The Privateers

Like a big ol' rock

Energy needs were just too high, I'd been told. The lack of aerodynamics meant the thing would never be able to get back off planet, if we were ever so unfortunate as to land on one. And we couldn't compensate with extra outboard thrusters or solar sails, because that'd be too obvious. I didn't look at it as limitations. I saw it as a challenge. A bit like 20th century submarines in space, really. The silent service. Except instead of hiding beneath the waves, we were all crammed into a hollowed-out asteroid, something like 20 cubic miles. Technically we were a space station. But unlike most of the mining bases, the whole point was that we still looked like a big ol' rock. Just had to hope nobody tried to mine us for tungsten, or anything like that.

We'd come to refer to this space-boulder as Caiaphas Station. I'm not sure who came up with the name. I vaguely recalled it being Biblical, but I confess, I hadn't done much reading to know exactly from where. As the station commander of sorts (albeit, since we weren't proper navy or colony, the rank meant nothing), I was in charge of balancing our assets and resources, but also, I was the one that decided where we went. Because despite being a big-ass rock in space, we did have some maneuverability. Couldn't exactly jump, or cruise, without drawing tons of attention, but we were still able to get around in the neighborhood. Point us in the right direction, squeeze out a few bursts of thrust with whatever burner fuel we have on hand, and then let the momentum take care of the rest. As long as we stayed clear enough of the planets, we'd be across the solar system in a few weeks. With some skillful application of all of our jury-rigged maneuvering thrusters, I could even slot us into orbit around Saturn or something.

But as skillful as I was, I wasn't so great at dealing with people...least of all, the kind of people who'd live in an asteroid.

Caiaphas Station was home to a lot of people that didn't have anywhere else to go. The people who couldn't show their faces in Coalition-controlled space ever again. I'd done a fair job of keeping the more notable groups away; religious terrorists were not welcome, nor was anybody who trafficked in hijacked Coalition ships. We'd had a very uncomfortable half-a-year when pirates of the Red Chasm were lodging with us, but eventually even my crew - reluctant as they were to turn away anybody with a reason to stay - got so sick of them freeloading and wrecking the pub that they banded together and jettisoned the lot of them, bright-red-colored ships and all.

Which was why I was confused, and upset, about the latest drain on our resources. We'd had a lot of freak power failures recently, and our stock of fossil fuels was starting to run low enough that I wouldn't be able to bring us to a stop with counter-thrust if the station got moving too fast. I got to asking around. Normally I didn't care who was doing what, as long as my people weren't literally killing each other. But it didn't take long for Paterson, my engineer, to spill the beans. He was mad. He had to take it out on someone.

"Commander, I gotta level with you. You got any idea how many ticking time-bombs we have on ice in G Storage?" he'd said, over drinks.

"Not literal time-bombs, I should hope."

Paterson pulled aside his collar and showed me some bruises around his neck. "You know when the power went out yesterday? One of Howard's damn cryo-pods went into emergency release."

"They don't usually revive fast enough to do any damage," I reasoned. "What happened to you?"

"Someone got smart and pulled their eject lever while I was busy cranking away at the power panel. Friggin' Beasley was distracting me, yellin' at me to fix the damn power and I didn't notice they were right behind me." Come to think of it, his voice sounded pretty awful. I'd thought it was just a cold, but whoever got him must have grabbed him pretty tight.

"Didn't someone pull the alarm?"

"Who the hell do you think?" Paterson slammed his cup on the table. "Beasley was the first to show up and told me to quit wasting his time! Couldn't speak up enough to tell 'em otherwise!"

I made a mental note to take a more serious look at my security staff. "I haven't been down in G Storage in a while. Cryo-pods, you say? What for?"

"Yeah, Howard's damn idiot money-making scheme."

"Not selling them as slaves, I hope." One of the few things I refused to tolerate on board Caiaphas. Just because none of us were privileged enough to fit in society didn't mean we needed to create another class of people even worse off than we were.

"No. Whole point of 'em is to keep 'em alive, he says. They're rich fucks from all walks of life. 'Cept most of em ain't got valuables or physical assets. Most of 'em are Earthers with stock portfolios or just a lot of cash in the bank. If they die, all that goes away, gets passed on to their next of kin or donated to whatever megacorpo they worked with." The more Paterson explained it, the more I could tell he never liked the idea to begin with. "Keep 'em alive, though, we keep their neural fingerprints fresh to authorize whatever bank transactions we need. Within reason, he says to me."

"Worse than slavery. At least slaves can think."

"Yeah, well, these people are pretty capable of thinking as soon as the freezers fail." Paterson pointed at his neck again. "Like thinking they can escape."

Paterson was valuable to me. Good engineers were hard to keep around, so high the demand was for their talents, and it sounded like he'd known about this cryo-bank scheme for a long time, maybe he was even complicit in it. But this sounded very bad. If one person was able to escape their cryo-pod, make it off the station without me or my security people finding them, who was to say it couldn't happen again? Especially with how power-hungry those things were... I needed to make an unpopular decision.

"Something's got to be done about the pods. They're too dangerous to us."

"Friggin' thank you."

"Go get Beasley, tell him to bring his staff to me. I want to revive everyone Howard's got on ice, but I want to do it in a way where they won't just run off. We'll need to release them one at a time, carefully, and make sure none of them figure out what this place is or what Howard's been doing to them."

Paterson's face soured. "You're gonna make me talk to..."

"Alright, maybe not you, then." I grabbed the old vice-commodore's skipper hat from the table and laid it on my head. "I'll talk to Beasley and get Security together. You see if you can scare up an operations manual for those pods. Then we confront Howard together. What he's doing goes against the few rules I've ever had about this place. I don't care how good the money is."