Weekly Drabble #346 - The Adventures of Scamper: The Ahab Chronicles, Part 2 (Patreon)

This week's prompt is from dennis with 'cat' and a little bit of 'tale as old as time'. I didn't get as much of the cat in as I wanted, but it's the thought that counts, right?

~

The Adventures of Scamper: The Ahab Chronicles, Part 2

“Wait,” Sklyer called as Harstyn walked towards the doors. “I don’t have any clothes.”

The Judiciary looked back at her as if realizing that. “Valerhas’s synthesizers will need a body scan to make something suitable for your species,” he replied. “If you wish to take the time to do so, you may. I do not intend to delay. If you want to witness the event as well, a shawl will do.”

“What event?” Sklyer called out, but the larger man was already through the doors. She froze in indecision for a moment. Luckily, she quickly found a large safety pin and used it to fasten the blanket around her shoulders, using her left hand to hold it closed at her waist.

Despite his awkward gait, Valerhas’s leader had made good time, but even slowed by her injuries, Skyler quickly caught up to him, her makeshift cloak fluttering and dragging behind her, and making her conscious of tripping over it. “What event?” she asked breathlessly. She was used to running errands up and down the high-g length of Gohenghist, but her concussion and sore ribs made even this exertion wearing. Lacking in-floor heating, the deck was cooler than normal on her bare feet, but not painfully so.

Harstyn reached a lift car, opening the doors and waiting for his small companion to board alongside him. “You shall see,” he said. His demeanour had shifted. There was a hardness to it, something boiling under the surface. He wasn’t even looking at Skyler.

Abruptly aware that she was alone with a stranger on a completely unknown ship, Skyler pulled the blanket tighter around her as if it could offer any protection. As the lift car sped through Valerhas’s decks, Harstyn’s breathing became deeper and more pronounced. His larger primary arms, each longer and thicker than one of Skyler’s legs, stiffened as muscles flexed beneath the pale-furred grey skin. He looked like he was preparing himself for something unpleasant.

Half-expecting the lift car to arrive at some horrible fate intended for her, Skyler was both surprised and relieved when they opened into a short hallway that led down to the ship’s bridge. On one side was the leader’s office and an emergency supply cabinet. On the other were doors that read ‘lead scientific advisor’s station’ and ‘direct data processing/analysis’. She’d never seen a freighter or mining vessel with those so close to command. Normally it was the quartermaster, chief of operations or lead geologist.

Harstyn pulled a code cylinder out from one of the pockets on his work suit and slid it into the waiting receptacle next to the bridge doors, tapping in a confirmation code on the keypad. That level of security was unusual, too. Gohenghist had just used access cards for secure sections.

The doors opened and the woman blinked. Instead of the activity of a normal vessel’s command deck – officers, specialists and crew of various ranks sitting at their stations, there were only two other people on Valerhas’s bridge. A Steersman was sitting at a combined Helm/Navigation console and there was a Thoughtful at a sizable U-shaped console. From the glance Sklyer got as she approached, it appeared to be a combination of Operations, Scopes and a scientific workstation.

The Thoughtful was the first to speak, she didn’t look up from her instruments. “I thought you were going to leave the animal in a pen.”

Harstyn grunted from deep in his throat as he stepped down to the ship’s command throne, but he didn’t sit in it, standing just before the large chair. “She wanted to see.”

“You invited her.”

Another grunt, this one closer in pitch and tone to a Thoughtful’s fluting, chirping accent. Judiciary vocal cords and tongues were extremely flexible, giving them the ability to emulate many different languages.

The Thoughtful paused to look at Skyler out of the corner of her right eye. “Does it have a name?”

“Everyone on Gohenghist called me Scamper,” the human mumbled, trying to process everything at once. “But my name is-”

“Do not touch anything, ‘Scamper’,” the Thoughtful interrupted. “And it would be a courtesy if you refrained from speaking as well.”

“You may speak if you feel the need,” Harstyn corrected, though he still wasn’t looking at her, “provided you are not disruptive. Ashi’wi does not like interruptions in work at the best of times, and we have never before witnessed a feeding event from this perspective.”

“Feeding event?” The more Sklyer learned, the more confused she got. What was happening here?

No one answered her. She stepped off the walkway that encircled Valerhas’s bridge, onto the operations deck. There were multiple viewscreens on the walls and large, clear viewpanels mounted above several of the terminals. Not a single unmanned station was shut down; they were all running. Most of the ship appeared to be automated. She was about to ask about that when her attention finally settled on the main viewscreen.

On it, backlit by the light of the system’s large, bright star, was another ship. Not the blocky, insect-limbed Gohenghist that had been her home for the last three years, but another vessel. The fear that she’d actually been recovered by the people that murdered her crew vanished as she saw the other ship for the first time. It was almost as large as Gohenghist, but lighter in frame. It had three blocky sections mounted below the crew and cargo section; processing, refinement and production modules. Asteroids and planetary fragments would be fed through them in sequence, turning crude rock fragments into cargo holds filled with valuable metals.

The dorsal surface was covered with guns. At least, as much as any civilian craft of that size could legally carry. And the engine section was larger than most mining ships, but it wasn’t the sublights that were responsible for that additional mass. The vessel carried a very robust shock drive. “It’s a claim-jumper,” she mumbled. Though the other ship was nearly four kilometers long, it was dwarfed by the massive asteroid it was slowly approaching, a planetoid nearly forty kilometers across, thirty wide and high.

Harstyn tilted his head towards her, focusing more with his high-set eyes. “Claim-jumper?”

“Anyone who jumps on a prospective site before you can,” Skyler said. “In an unincorporated system, the first one to set up a ‘recognizable, functioning and productive process’ within a specific area like a moon or section of an asteroid field has legal standing over all resource extraction and exploitation within that region.” You couldn’t just hack a chunk out of an asteroid or scoop up a bellyful of a gas giant’s clouds and stake a claim, nor you could drop a pile of scrap machines onto a planet’s surface and say it was yours. The Compact’s legal system required that ‘recognizable, functioning and productive process’ before any claim could be considered. “A claim-jumper will let someone else do the work of searching and surveying and either beat them to the system and set up shop on the most valuable sites, or chase them off when they get there.”

“Or kill them,” Harstyn rumbled.

“Or kill them,” Skyler confirmed. It wasn’t normal by any stretch of the imagination, but a system that mining megacorps’ didn’t already have their hooks into could be worth a fortune to an independent miner or smaller company. Gohenghist had been contractors working for a minor interstellar concern, sent out to confirm the original survey reports and plant the company’s sigil. There’d have been massive bonuses for them if they could do so before anyone else. This system was obscenely rich in mineral wealth, and there was a lot of money on the line.

Someone else had obviously agreed. There could be no troublesome legal battles if your competitors never survived long enough to get to court. By the time Gohenghist’s client sent another ship to investigate, the claim-jumpers would be firmly established here. They were already preparing to stake out their territory, moving closer to the massive asteroid before them. Save for the outer layer of cosmic dust and a few surface imperfections, it was nearly pure iridium. A fortune. The bonus from securing it, let alone their cut of production would have set every soul on Gohenghist up for life and they’d made it their first target for resource extraction.

The leader’s throat pulsed, this time swelling out to the sides in a Judiciary’s version of affirmation or acknowledgement. “Distance?”

“Target is three hundred and seven thousand kilometers. Prey item is three hundred, twenty-six thousand kilometers and closing on target.”

“Helm.”

“Holding position outside real-time range.”

“Do not cross that limit.”

“I am aware, patron. We are holding outside three hundred thousand kilometers from the target.”

Skyler’s confusion increased as she looked from the readouts on the Thoughtful’s screens. The distances were all wrong. The claim-jumper was three hundred and twenty-six (twenty-five now) from Valerhas, which made it the ‘prey item’. The ‘target’ was the asteroid itself. Was Valerhas was going to counter-jump the first ship? Why would they have brought her aboard, then? She wasn’t only a witness, but a complication. Maybe they wanted her to claim this was an act of self-defence? If they were counting on her loyalty to her old crew to lie for them, they’d made the right bet.

But then what was all that about a “feeding event”? What was going on?

“How are you getting this close without them seeing you?” she asked instead.

Harstyn nodded again, but it took him several seconds to answer. “Valerhas has a unique ancestry,” he grunted.

That didn’t explain anything. “You said Gohenghist would have been killed regardless. Do you mean you would have done that?” Maybe she was on a ship of murderers after all.

The Judiciary held up his left hand, palm towards her in a gesture for silence. “Watch,” he told her, his eyes fixed to the screens and glinting with a disturbing, baleful intensity. “It’s about to happen.”

Skyler fell silent, watching the screens as the leader bid her, unaware that this would be her first encounter with the thing she would come to know as Moby.