John Ayliff - Belt Three

‘I’m not heading for LN-411 right now,’ Keldra said. The transmission shut off.

Ayla swivelled in her seat to face Jonas, looking on the verge of panic. ‘Captain, the ship’s altering course. They’re not heading for LN-411. It looks like…’

‘They’re heading for us,’ said Jonas.

‘Yes.’

He cursed under his breath. ‘Pirates.’

Ayla’s eyes widened. ‘Pirates?’

‘Full burn. Evasive manoeuvres.’

Ayla closed her eyes for a moment, and Jonas felt the deep rumble and the shift in gravity as the hauler’s ponderous engines fired.

‘I can try, but we’re overloaded, and there’s nowhere to run to, even if we went deeper into the Red Zone,’ she said.

‘No, stay out of the Red Zone.’

Ayla nodded, relieved. She was no Scriber. Even with pirates bearing down, no normal person would willingly head into the path of a Worldbreaker.

Jonas swung out of his chair and headed for the door. ‘You have the bridge. I’ll be back soon.’

From the outside, the Coriolis Dancer resembled a fat metal mushroom. A single grav-ring ran around the outside of a domed cargo bay, with the fuel tank and chemical reaction drive protruding below the bay like a stalk. Jonas kept the grav-ring spun up at a quarter gee to match the home gravity of most of the miners. Normally on a homeward run the cargo bay would be packed with canisters of uranium to sell at the nearest city, but today it was crammed with the mining and hab equipment they’d salvaged from their hurried evacuation of LN-411, with their last haul of uranium nestling forlornly in the centre.

Jonas’s two dozen mining servitors stood in a row along the ring’s orbital corridor. He tried not to meet their blank stares as he ran past. As Gabriel had, Jonas made sure only to use legal servitors – condemned criminals, or tank-borns who had been unable to pay off their cloning debt – but he knew there was a thriving black market in the mind-wiped victims of pirate raids. That would be how Ayla and the rest of his crew would end up if the Remembrance caught them, and Jonas as well, if Keldra learned his secret.

Most of the free-willed personnel were crammed into the crew lounge, almost the only room on the ship not filled with hastily rescued mining equipment. There were six Worker-caste mining supervisors, and a couple of Engineer-caste members of the Dancer ’ s regular crew. They looked up from game pads as Jonas opened the door. He found Matton, the huge red-bearded mining foreman, and gestured for him to come out into the corridor.

Matton waited until they were in the corridor and the door was shut before he spoke. ‘We felt the engines fire.’

‘Ayla’s putting us on an evasive course,’ Jonas said. ‘Pirates.’

Matton had worked for years to build up his physical strength, but he still moved with the grace of someone who’d been raised in quarter gravity. Now he closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath, and Jonas could tell he was suppressing an urge to punch something.

‘Damn scavengers, picking us off at a time like this. Well, we had a good run while it lasted. Do you know what to do?’

‘I want you to jettison the cargo. Empty the bay.’

Matton sighed. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘It might make us light enough to outrun them.’

‘Wouldn’t work. What kind of ship is it?’

‘It’s a two-ring clipper. Salamander class, I think.’

‘No, it wouldn’t work. The Salamander has some of the best engines outside of a Solar Authority cruiser. If they’re looking to rob us they’ll be flying with an empty cargo bay. We don’t have the acceleration to evade them.’

‘It’s still worth a try. What if we strip out everything non-essential? Empty the grav-ring. We just need engines and life support.’

‘That would take hours. The pirates would be on us before we were done.’

Jonas frantically tried to think. ‘We’ve got a servitor combat programme, haven’t we?’

‘A basic one, yes, but we’ve no weapons. The servitors couldn’t repel a pirate boarding party.’

‘No, of course not, but they could be a diversion. If we tie the pirates up in a fight, the rest of us can escape in the shuttle, and if we jettison some junk at the same time then they might not notice us.’

Matton shook his head. ‘They would notice us, and we’d be lucky if they stopped to pick us up rather than shooting us out of space. Sir, you’ve got to surrender. Pirates don’t hurt true-borns. They’ll ransom you to your family – that’s how it works. You can’t save us, but you can save yourself.’

‘I’ve got to try something. Give me a programming spike.’

Matton drew the device from the pocket of his overalls and handed it to Jonas. ‘It’s up to you, sir, but it’s a bad idea. I should get back in there and tell the men what’s happening.’

‘Tell them I’ll get them out of this,’ Jonas said. ‘I don’t just want to ransom myself. I’ll find a way to save all of us.’

‘Sir, you can’t, so don’t try. I’m not going to go in there and give those people false hope.’

‘Matton—’

‘Sir, you’re more important than us,’ Matton said gently. ‘We’re just tank-borns. Clones. You’re a true-born. Look for a way to save yourself.’

‘You know I don’t think I’m better than you.’

‘Don’t let the men hear you say that.’ Matton put his hand on the lounge door, and then paused. ‘It’s been an honour working with you, sir.’

Jonas nodded sadly. ‘And for me.’

He went up to the nearest servitor and raised the programming spike to the back of its neck, then lowered it again. Matton was right: a straightforward fight would be no good, even as a diversion. He had to think of something else.

When Jonas got back to the bridge, the Remembrance of Clouds had furled its sail into a bud and was firing up its reaction drive. Ayla had put the Dancer on course for a cluster of small rocks where they might be able to hide, but the pirate ship was closing too quickly. The pilot looked up from her concentration as he entered.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘How long?’

‘Just a couple of minutes.’

Without the glare of reflected sunlight from the sail, the Dancer’s scope was able to resolve more details on the Remembrance of Clouds . Some of what Jonas had taken to be repair jobs were actually weapons: he could see dozens of small missile turrets sprouting all over the ship, and something larger, like a launch tube made of industrial piping, built into the nose complex.

His mining outpost on LN-411 had deterred pirates using surface-mounted cannons, but most of the cities with which he traded did not allow armed civilian vessels to approach them, so the Coriolis Dancer itself was unarmed. Normally, the Dancer would only travel to a city when the orbits brought it and LN-411 close enough for it to cross without danger, or when it could join a convoy with an armed escort ship. But a Worldbreaker evacuation meant a breakdown in the normal routine of inter-city commerce. At any time there were hundreds of Worldbreakers starward of the veil. When one of them passed through an inhabited section of one of the belts, the Red Zone of its probable course became thick with unarmed ships making long spins to whatever unthreatened outposts they could reach: rich pickings for any pirate ships nearby. Worldbreakers and pirates both struck rarely enough that true-born ship owners accepted the risk; and since pirates would normally ransom true-borns back to their families, the risk to them was purely financial. It was Jonas and his crew’s bad luck that this pirate had focused on them.