon a wounded ISOG advisor.  She had been hit by multiple bursts of flechettes, and she was trying to reload her sidearm even though she was coughing up blood.  She had looked at him, and stopped, flipped the pistol in her hand around her trigger finger, and held it out to him by the barrel.  He'd hesitated for a moment before taking it; the woman hadn't been able to speak, so she pointed her index finger at her head, thumb raised in a 'gun to the head' gesture.  He understood what she wanted, and he knew that the medics would be hard pressed to keep her alive at all; he finished reloading the pistol, asked if she was sure, and when she nodded he put a single round through her head.  Kanjira had happened along to find Dirk standing there with a smoking gun and a dead advisor in front of him.  Neither one of them had said a word; he had just disobeyed their standing orders to take any ISOG advisors prisoner.  She'd shrugged her shoulders and moved out in the direction of the rest of the company.  She had never reported it, or judged him for his actions that day.
     "No, I haven't forgotten, thank you so much for the reminder.  As much as I'm sure we'd both enjoy a forced death-march down memory lane, I came here because I need your help."  He said, somewhat acidly.
     She had a smirk on her face as she replied; "OK.  If I can help you, I will, but I can't make any guarantees.  Understood?"
     "Aye, aye, Top.  Loud and clear."  He proceeded to explain what he needed, and why.  He made it clear that he was only interested in legit goods, and was prepared to pay in hard currency.
     "Your boss has to be regretting his decision to try and upgrade his guns on the cheap."  She paused to take another bite from her plate before continuing; "The best I can do for you is to point you in the right direction.  Right now, the only stuff available from the Navy is older than the stuff you just got rid of."
     "Great," he said sarcastically, "just when I though I was going to get out ahead of this... Can you at least tell me if there's anyone insystem who has something?"
     "The Ocelot."  She replied without hesitation.  "It's scheduled to arrive at the station in 27 hours.  I just got an update from their last stopover in Rigel-K via hyperwave comm, and they have spares left over from their last upgrade.  The capain's name - "
     " - Is Powers.  Jayne Powers, right?"  Dirk's tone was miserable.
     "Yeah, what gives?" 
     "It just so happens that Captain Jayne Powers is my own captain's ex-wife." He explained. "And the two of them can't stand each other.  I'm fucked."
     Dirk reflected that this day had started out badly enough that he shouldn't be surprised by what he'd just heard.  Thinking fast, he decided to throw the dice, and see what happened.
     "There's no way I can deal with Powers directly, but what about you?  Would the Corps get its tits in a twist if you acted as a broker?"  He could see her turning the idea over in her head before speaking.
     "I can try, but it can't be official.  The most I can do is reach out and let her know that there's a buyer for what she's got, and then tell you how much it'll cost.  Anything else would be seen as acting as your agent, and that carries some stiff penalties.  I'm gonna be skirting too close to the edge as it is."  She gave him a warning look as she finished.
     "Fair enough.  I'll give you my private comcode, so you can contact me directly with details, but, for fuck's sake, don't tell her who's buying."  He pleaded.  "That would only complicate matters to shit."
     He finished his drink and stood to leave, but turned back before he took a second step, to say: "Thanks, Top.  If this deal goes through, I'll definitely owe you one."
     "On top of what you owe me now?"  She said, as he walked out the door, leaving her to settle the bill.

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 6

* Again, I would like to say thanks to Joe MacDonald for the idea of Arae and ARA Corp. *

     Since the first demonstration on November 5, 2055, there was no layman's explanation for how faster than light travel was possible that would be in any way accurate, or make sense.  The best researchers on the phenomenon lived in the Darkaellan Imperium; Earth and Nova Sol had their own FTL manufacturing capacity, but in general the quality was inferior, and they were only sixty percent as fast, at best. 
     FTL had been a very dangerous way to travel; roughly a third of the first hundred ships built to take advantage of the new drive technology were lost in space, some were found, most were not.  The discovery of the first FTL transit locus between the Sol system and Rigel Kentaurus had made traveling between the stars considerably safer.  The accidental discovery of transit loci, however, was seen as the major reason why humanity had spread so quickly throughout the systems nearest to the Earth.
     A transit locus was essentially just a volume of space that,  for whatever reason, was 'easier' for ships to break out of normal space and into FTL.  A considerable amount of effort had been expended in trying to determine what lay behind this, but no theory that fit the available facts had yet to present itself.  DTI, as the primary FTL drive manufacturer was the most experienced with the underlying principles, yet even their best scientists and technicians were at a loss to explain the phenomenon.  Transit loci nevertheless existed, and several hundred had been cataloged since the position of the first was plotted.  Loci had also been given classifications based on their size, stability, and 'depth'.  The last category was a reference to how much energy a ship's drive would have to expend in order to make the transition; the greater the depth, the easier it became to make the jump.  They also made the drop from FTL to normal space easier on the other end.  Given the distances involved in traveling between stars, no mater how close they might be, the accuracy of a pilot's astrogation borders on something resembling an extreme form of OCD.  The smallest error can result in massive variations in the position from which a ship emerges out of FTL.  Hitting a specific point in space from several light years away was no easy task, and good starship pilots were often the best paid members of a ship's crew. 
     Loci classes ranged from Alpha 3 and 2, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Omega; of these the Alpha 3 Locus was the most desirable, due to their size, easily predictable position, and extremely good depth.  They were also regularly patrolled and monitored, had no natural hazards, and were not too far out from a system's primary star.  Alpha 2 loci weren't much different except that they were not patrolled, but had remote monitoring satellites watching over them. An Alpha was free from natural hazards, but was unmonitored, nor was it patrolled regularly.  The Alpha loci were the most commonly sought by privateers who didn't want their comings and goings too closely observed.  Beta loci were listed as 'mostly safe', which generally meant that the likelihood of running into a natural hazard or the risk of piracy was low, but not nonexistent.  They also often had less depth than Alphas, but some have been surveyed that are actually much deeper, and are closer to the primary of the solar systems in which they appear, making them ideal for smuggling.  Betas are also less stable, potentially causing a massive drain on a ship's power reserves.  Gamma loci were considered barely safe at all, and were classified as such due to significant natural hazards, piracy, or armed conflict; no pilot with any experience or an alternative would consider using a Gamma locus, except in a life or death emergency.  An Omega locus was a totally different matter.
     Any pilot knowingly transiting an Omega locus could count on having his license revoked, which made the generous assumption that the ship and crew survived.  Omega transits were almost universally considered an exotic form of suicide at best.  There was intense speculation as to how and why Omega loci were even charted; pilots tended to be a conservative bunch with regards to risk, however, and weren't likely to try to find out firsthand.  Some people had suggested that systems were given a blanket Omega classification because there was something there that the UniSys Stellar Cartography Group did not want discovered.  No one ever really paid much attention to the rumors of intelligent alien life, strange artifacts, UniSys or Corporate black sites, but the rumors persisted to the point where one had to admit that there might be something to them.  There was a massive loophole in the classification system, however; a ship with a suitably powerful drive, like Cameron's own, didn't need to use a transit locus to make the transition to FTL.  The Jester was so overpowered for its size that, when combined with his state of the art drive, he had no real need to use transit loci at all.  Doing so was not recommended practice, and a crapshoot to be sure, but it could be done.
     Cameron combed the fingers of his free hand through his graying brown hair, the other raised the thick-bottomed crystal tumbler of Terran scotch whiskey to his lips for a contemplative sip of the smoky flavored amber fluid, chilled to perfection by a pair of frozen stone spheres that would not melt or alter the flavor of the beverage.
     He savored the scotch, both for its flavor, and its scarcity; the distillery which had produced it was located on an island west of the Scottish mainland on Earth, and it had been largely unaffected by The Devastation.  It had been part of a case he'd bought on one of his rare trips through the Terran solar system.  There was little reason for him to go to Earth; the large bulk carriers brought raw materials to the massive refueling stations around Jupiter, Mars orbit, or the Moon.
     Earth sucked in raw materials and spat out colonists.  Some of them were lucky enough to be able to afford a ticket to a specific world or station, although the latter normally only did so if they had a job lined up already.  Other colonists took whatever passage they could get, and hoped for the best; most of the governments on Earth offered cut-rate transport to anyone who wanted to go.  As long as you didn't mind the idea of ending up on a marginal world, you could travel for practically nothing.  Some colonists weren't given any choice at all.  Many governments made it a practice to ship out some of the more restless members of society.  China was one of the biggest; they shipped out over half a million dissidents, deviants, petty criminals, and unemployed homeless people a year.  They shipped out people whose only crime was to be on the wrong side of an argument with a government official, or someone with the political connections to make it happen.  When the former United States of America split into its current three parts, the New Confederate States had possessed no qualms about using 'involuntary transportation' as a way to deal with its own dissenters.
     Then there were the corporations, that for any number of reasons, had decided to set up new colonies on far flung worlds.  Some of them had become stunning success stories; Minotaur was one such.  The Darkaellan Imperium was founded by the multisolar HHI, and had comprised mostly Northern European secularists; whose highly ethnocentric makeup led to some raging accusations of racism.  Resodyne Genetics had bought out ARA Corp, which had tried to colonize the Arae system far out on the edge of the populated sphere, nearly out in the mining systems, but something had gone catastrophically wrong and the whole effort had been abandoned.  The Arae system's transit locus was listed as an Omega, but there was no actual prohibition on entering the system from beyond the 5 light hour limit.  His ship's endurance would allow him to enter the system from well outside the star's gravity well, with a narrow margin to operate before they would have to turn around and come back.
     He considered the file on his office terminal, displaying all of the information he had been able to track down on the system, and he couldn't understand why the decision had been made to abandon the colony.  It was the footnotes of an appendix to the main document that had captured his attention; whatever had happened, had happened on the planet, but there was no mention of the colony ship in any of the insurance records.  Resodyne had never made a claim of ownership on any vessel in her class when they acquired ARA Corp's assets, which meant that there was potentially a whole colony ship lost in that system somewhere with no owner in sight.  The idea of an asset that huge just drifting along, free for the taking, made Cameron want to drool out of sheer avarice.  All by itself, that ship was worth over 500 Million UniSys Credits, but if it was still loaded with colony equipment, that could easily double.  It was the kind of payday that every salvage operator hoped for.
     He still had a lot of questions about whether or not he should do what he was planning, but the answers could only be had by going and doing it.  Once the ship reached Vulcanfall, he would either have to commit or back away; he would be in sorry shape financially if he did the latter, and likely bankrupt if the former didn't work out as hoped.
     His light brown eyes stared unfocused at the terminal's screen as he leaned back in his office chair and brought up his glass to his lips to take another sip, but his thoughts ran through the possibilities and pitfalls that lay ahead once more, trying to find some certainty amidst the unknowns.

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 5

*I would like to thank my good friend Joe MacDonald for the characters of 'Rip' and Cody introduced in this chapter, he gave me a short bio on each one about 20 years ago, and I decided that they finally deserved to be heard from.* 

    The forward loading bay was, of necessity, the largest on the Jester; since the United Systems Interstellar Traffic Commission had decreed over 75 year ago (with a lot of badgering from the board of directors of New Detroit) that all ships with horizontally layered decks, docking at any space station, would be required to match their artificial gravity to that of the station and dock bow-on to the station's docking bay.  The loading door actually consisted of two overlapping doors that moved in opposite directions, with an airtight door on the inside and a thicker impact shield on the outside; which was there to prevent some random micrometeorite from putting a hole in the ship through the loading bay.  At something like twelve meters wide and five high, there wasn't much that one couldn't load into the Jester.  The loading bay itself was over seven meters from the deck to the gantry crane ceiling, sixteen meters wide, and just under twenty long.  The aft bulkhead of the loading bay had two separate vacuum tight doors leading to the cargo bays which were now packed with whatever tramp cargo and additional supplies, spares and parts Captain Marshall had seen fit to carry.  If things got desperate then the loading bay could, in theory, be used to store cargo, but that was generally considered to be a bad idea since the loading bay didn't have all of the deck cleats and anchor points that were necessary to immobilize cargo.
     "Y' don't want anything comin' loose if the gravity goes out."  Rollie explained as patiently as possible to the ship's new passengers.
     "Is that something that happens often?"  Asked the gentleman who had just come aboard with a young woman, "Loosing gravity, that is."
     "No, at least I've never heard of it just... Happening."  Rollie explained, "I'm just sayin'.  Gravity polarization's a more or less mature tech, but better safe 'n sorry, right?"  Rollie found the man, one William 'Rip' Rolland, a bit difficult to take.  He was impeccably dressed, well groomed, and spoke with an accent that put him in mind of the colonists on Jefferson who emigrated from the southern areas of the former USA.  The man was clearly not accustomed to natural sunlight, however.  His skin was pale and waxy, and when he spoke, his voice had a rasp to it that one normally associated with things like pulmonary infections.
     "I am given to understand that this ship is one of the fastest in private hands; is that correct?"  Rip asked casually.
     "Actually, the Jester is 'the' fastest privateer in the known sphere."  Rollie replied defensively.  "We'll make Vulcanfall's system boundary in under three weeks once we go FTL.  The best courier ships take three and a half, and your average starliner takes at least five."  He decided there was no harm in telling them just exactly how the Captain had acquired the Jester's FTL drive.  It was a good story, hell, it was practically legendary among privateers.
     Captain Marshall wasn't the only privateer to ever acquire a military grade FTL drive, but he was the only one ever to get his hands on a late model Darkaellan military FTL drive.  By sheer dumb luck he had stumbled across one of their navy's ships while transiting an uninhabited star system; unmanned and adrift, he had laid claim to it under USITC salvage law.  The Darkaellan Imperium had challenged his claim in court on the basis that declared military assets were the sole property of the nation whose flag they carried, and were therefore not subject to open salvage.  The Captain was a man who knew salvage law, however, and there was a very tight loophole that the Imperium's legal team had overlooked.  The ship had not been left with an active beacon to warn passing vessels that the ship was in fact awaiting retrieval, ergo the ship was considered to be abandoned, and therefore subject to open salvage by any and all comers.  The court had sided with the Captain, and then he made the Imperium an offer it could hardly refuse:  They could have the whole thing back on the condition that he be allowed to keep the FTL drive.  The alternative was to watch him sell off one of the Darkaellan Imperial Navy's latest military vessels piece by piece to the highest bidder.  It had been an enormous gamble, but it had paid off in spades.  There had been a whole lot of legal wrangling between the two parties regarding whether or not he would be entitled to the same maintenance services from DTI's technicians, and in the end it had been a legal rep for DTI who had signed off on it; with the proviso that any future sale of the vessel would entail the removal of the Jester's FTL unit by their agents beforehand.  The captain's fortunes had improved considerably by being able to get choice contracts for high value salvage on very tight schedules.
     "Well isn't that just capital, I always say-"  The racking cough that erupted from deep within Rip's chest caused his nurse companion to grab an inhaler mask from her medical bag, which she placed in front of his face with the ease of long practice and familiarity.
     "I think we'll cut our tour short,"  the nurse said neutrally for the benefit of Rollie and her charge, "Rip here needs to rest a bit."
     Rollie escorted them to their 'stateroom'.  Not that the amenities were any better than those of the rest of the crew, but the room itself was actually about two meters wider than the rest.  The extra space in that one cabin was one of those things for which no one had ever given a good explanation; at least not one that had made sense to him, but he was good at letting that sort of thing go.  Rollie was nothing if not observant, however, and he tended to notice things that were out of place or slightly off.  Their two passengers were definitely odd; the nurse, named Cody Daniels he recalled, was as professionally skilled as any he'd seen, but she didn't have the same detachment as their own, Jinx.  At first, he had thought that the nurse thing had been a cover for being a personal escort or doxie, but he didn't see any of the tell tale signs that she was any of those things.  Whatever her reason, she was taking really good care of her patient; she had a very gentle and caring demeanor that a lot of people might mistake for simplemindedness.
     He left them to their own devices after showing them how to pull up a ship layout on their personal ship badges, and headed for the well deck where the tugs and ship's salvage and maintenance mechs were kept.  He had been assured that this 'Rip' character wasn't carrying some contagious disease, but had a chronic condition, hence the nurse.  Nevertheless, he wanted to get out of there, and quick.

- - - 

     With the ship loaded and ready to go, Rollie had some free time to himself.  As a professional loner, he found the peace and quiet of the ship's well deck very much to his liking.  The well deck was the primary storage area for the ship's auxiliary craft, like the four giant yellow, spider-like CAT-Hyundai salvage mechs, or the pair of NHI PM-3 'Mule' recovery tugs.  He made his way to his preferred hideaway in the number 12 emergency escape pod, where he got comfortable in a crash couch and pulled a battered stainless steel cigarette case and old fashioned Zippo out of his pocket.  Setting the pod's ventilation on its highest setting before lighting a cigarette, he noticed that his supply was running low, and resolved to address that deficiency as soon as possible.  New Detroit, like all other members of the Humanist Interstellar Alliance, had a total ban on real tobacco, and Rollie didn't know anyone on the station who was dealing that he could trust.
     Over a century ago, a bunch of prize winning geneticists had found a way to modify tobacco so as to make its consumption relatively harmless. Within a generation of its creation most of Earth's governments had banned the growing and sale of "real" tobacco, since virtually all tobacco companies had started using Synthabac.  In addition to making smoking virtually harmless, Synthabac reduced the levels of nicotine by more than 90 percent and gave it a flavor like smoldering dried salad greens.
     Naturally, a black market had evolved.
     Real tobacco could command some really high prices in the right market, and Rollie reflected that it was a good thing they had a stop over in the Rigel Kentaurus system.  Níngjìng Bay was possibly the biggest city known to man, with a metropolitan area of more than 420 square kilometers and 62 million-plus residents, it had more than a fifth of the planet Minotaur's total population.  It was also one of the best places off Earth to find quality leaf, and had the distinction of being the only place, on any planet, that he didn't suffer from the crippling anxiety that normally came with his agoraphobia with regard to planets.  Rollie mostly found the idea of going onto any planet insane; there was no control over the environment at all, the weather could change in an instant, there were biological pathogens of every variety, and last but not least, there was wildlife.  His personal view of the universe might very well be unique, he had never found anyone else who shared it, at any rate.
     Rollie knew that the Captain only tolerated his skirting the prohibitions on real tobacco because he occasionally enjoyed a cigar on special occasions himself.  He also realized that his willingness to turn a blind eye to personal use of the product would not extend to outright smuggling; that hadn't stopped Rollie from purchasing enough, from time to time, to cover the occasional 'gift' to help smooth out a side deal on something else however.  Rollie had made a few easy credits that way, and he figured that a long-term operation like the one they were about to undertake might necessitate a relatively large purchase, just for his own consumption.  He did some rapid arithmetic in his head, and quickly realized that his next purchase would put him way out of his normal dealer's comfort zone.  He would have to move up the food chain a bit, and that could be dangerous, since he would be asking for a quantity that - in his case - would be considered 'intent to traffic a controlled substance' under UniSys Code § 105-009.  Needless to say, the idea of spending time in a dirtside prison was not one he wanted to think about.
     He decided to put his mind to work considering other things, like just exactly where they might be going on this very new hush-hush job of theirs.  The Captain was keeping the final destination a mystery, and there were as many rumors as ears on the ship regarding what the job might be.  All anyone knew was that it would likely be about six months round trip, and anybody not comfortable with that could debark anywhere between New Detroit, Minotaur and Vulcanfall; after that anyone who stayed on board would be going all the way.  He suspected that the Captain had stumbled onto a really big, fat salvage claim, and didn't want to risk having it jumped, unlikely as that might be.  He just hoped it wasn't anything involving the Imperium; they had Saints-awful long memories when it came to people who interfered with them.
     Rollie reflected that Darkael was a place that no one really understood, it was impossible to just got there and see what was going on, and people from the Imperium tended to be less than enthusiastically welcomed anywhere.  They were tolerated on Minotaur, and generally disliked in the rest of the Alliance.  The Jefferson Republic hated the Darkaellan Imperium for reasons that were unclear to most non-Jeffersonians, and their theories about Darkael were laughable; most of them revolving around the idea that the MacMullen family keeps itself in power by using genetic engineering to deny people's free will, creating a totally atheist, plutocratic, class-based genocracy.  The Free Systems League displayed a sort of studied antipathy toward the Imperium that was little different from its attitude towards the Alliance, with the exception of Glamis, where they tended to blend in fairly easily due to their shared Scottish roots.  What exchange of ideas existed between the Imperium and the rest of humanity was largely based on trade, commerce, and banking.  The Darkaellan Imperial Bank was the most reliable financial institution in the Known Sphere.  They had bank secrecy down to an art form, and even UniSys wouldn't try to pry information out of them.  Even members of The Cartel, which hated Darkael with a white hot rage, had money in DIB accounts.  The most compelling reasons for this were that the bank offered foreign currency exchange, with commission rates lower than anyone else, and their interest on cash deposits was almost always better than their competition.  They also made a habit of having real human beings working behind a counter that you could go in and talk to, if you wanted to get help in person.  Most banks just had highly interactive kiosks, and the only human being working for the bank was a maintenance tech.
     There was of course their involvement in Sigma Draconis; their 'military advisors' to the independence-seeking locals hadn't offered a lot of advice, but had brought in a lot of weapons to fight with.  The so called advisors were Darkaellan special forces units, although it wasn't common knowledge, and they were there primarily to disrupt the mining operations of Techidexon Mining, who were in turn using Cartel mercs 'to maintain site security'.  He and Dirk had gotten drunk one night, and Dirk had opened up about some of the things that had happened after the Alliance Marine Corps had landed at Scatha to try to bring some order to Sigma-D.  It had not sounded like fun.
     Rollie finished his smoke by blowing a large smoke ring at the air intake grill in the pod and decided that he'd wasted enough time.  He decided that he would spend some time on station in the company of a woman whose affection was negotiable, it had been a while, and he needed to take his mind off the job for a few hours.

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 4

     Alex slid her right leg across Dirk's, and used her fingertips to trace circles around his left nipple as the perspiration from what had turned out to be an epic lay dried on her skin.  Dirk was gently digging his fingers into the soft skin just above her buttocks, just the way she liked.  She enjoyed being here with him after they had sex; he wasn't chatty, which counted as a huge win in the bonus column of their relationship.  He spoke when it was required, but he wouldn't talk her ear off.  Shifting position, his thumb started massaging the edge of the large muscle where it met the tailbone, and she pressed her damp mons against his thigh.  She could feel the slow metronome of his heartbeat as she rested her head in the hollow between his chest and shoulder.
     Alexandra Galilani Jarvia Chase had taken one look at Dirk when he first came aboard, and she'd thought, more or less:  'OK, how do I get one of those?'  The fact that she'd been 17 when they'd met had put a wall between them that she couldn't tear down; Dirk had some very old fashioned ideas about 'age appropriateness' when it came to sex.  Her own personal experiences had shown that attitude to be quite rare, she wasn't a virgin after all, but he'd been adamant.  She had gotten to know Dirk as a person before she pounced on him like a starving lioness, which had been about eleven hours after she had turned 18.  He hadn't disappointed.  He was easy on the eyes, he knew how to have a good time whenever the ship put in at a new port, and he was a demon in the sack.  
     He wasn't perfect though.
     She had come to realize that the man, now lying naked in her bed, had a complicated history that involved a lot of violence, and his experiences with the Alliance Marine Corps had been less than life-affirming and peaceful.  His life before his enlistment was something that he never discussed with anyone.
     Ever.
     It became obvious after their first massive blow out, which had started with her prying about his life before the AMC.  He hadn't raised his voice, but he had made it very clear that she had stepped way over the line.  Not that her own more obvious anger had made things better, it hadn't.  He'd been the first one to make a peace offering, and things had gone on as usual since.  Not without an occasional need for space, but calm for the most part.  She reflected that he really did have better interpersonal skills than most dirtsiders, and those skills were important when you had people locked in an airtight box traveling between the stars.  Her own were relatively good, but she had a temper that occasionally got the better of her, and when it did she could get ugly.  Dirk rarely ever blew up, but he wasn't shy about speaking his mind with a frank brutality that tended to rub people the wrong way at times.  She nearly laughed at the memory of the first time he'd done that to her; she had wanted to punch him, but that would have been a colossal mistake.  The Captain would tolerate a lot of joking around, bitching, and (as long as performance didn't suffer) crew hookups, but the last person to take a swing at another crew member in an argument was probably still trying to find a way home.  Cameron had formally blacklisted the man with the UniSys Interstellar Transportation Commission, and once the USITC pulls your ticket, you never work on a starship again.  Needless to say, getting blacklisted would not make her welcome at family reunions.
     Alex had been born on a starship; her family had been spacers since the First Exodus, when little was known about what lay beyond Earth's solar system.  Her great grandfather had seen the new stars of humanity's future from a reconnaissance and survey ship.  Her mother had been the Captain's own captain at one time and he had been responsible for introducing her to her future husband.  Alex had come to know her captain as 'Uncle Cam' when she was just a little girl, and when she'd turned 16 she decided to ask him for a berth to finish her spacer's certification.  He had made it clear that she would work her ass off if he said yes, then told her to make certain her parents were willing to let her.
     He hadn't been kidding.  She had never been afraid of work, but this had been a whole new experience.  The work load was as strenuous as anyone else's, and she had developed calluses, muscles, and skills in what seemed like equal measure.  Working two shifts eight hours apart was old hat, but the sheer volume of study they piled onto the work cut into what little free time she'd had.  The load slackened a bit between stars, but not much, the drain on the systems when the ship was in FTL meant that there were sometimes weeks or months of time to study.  Alex had wanted to get away from home and check out the universe.  One out of two had to count for something.
     She hadn't had her Able Spacer certification a week when she was given the task of helping with the installation of a new communications console on the bridge.  Her interest had been piqued regarding the whole process, and she had nearly driven chief engineer Ludmilla Brostowski nuts with a constant barrage of questions about what she was doing.  That was when and where she'd decided she wanted to earn her Electrotechnical Officer's certification, because that would a master key to just about any ship's crew.  Trained and certified EOs were hard to come by everywhere, and they could command some serious fees for their work.
     Alex's personal stroll down memory lane, combined with the steady rhythm of Dirk's heartbeat under her left ear, had been causing her to drift off when the Captain's call came in.  Dirk's reaction was predictable:  He swore.  A lot.  Then said "Aye aye, Captain!"  Cut the connection and started putting on his clothes.  She felt obligated to ask the obvious.
     "Do you think you can do it?  Get the lines on the cheap, I mean."
     "I don't even know if I can get the lines, period.  Captain's got two aging Freedom Arsenal FA-76B1 twin railguns mounted, right?"  She nodded her agreement, and he continued,  "His cooling system was originally designed to Alliance Navy specs, but since the Free Systems League's naval contractors just copied AN designs, the same lines will work in both.  The problem is that old AN spec SPC units tend to end up being bought by the League Navy and it's auxiliaries.  As a result, we may have to settle for what we can get."  He was pulling on a vintage black t-shirt he'd found in an antique clothing shop on the station, with the word 'ANTHRAX' across the front in angular block letters as he finished speaking.
     "Sounds like you have your work cut out, huh?"
     "Actually I could use your help.  I need a list of ships in system, and whether or not they have what we need.  If you can do that, I'll talk to some former colleagues of mine at the local Alliance Naval Station.  Maybe we can get what we need in time to enjoy a real bed and room service one more time before we leave port." He said suggestively.
     She had to admit that the idea of a soft bed in a nice hotel, and room service for real fresh food instead of prepackaged, no matter how good, was the only reason she agreed.
     "OK, Marine.  I'll help, but only 'cause you ask so nice." She teased with a smile, and swatted him on the backside as he walked past her bunk to leave her quarters.

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 3

     The Jester was still docked with New Detroit station, and Captain Cameron Valentine Marshall was in his private office just astern of the bridge contemplating the report being given by his long time friend and Executive Officer, Gandu Mkaba.

     "... And I can't see how it would be possible to replace the defective lines without expending significantly from our reserve capital.  We have little choice but to pay hard cash for them; the only merchant who has SPC lines compatible with our systems is refusing to extend us credit."  Gandu concluded.  Cameron was rubbing his temples with his thumbs, trying to massage some of the tension out of his scalp.  The last thing he wanted to do was spend any more of his hard cash for a problem he thought he had already solved.

     The Jester had been laid down in '27 and was more than five decades old now; but the engineers at the New Halifax shipyards in the Sol system had designed the toughest hulls in space, with over 90 percent of their hulls in Jester's age category still in use somewhere.  NHI-312B salvage/transport ships were generally thought to be the toughest; combining massive amounts of power with their extremely high deep space endurance, making them ideal privateer ships.  He had - for years - been putting away his corporate bonuses, along with a large chunk of his regular pay, in an effort to bankroll his own cargo ship; when one of his superiors called him to say that the company was going to be auctioning off a block of its fully amortised and depreciated assets - including several ships.  He wasn't sure if any of the ships were what he wanted at first, but after checking them out from bow to stern while they were laid up for some final maintenance, he decided on one with absolute certainty.  The only issue had been money, and he hadn't had enough of it.  He might have put a down payment on a smaller ship than the one he had in mind, but everything he could scrape together on his own had fallen short.  He had gone looking for every last favour he could call in, but in the end it still wasn't enough.  He had called his boss back to say thanks for the tip, but the dream of privateering would have to wait another couple of years at least.  The return message had floored him completely: 'Cam, pick your ship, and we'll see to it that it stays off the auction block.  The company will help arrange your financing on very generous terms if you'll work on contract for any of our salvage claims over the next five years.'  He'd taken possession of Lot#DG781A within the month, and had it re-registered as 'The Jester' the same day.  The company had done right by him, and while he wouldn't exactly call it a gift, the financing terms had been better than he could ever arranged on his own.  His five-year contract had kept him and his crew busy, doing what amounted to trash runs getting the company's damaged and derelict spacecraft back - either running or to the breakers for scrap.

     Those early days of doing corporate trash runs were looking pretty good right now.  "Where do we stand on everything else?  Fuel, life support, supplies for the galley, and the like?" Cameron asked, as he pulled his hands away from his face to look directly at his XO.

     "We are ready to go:  The bunkers are full to the brim, our galley is supplied with everything we need for a long term deployment - including the additional emergency ration packs you requested, our life support system is certified for a minimum full-time operational cycle of 12 months, every system has been checked and re-checked, spare parts have been laid in, and all of our auxiliary craft have new inspection tags.  We even have full ammo bins on the main guns;  all we need is new SPC lines for them."  He gave the Captain a sly grin and added, "Oh, and of course there is the issue of new hires on the dock.  I did a preliminary screening, and there are about two dozen or so with potential."

     Cameron gave a disgusted sounding sigh and asked, "How much potential?"  He truly did not want to have to deal with hiring new people, but he realized that New Detroit was the best place to do so, and his reputation for giving his crew solid pay and a decent bonus structure, along with a fairly generous benefits package, meant that he could be choosy about who joined his crew.  He knew that they needed more hands; but this next job was long term, and most newbies lasted long enough to get to a new world and jump ship, with little more in their pockets than their last paycheck.  All of which meant that he would have to be more involved in selecting crew than normal, and he wished he didn't have to.  It was his preference to let Gandu handle hiring and dismissals, while he settled accounts and lined up work, but a long term job with the potential payoff of the one he had decided to undertake this time required greater personal involvement on his part and there didn't seem to be any way of shaking it.

     "I would say that three of them will probably stay with us, regardless of how the new job goes."  He cocked an eyebrow in an unspoken question, but there was no further explanation forthcoming.  "We might get a dozen in all, but if the job doesn't pan out the way you hope it will, then our reputation might suffer.  Unless you are willing to go into the red to pay bonuses up front..."  Gandu let the unasked question trail off when he saw the look of disapproval on his Captain's face.  "Other than that, all I can suggest is that you be honest with them about the risks:  Big bonuses for success, basic pay and a good record if we fail.  The old hands will stick by you whatever happens, but you know as well as anyone that if you make promises, and can't keep them, then the good rep that gets us work is gone."

     Cameron knew everything he'd just heard was true and he had already decided to do pretty much everything his XO had recommended, but it was nice to see that Gandu was on the same wavelength.  Not that any of it was genius level thinking, just good people skills.  He grabbed his shipcom badge from its slot on his desk and punched a code in.  "Dirk" he said in an authoritative voice, "find me replacement SPC lines, whatever it takes, just get them.  Preferably, for no more than what we paid last time.  Understood?"  He and Gandu smiled at the delay in response, which usually meant he was cursing in a variety of languages.

     Dirk's "Aye aye, Captain!" came back over the com with crisp military precision, leaving Cameron feeling better for having dumped the problem in someone else's lap.  This gave him the mental breathing space to deal with his more pressing crew issues.  He looked back at Gandu before speaking again, "OK, get the applicants on the deck at 0800, and I'll talk to them in a group before we start interviews, maybe we can thin out some of the green and less than committed, before we start making headway.  I truly hope that we can get a few people with experience, did your preliminary screening happen to catch any old hands or able spacers?"  

     Gandu had always shied away from his boss' desire to take on 'old hands'; men and women who had worked on ships without being officially rated in a specialty, usually as dependents of spacers, sometimes just chronic wanderers with training in a wide variety of fields useful enough on board a starship to allow them to 'work their passage' and maybe put some money in their pockets when the ship hit its next port.  "One old hand, two able spacers, and at least five new ratings looking for a berth, as well as eleven or twelve who might make passable cargo handlers and janitorial crew.  Oh, there are two who want to take passage, and are willing to pay for it."

     "Passengers?  Willing to pay for a berth on a salvage ship?  Please tell me you checked with USPF and local law enforcement before agreeing to anything."  The last thing he wanted was to find out these so-called passengers were wanted on a local warrant or by the UniSys Criminal Court; that would be a great way to get himself blacklisted from ever docking at New Detroit again, and if that happened he might as well sell the Jester and quit.  Being blacklisted was worse than death for a ship owner, especially here, where virtually every ship in the populated sphere called in at some point.  Privateers like him could pick up contracts for transportation of goods, and in his case get information from a network of fellow privateers that led to potentially huge salvage claims.  And he wanted this happy state of affairs to continue.

     "Yes, I checked," said Gandu looking somewhat aggrieved, "they have no local warrants, and aside from a friendly warning from the USPF office not to gamble with the one named Rolland, they are not persons of interest to the Untied Systems either."

     "Then why would they want to ship out with us?  They would be a lot more comfortable on a regular liner, as opposed to a working ship.  I just don't get it, but if they have hard currency, then I really don't care, but you have to admit that it's a bit strange."  Cameron had taken on passengers in the past, but they tended to be people who couldn't afford the rather high prices most starliners charged for a decent berth, or just wanted to get there fast; since no 'liner could match the Jester's FTL speeds.  He had ferried a few USPF agents between systems, when they were in hot pursuit of a fugitive, for just that reason; and they knew he'd do it again in a heartbeat, since a USPF agent could authorise him to use faster insystem speeds than would normally be allowed.  He had gotten some nice early delivery bonuses during one such incident, and the USPF had gone to bat for him when the authorities on New Jerusalem had wanted to impound his ship and arrest him.  They even paid for the ride without much complaint or delay.

     "I admit it seems unusual, but the gentleman who contacted me said that he was traveling with a private nurse.  He apparently suffers from a rare type of emphysema which requires constant care.  He also said that starliners are crowded and slow, both things he was eager to avoid."  Gandu finished with a shrug of his broad shoulders.

     Well, I can't say that I don't agree with that," Cameron replied with considerable feeling, "Let's take a look at those applications..."

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 2

     "Hóu yīnjīng de xīshǔn jìnǚ!"  Rollie thought better of walking into the tight, confined space of the power and motor control room for the ship's dorsal railgun turret when he heard that particular curse (Monkey cock-sucking whore!) from its current occupant.  He chose to wait patiently out in the rather narrow, but uncluttered, service corridor instead; remembering the last time he had tried to offer advice on the crisis of the moment, and the rather spectacular end result.  He knew offering to help would just get Dirk's hackles up; he was constitutionally incapable of asking for help with anything, and any offer was likely to be rejected.  Rollie reflected that it was more than ironically hypocritical that he would be hurt if you tried the same thing with him.
     Dirk had come aboard the Jester over two years ago as a rating, less than a month after his discharge from the Alliance Marine Corps.  He was a veteran with a relatively clean record, and he seemed willing to do whatever work came along.  Captain Marshall had soon found out he had done two years as a weapons technician with a Fleet Marine detachment, as well as three ground combat tours in the Sigma Draconis system, and he put Dirk to work as his primary weapons tech and gunner.  That had been a very good decision, as it turned out, because they had nearly gotten jumped by a renegade privateer after coming out of FTL on the outskirts of the Jefferson colony's system.  There had been no warning, much less any time to power up the FTL drive for an emergency jump out of the system.  Dirk's quick thinking had resulted in the taking of their would-be attackers' ship as a prize and having it condemned by the local government; not that the prize money had been particularly high (at just three percent of the lowest possible assessment, the Jefferson authorities would never be noted for their generosity), but good enough to leave some extra spending money in the crew's pockets.  All of which had made Dirk a very popular man indeed.
     There was one last grunt of massive effort from the power room and the sound of the high pressure cooling system's pumps spinning up at their lowest setting.  This sound was followed within seconds by a loud bang and the unmistakable sound of liquid under pressure leaking in very large quantities.  The string of curses that followed could only be described as eclectic, coming as they did in at least a half a dozen languages; of which Mandarin, Alliance Standard English, and Gaelic were the only three which Rollie recognized.  Not that he could understand more than AS English, but he knew what he was hearing.  He once had the desire to ask him how he came to learn Gaelic, but the answer had been rather more enigmatic than revealing: "My father insisted, I felt obligated" was all he had said before walking away.  Rollie got the immediate sense that this topic of conversation was not one reopening would be looked upon favourably, so he decided to drop it, shrugged his shoulders and moved on.
     Rollie's musing was abruptly cut off by Dirk's sudden appearance in the corridor, looking for all the worlds like he had just bathed in a vat of the thick, viscous coolant fluid used to control heat buildup in the railguns' superconducting magnets; which only became truly liquid except at high pressure, and at temperatures high enough to cook a large turnip in less than a couple of minutes.  All of this was bad enough, but the bright pinkish colour of the slimy goop was an obvious cosmic insult, added to the sense of injury Dirk was displaying when he saw Rollie standing there, clearly trying not to laugh, and said:  "One word.  Not.  One.  Word.", before storming off down the corridor toward the emergency burn shower where he promptly stepped in and hit the controls setting the water mist and ultrasonics running in an effort to clean off the worst of the ooze covering over half of his body.
     "You gonna want clean clothes?" Rollie yelled over the sounds of water misting from the 8 nozzles in the shower and the high pitched buzz of the ultrasonic sound waves breaking up the gunk stuck to Dirk's exposed skin.
     Rollie didn't get an answer before the com-badge on his shipsuit collar started chirping with the sound of an incoming call.  He answered it with a drawling "Yeah?" that managed to come out as "Ee-yea-uh?"
     Gandu Mkaba, the ship's Executive Officer, spoke in a lilting, musical Swahili accent:  "What in punda shetani is going on up there?  I have at least three alarms going off on the bridge right now!  Who has activated the chem-burn shower?"
     Rollie decided on brevity over detail: "Dirk's inna shower.  Number one turret had a malfunction, an' he got covered in coolant goo.  Prob'ly figured there was no sense trackin' it all over the ship."
     There was an uncomfortably long pause, and Rollie could just imagine Gandu standing to his full 193cm height trying to scowl down at him through the damage control station com panel on the bridge.
     "I am sending Jinx and Erwin to you, and they will -" Dirk reached out of the shower and grabbed Rollie's com-badge, cutting him off.
     "I don't need a medic or engineer, Gandu, I need a clean-up crew, a real shower, and new SPC lines for the cooling system."  Dirk's voice carried a tone of exaggerated patience that was sure to rub the XO the wrong way, but he kept going.  "I warned you and the Captain that those so-called 'factory rebuilt' Mark 31 coolant lines you got for a 'great deal' were no good, and I was right; they didn't even make it past the low pressure test before popping."
     Rollie was sure he could hear the XO's teeth grinding over the com when Jinx and Erwin came around the corner.  Jinx took one look at Dirk and she laughed reflexively, not even trying to hide it, while simultaneously checking her datapad's link to the shower's limited medical sensors to be sure that Dirk wasn't seriously injured.  Erwin Koch looked as stern as he always did, and headed toward the turret room muttering something under his breath in German.
     "Thanks." said Dirk as he tossed Rollie's badge back to him and stepped out of the shower, his clothes soaking wet, but no longer covered in super pressure coolant.
     "Cap'n's gonna have some sharp words for ya over that chat y'just had with the XO, y'know."  stated Rollie with a rare note of genuine authority.
     "Better that he read me out, than end up in a tight spot with his guns out of action.  Worst he can do is beach me, maybe try to have me blacklisted, but I won't let that stop me from telling him he was wrong to ignore me when I told him those units were junk." replied Dirk confidently.
     Rollie gave that statement a remarkably fatalistic shrug of the shoulders, and said "Just sayin' is all."
     Jinx had finally gotten her laughing fit under control enough to ask questions.  "Other than your pride, are there any injuries you want to tell me about?  The chem-burn shower's sensors have limited capacity, but they tell me you are just wet.  Do you wish to go to the medical bay?"
     "Bù, Xièxiè, Jin-Xie. Wǒ hěn hǎo." Dirk replied in fluent Mandarin, 'No, thanks, Jinx.  I'm good.'  Jinx gave Dirk a respectful nod of the head and turned back down the corridor toward the crew area without further query or comment.
     Rollie watched her go, his wistful gaze firmly locked on Jinx's backside until she was out of sight.  Jin-Xie Kang, or 'Jinx' to the crew, was in his opinion, the best looking woman on the ship by a country mile (whatever a country mile was; it sounded big).  Her features combined the fine boned delicacy of a native Minotauran's upbringing in lower than normal gravity, with a pure Han Chinese ancestry; tall and lean, with curves in all the right places, hair so black that it shone blue under the right lighting, and that rarest of features for someone of Chinese descent:  Green eyes.  He wondered, and not for the first time, what a woman like her was doing on a ship like the Jester; as a nurse and sick bay attendant, no less.  Privateer ships tended to collect odd specimens of humanity (Rollie being no exception), but if she had a storied history, she wasn't letting on.  It just seemed weird to him that a girl that good-looking - and smart - wasn't a famous celebrity somewhere.
     Rollie's daydreaming was cut short by the far less pleasant sight of Second Engineer Erwin Koch coming back from the power and motor control room, covered from fingertips to his elbows in slimy pink SPC fluid, and looking grimmer than normal.  He appeared to be thinking very hard as he approached the shower station where Dirk was dripping dry.
     "Ve haff a big problem mitt ze guns, I think, Ja?"  Erwin Koch spoke with a German accent that was thick enough to stop bullets.
     "No kidding," Dirk replied dryly "I'd say the captain got royally screwed buying those Mark 31 SPC lines, no matter how little he paid for them.  Hell, even free they'd still be less than useless, which is why the Alliance Navy scrapped them to begin with.  'Factory rebuilt' my ass.  Did we keep the old Mark 27s?"  This last was addressed to Rollie, who could be relied upon for just about any mundane information regarding the movement of goods on, or off, the Jester.
     "Nope, they went out as soon as the new ones came aboard; sold 'em to the captain of a tramp freighter named Sarpedon; and before you ask - they hit the FTL locus to Dar Ash'Sham over 12 hours ago.  Sorry big guy." He patted Dirk companionably on the shoulder, his face a mask of companionable regret.

Here Be Monsters - Chapter 1

The following is the first in a series of what I hope becomes a full length story.  Enjoy it if possible.

     Bullard knew that the ship was lost;  they had overwhelmed his pathetically small security team before most of them knew what had hit them.  The lucky ones never saw what killed them, the ones who saw... Well that didn't bear thinking on.  The human mind can only take so much horror.  The crew had abandoned ship over 12 hours ago, leaving only the scientists who - foolishly or bravely, take your pick - had refused to leave, and Bullard's thirty-six man security team.  And them.

     The ship's power distribution network was failing, causing the already dim emergency lights to flicker and the artificial gravity to surge with each new short-out in the system.  Sooner or later the entire power grid would fail and then the lights, gravity, and life support would go with it.  The flickering lights lent a macabre carnival air to the long walk down the upper maintenance tube, causing enough stress that his bio-monitor cuff began to chirp anxiously.  Bullard did his best to throttle back the anxiety he felt, to little effect.  His team, while not perhaps much better than the average pack of rent-a-mercs that they were, had done better than he'd thought they would, but it hadn't been enough - not even close.  Bullard was a graduate of one of the hardest schools of warfare, he had learned his trade with the Alliance Marine Corps at Scatha on Sigma-Draconis, but Czakó had impressed him more than he would have thought any Terran merc could; she had wanted to emigrate to the Hungarian settlement of Új-Hazájában on the world of Nestor Ráj, and she was willing to put her ass on the line for the money to get there.  Dorina Czakó had been the last one to go, and she'd gone down fighting, buying time for him to get the crew and most of the scientists and lab personnel off of the ship.  At the end she'd held them back with just her pistol.  At least they hadn't taken her alive; she always saved one bullet just to be sure.
     'Broadway' was the nickname on most ships for the spinal maintenance and transfer tube.  At approximately 600 metres in length, Broadway gave access to all of the major sections of the ship; the problem Bullard was facing was how to get through each of the sixteen bulkhead doors before someone - or something - decided to come and check Broadway out.  Not for the first time he bemoaned the fact that he had been cut off from both the shuttle bay - and the armory - when everything on this Saints-forsaken ship had gone to Hell.  The armory at least would have given him access to his personal military-grade vacsuit, and SmartLinked heavy weapons, then from there it was a short jog to the shuttle bay where at least one emergency evacuation vehicle was left in addition to the small pinnace.  All of which was as inaccessible as if it was back on Minotaur.  He considered himself quite fortunate to have the weapons he did, their weight was reassuringly familiar; and the habits of years, surviving in some of the Alliance's most brutal war zones, came back to him without effort.
     He swept his shouldered rifle across his field of view as he headed forward, instantly at the ready should anything come his way.  So far, nothing had, but he didn't expect that to last much longer.  If they got to the bridge of the ship before him, he might as well eat a bullet himself; because they would be truly free, and Bullard knew that would be worse than a disaster.
     Bullard couldn't have said in that moment how he knew, but he became clearly and acutely aware that he was not alone on Broadway.  His Colt-Armacon M-125A1 was tucked in close, finger resting lightly on the trigger, as he spun around like a striking snake and saw two shadowy figures less than fifteen meters away.  He settled the aiming reticle of his rifle's smartscope on the larger of the two shapes, and subconsciously activated the recording function setting it to download into his own cranial link's on-board memory.  Pulling the trigger sent a stream of over a dozen hypervelocity flechettes at his first target, each travelling just over 1490 metres per second, and their effect was gruesome; while each individual flechette was not extremely dangerous, a dozen hitting within a few centimetres of each other certainly was, and the first target jerked a little death dance before dropping to the deck.  In a vacuum the rifle's shots would have been silenced by the lack of any conductive medium, but the deafening blast of noise would be as good as a personal invitation to his pursuers to come and butcher him like the rest of the personnel who had foolishly remained on board.  He swung his weapon to bear on the second figure coming at him with the smooth precise control of someone whose considerable skills were backed by the best reflexes that modern cybernetics could provide and that money could buy, and it was very nearly not enough.  The second attacker got to within less than two metres of him when the first round hit its mark and he simply held the trigger down.  He reflexively checked the rifle's ammunition level through the smart scope before checking the bodies, deciding he should get a better look at what he was facing.

     He rather wished he hadn't.

     The thing lying on the deck was a kaleidoscopic patchwork of tissue grafts and physical enhancements, each more horrifying than the last.  Bullard had never heard of Mary Shelley or read her centuries-old tale, but the old soldier recognized the work of a Dr. Frankenstein in this creature none the less.  He realized his weapon's innate armor piercing abilities had been the only thing to save him from certain death; the thing had dermally implanted impact armor covering the more vulnerable areas of the torso and head.  Most of the face had been surgically excised to make room for considerable cybernetic enhancement which appeared to have been grafted directly to the skull, leaving only the lower mandible intact, but with bulges that hinted at subdermal armor and muscular enhancement.  He was just starting to think of how terminally insane a person would have to be to subject themselves to the kinds of suffering involved in what had been done here, when he turned the body enough for the head to roll away from him.  It could be said that it was a testament to his humanity that he nearly vomited in disgust at the sight of the double-helix-and-barcode that had been laser branded on the back of the neck, denoting that this had once been a vat-grown GMH.  Anger and shock drove him to his feet and set them running now that he understood what he was facing; Genetically Modified Humanoids, enhanced with high end cybernetics and bioware.  He was certain he had no time left to get off the ship, but he might be able to get to the bridge and put a message on one of the ship's emergency beacons, in the hope that anyone coming to the rescue would be able to bring some justice to the ship's crew; who had died for the sake of some mad scientists' pet bioweapons experiment, now gone horribly wrong.

     He realised that there was only one more bulkhead to clear before he made to the bridge  A flash of motion caught out of the corner of his left eye caused him to spin around, reflexively bringing his weapon to bear on the source of movement.  The shock of impact was severe enough that he nearly bit through his tongue when the GMH sprang at him delivering a perfectly timed strike, throwing his aim wide to the right and high.  He could see that the blow had also broken his left forearm in two places.  Turning back to where his opponent was coming for him again he decided to get in close, but realised with a mounting panic that he couldn't breathe.  Looking down told him why:  The long bladed combat knife had perforated his right rib cage, transecting his lung from right to left.

     The thing squatted there looking at him with its head cocked to one side like a dog who has just been shown a magic trick making a cooing sound like a dove.

     It knew.  He was finished.

     That he had failed was the last thought Bullard had before the black took him down into eternity.