The Privateers

Expendable

The SLCN Midway was effectively a ghost ship now. The crew had abandoned ship in minutes, with the kind of efficiency only attained by relentless drilling and rehearsal. All of the merchants, mercs, and other pilots had taken off to space as soon as the alarms went off. Florian's Tavern was nearly empty. Only two other people remained among the overturned tables, chairs, and telltale signs of a sudden evacuation - the bartender, cowering behind the bar with a can of New Harvard Lager in hand...and Lucia, staring at a tiny package the size of a roll of film.

I tried asking her what the problem was, and she shushed me by holding up one finger, continuing to stare at the tiny canister. As I carefully approached, I saw four characters etched into the side of the can - E400. Then I stepped around it and noticed that the can had some wires protruding from it, and those wires were connected to a PDA which was displaying garbage on the screen...and a timer, with 30 minutes remaining (and counting).

E400... an element that had gone without a name for long enough that it just started going by its number instead. Science had - slightly - figured out that, with proper catalyst, a particle of E400 would form a "worm-cloud." Less of a hole, more of a big blue poofy mass that'd fling anything inside it in a given direction, very, very fast. Every jump gate in the system operated on the stuff; every "jump drive" installed on a ship wasn't so much powering the ship as it was interfacing with the gate and catalyzing a worm-cloud on demand. This, of course, needed to be done extremely carefully; you wanted to make sure that, among other things, all of the bits of your ship would be flung in the same direction, and that the worm-cloud would be large enough to cover the whole thing.

The little film-can on the table looked like it had room for far more than just one particle. I knew what the problem was now - that little film-roll was the cause of our bomb threat. If this canister of E400 were to be catalyzed, the resulting uncontained reaction would fling the SLCN Midway in about a hundred different directions at once. And of course, that went just as much for the three of us left on board. I had no intention of winding up on the other end of fringe space in pieces.

The bartender had evidently accepted his fate and opted to go down with the ship, but I wasn't about to let anybody die on my watch, so I pulled him up and dragged him out from behind the bar. He could barely stand, likely because he was on his fifth can of NHL. By the time I'd made it back to Lucia, she'd brought out a pair of wirecutters and her own PDA. My desperate plea for her to forget about the bomb was ignored. I called her crazy, and she ignored that too. It was only when I brought out my rather colorful repertoire of swears that she broke her gaze from the bomb and pulled her tranquilizer pistol to my face. I instinctively put my hands up - dropping the bartender on the blue carpet - even though I already knew the thing only fired anesthetics.

At this point I tried to reason with her. I told her I knew she wasn't a bomb technician, that she was obviously just going to guess at the procedure. Her response was that there was a 50/50 chance that she'd detonate the thing in the process, but since the Midway was already evacuated, the only people caught in the blast would be the three of us. The SLC had written the Midway off as a loss the moment that the bomb threat had reached the top brass, she figured, hence the evacuation order, as opposed to SLC sending a bomb squad.

I had an alternative idea, though; one that might have a better possibility of working, with a potentially good side-effect. As soon as I'd given her the brief, she agreed - trying to move the explosion away from the Midway was likely a lot easier than trying to stop it. With just 20 minutes left on that PDA's timer, we set to work.

I grabbed a nearby bar stool and set it next to Lucia. We both took the E400 canister and the PDA and moved them slowly to the top of the stool, careful not to let the components separate or jostle too much. She happened to have a roll of tape on her, so we secured the thing in place, maybe a bit too well. We carried the chair to where Lucia's ship was parked and stuck the entire thing down the barrel of one of her missile launchers. Quickly, we boarded her ship, with me uncomfortably cramming myself into a passenger seat that I was slightly too tall for. We needed to get a bit of distance from the Midway, but once we did, Lucia aimed the ship at a random part of empty space, and squeezed the trigger. The bar stool came right out, firmly stuck to the nose cone of one of her EMP missiles, and jetted off at about a kilometer a second.

Then, right on cue, a dazzling flash of bright blue light filled the viewport windows. A massive burst of blue, brighter than the busiest jump-gate in town, left me a bit dizzy from looking directly at it. It eventually collapsed on itself, leaving nothing but a cloud of blue dust.

It didn't take long for Lucia's vidcomm button to start blinking at her, with an audible tone that was as familiar as a popular song, though I couldn't place which one. She bashed the thing with her fist, revealing a chiseled and intimidating face on the monitor next to it. I wasn't used to seeing actual video on my vidcomm anymore. A tiny LCD screen below the monitor performed a live transcript as the man on screen spoke in an authoritative Old Texan drawl.

God damn, it's really unnerving to see this thing type out what you're saying while you're still talking...even more so when you notice it doesn't even bother to name you.

She smashed the button on her vidcomm again, causing the man to disappear amid a mass of white noise. I really hoped at this point that we weren't going to be branded as terrorists after what we did.

Back at Florian's Tavern, the drunk bartender was doing his best to continue serving drinks to the rather well-dressed SLC officers at the bar, despite the fact that the only reason he was continuing to stand was because he was leaning on the bar. He'd evidently mixed a little too much vodka into one White Russian, causing one of the lower-ranking officers to nearly gag on it. Light-weight.

The commander in charge noticed Lucia approaching, paying me little mind, and stood up. He was a tall sort of guy, probably six-three, and had the stature of a proper military man. He was probably bald under that officer's cap. Before he started talking, he nudged his science officer and instructed him to start logging. The nervous underling pulled a PDA - fancier one than I'd gotten, I had to admit - and tapped the screen a few times.

He was all business. A man not yet soured on Coalition service, I had to figure. Lucia wordlessly extracted her pilot card and laid it on the table; I did, too. Marston still didn't seem particularly interested in me, but he slid both cards over to his science officer.

Without saying anything else, I pulled a small mahogany case out of my jacket pocket and slapped it on the table in front of him with a wooden "plunk." He glanced at it and almost looked more pissed off than he did before I'd said anything. In utter disbelief, he popped the case open, revealing what I'd kept in it: the Colonel's Eagle that had once been pinned to the shoulder of my Coalition uniform.

He carefully pulled the Colonel's Eagle from its indentation in the case and had one of his other underlings run the serial number on its backside. When he was told that it was legitimate, and beyond that, shown the photo identification attached to it, he slammed the table with his hands, hard enough to make all of his entourage jump slightly.

Before anybody else could say anything, I grabbed the case back from Marston, took Lucia's hand, and dragged her back towards the docking bays. She wasn't thrilled with the idea, but there was little else to do. If either of us stayed there, Marston would find some way to detain one or both of us.

And I knew I'd have a lot of explaining to do to Lucia, as soon as we were out of earshot.