The Privateers

Off time and over budget

The towboat finally showed up and tractor-beamed me and my burned-out, turn-of-the-century ship into its massive cargo hold. They don't ever keep cargo holds pressurized in this business; most merchandise that needs it tends to have the atmospheric controls built in to the crate. A lot of times the crates are more expensive than their contents, but nobody ever notices unless they're damaged enough to trigger the property rights clause in the merchant contracts.

I'd been instructed to stay in my ship. She was only barely holding together by now; the landing skids had been making concerning creaking noises if I shifted in my chair too much, but at least the windows were still sealed. I wanted to stretch my legs, but all I could do was pass the time playing card games on my PDA; like all the other things I owned, it was older than I was.

When we finally arrived at the Lloyd naval base and I was allowed to get off, the boatman pinged me an email with the towing fee. 1,500 credits for the tow, itemized for fuel costs, and "compensation for lost cargo space." I didn't see that he was carrying anything else back there except for me and my husk of a ship. You'd pay that much for a trunk of exotics. Worse, there wasn't a due date attached, so I had no idea when he'd be sending collections agents after me. And collections agents tended to have missiles, these days.

When the nanobots finished looking over my wreck (I could scarcely call it a ship anymore), my PDA once again pinged with an email, my bill for repair and refitting costs. 6,000 credits to replace the lost missile launcher and laser cannon, 750 to load the missile launcher with ammo, 30,000 to replace the burned out shield generator, 20,000 to replace the targeting computer's dead GPU, and 3,500 to replace the alloy hull plating that used to be attached to the side panels. I quit reading before I got to the replacement costs for the wings and afterburners. Strange world we're living in, I mused to myself, when personal protection is more expensive than the stuff it's protecting. I might as well have just scrapped the thing and took out a loan for another one. Assuming anyone in the system would trust anybody enough to sign over a lease.

The bill wasn't getting any smaller (or bigger, I reassured myself), so I went for a stroll through the base. There wasn't much to be done without military clearance, since all but the lowest three decks were locked off to civilians. The local bar, The Exhaust Port, was only considered a bar for 20% of its floor space, with the remaining 80% being a mysterious VIP section that nobody knew anything about (or else very convincingly pretended they didn't).

Even though I couldn't even afford my tow fee, I still insisted on buying a drink. It might loosen me up, I'd been told, but all I'd gotten out of my glass was a headache. Or maybe it was the sound system, which was loud enough that I could barely hear the barkeep, and was likely on fire, judging by the stench of burned speaker foam I smelled every time the music flared up.

I took my egress from the tavern before it erupted in an aural inferno and decided there wasn't much I could do without taking on more missions. And to take on missions, I needed something to fly. The USS Please-Don't-Shoot-Me wouldn't get me very far without wings. Or afterburners. Or shields.

A quick trip to "Debatably Honest Bob's Ship-porium!" later, I learned that my ship was worth more as scrap metal than as a trade-in for another vessel. I'd thrown the dealer for a loop when I immediately asked him my ship's value in scrap iron. First, he laughed in my face. Then, he looked at my ship and laughed again. Finally, as if my heart hadn't sank enough, the dealer looked at me, opened his mouth several times as if to speak, and didn't end up saying anything at all. With a grim expression, he pulled me into his office without much of a word.

The dealer made me an offer that he claimed he'd never had to make before. He told me that most privateers never last long enough to finish making payments on their ships, so he'd never given much thought to financing or credit lines for his customers - cash up front only. In my case, though, I was so badly in the hole for repair costs, and my ship worth so little, that he was willing to let me "start fresh," so to speak. He'd take my ship, scrap anything that couldn't be fixed, get his people to fix anything salvageable and sell it to make up costs, then keep me on retainer to do some odd jobs in one of his spare civvie-shuttles, until he figured I'd worked off the rest of the bill. I figured he was trying to lead me down a slippery slope - plenty of fixers in this sector you couldn't trust to keep their word without some firm writing - but what the hell, I shook his hand and sealed it. I didn't have much of a leg to stand on otherwise. At least I'd still be flying, Bob had said, and not helping "Big John" bolt down thirty-some tungsten plates. But his jobs took priority, per the contract, and I was forbidden from taking on any more kill jobs in his ship until I could afford my own again.

I examined the exterior of Bob's Ships Number 72. She was, somehow, an even older model than the one I just gave up - a passenger shuttle, probably from the late 22nd century. It still had some of the classic checkerboard livery on the folding wings, and a few spots of yellow paint that hadn't flaked off yet from all the solar radiation. Bob and I circled the ship a couple of times, while I listened to him ramble on about the kinds of stuff he'd "rescued" from other junk piles like mine. A taxi like this didn't come with much armor, couldn't pull much in the way of fancy maneuvers, and only had the one gun mount, with the token standard mining laser attached. Thing was cheap enough, he said, that he had a literal pile of them in the warehouse from people wanting anything more powerful.

As we climbed into the cockpit, my ears picked up a familiar, very faint, high-pitched squeal. It was the noise of my old cathode-tube display, still stuck in its text-only fallback mode. Bob told me it was better than nothing. Nobody would buy back a targeting computer that was permanently stuck in debug mode, after all. I tried not to act too excited for him. I'd gotten so used to reading the amber-scale text output that I almost thought a graphical radar was cheating. I tried to ignore the missing access panels and pieces of dashboard.

I settled in to the familiar pilot's chair on the right side of the cockpit and buckled in. On my left was an empty chair with no controls in front of it, and a couple other chairs bolted to the walls behind it. Room for three. It almost made up for the lack of cargo hold. Maybe I wasn't going to be pulling big merchant hauls with this thing like I'd been doing in the USS Please-Don't-Shoot-Me, but maybe a rich fixer wanted a ride once in a while and would be able to bolster whatever Bob was going to be paying me. I could dream.

I hadn't noticed Bob stepping out the access ramp, but I could only figure he was the one ringing me right now. I picked up the familiar mic off the monitor bracket and keyed it up.

It felt like driving somebody else's car. The seat felt wrong, like it was conforming to the wrong kind of body. I couldn't place what I was smelling, but it was a kind of acrid smell hanging in the air around my head. The cockpit panels that existed had been turning yellow and brown over the years. Her handling didn't feel quite right, like she would yaw right more easily than left. The thrusters kept lurching and popping. She held her speed well enough, though, and if I stayed out of trouble, the lack of shields wasn't going to be a problem.

Maybe the ruffians and marauders would leave me alone if they knew I couldn't carry anything valuable.