Weekly Drabble #283: TLA, Pets Pt. 3 (Patreon)

With the prompt of 'whispers in the dark' from Henri Black, we return to our story about two children seeking independence from their family... and what has been happening in the background as they make their way in the world.

Enjoy!

~

Pets, Part 3

The second time was when it whispered to them.

Sky Spider was on deep-range patrol. The Hunter’s Family claimed a wide area within and outside the Kaedan Vault, with several merchant and trade guilds paying protection money to the Unbound. For the ships and fleets that operated in these regions that didn’t offer tribute, “inspections” sometimes were called for. Just to make sure those vessels weren’t running anything that could endanger the Family’s “nieces and nephews”. At least, Jivek called them inspections. The targeted crews called them piracy.

In regions where the locals didn’t pay or in systems contested by other clans, inspections were far more common, but this far into the Vault, there wasn’t much to find. Only dead space and worlds left abandoned. It was a lot of territory for a single small ship to cover, and the odds of finding anything were low.

Jivek and much of the Family were preparing for a rich score. They’d gotten a tip about a colony resupply convoy coming into the sector, including information on its route. While a convoy would be a large mouthful for the clan, Kiinil was a clever leader. The Hunter’s Family had taken prizes like this before, separating one or two fat, full transports from their escorts and making off with them before the defenders could interfere.

Some Unbound would transfer the goods to their own ships – a process made easier if the prey ship had modular cargo pods – but if the prey vessel was still flightworthy, it was often more expedient to send a prize crew over and escape with the entire ship. The cargo would be sold, while the ship and its most important crew and passengers would be ransomed. Non-vital personnel were usually set adrift in saviour pods and shuttles to be picked up by their comrades. There was no need to waste money and supplies on keeping them for, at best, middling rewards.

Very few Unbound cartels committed wholesale massacres of captured crews; there were few better ways of making every ‘inspection’ as costly as possible than ensuring that the souls aboard prey ships knew that they were going to be killed no matter what they did. They might as well fight and hope for an unlikely victory, or even self-destruct once you got in close enough. What other choice had you given them?

Not that there wouldn’t be killings. The crews of vessels who fought and lost might be slaughtered or ritually decimated, halved or sixth-seventh, but this was a matter of discipline rather than wanton bloody-mindedness. It was a lesson to any other spacers than the Unbound would encounter in the future. Surrender and be treated fairly. Resist and face the consequences.

There was a parallel in that lesson to the one both Caitlin and Calvin had recently been taught. Again.

Caitlin looked over at her brother. His left eye was still covered by a bandage. He’d crossed father. The Pedlar was stern with his underlings and adopted children alike. He didn’t tolerate back-talk or ingratitude and Calvin had, again, asked one too many questions about their original parents. It was a bad trait of his that she couldn’t talk him out of. The young woman unconsciously touched her own eye socket as if it was the one that had felt their father’s fist, just as Calvin, without even looking at his sister, touched the right side of his jaw as if that part of his face was as bruised as Caitlin’s.

She’d tried to get between her brother and father, but insubordination was another thing their father had no patience for. He’d fractured her jaw, and Calvin’s orbit. Once the medic had seen to them, he’d sent them out on this varak chase as an additional punishment. ‘Picking a tick’ was the Pedlar expression for getting someone out of your hair. As the twins had grown up, Jivek had been picking a lot of ticks.

While the rest of the Family would be sacking a convoy and glutting themselves on plunder, Jivek’s children were consigned to the edge of nowhere looking for ships that didn’t come here. At one point, they did. This system, one of many in the Vault denoted only by a string of numbers and letters, was along a well-charted route that led to the heart of the Kaedan Vault, but there were few colonies in the local celestial neighbourhood. The route came too close to 12/S12-3833. The systems nearest that one had been inhabited at one point; now the only thing that lived on those worlds were ghosts. Too many accidents and disappearances had convinced the colonists that remained to move to less unstable homes – often out of the Vault entirely.

Some said that was the work of the Space Force, creating rumours of vanishing populations and instigating the hauntings on their own. Often times, rumour worked better at keeping people out than a locked door and this campaign was just another layer of security for 12/S12-3833. Those who believed that the Watchers owned that system claimed that the enigmatic species had taken the colonists for seeing or potentially seeing too much. Some even insisted that it was from such populations that new Watchers were made – you could pick your story as to how that might work.

Regardless of the truth, there was a wall of silence around 12/S12-3833 that few dared break. Those who did claimed the most fanciful of finds or simply vanished themselves. Calvin had no intention of joining those ranks today, tomorrow or at any point in the future, but the mystery intrigued him. There were answers out there to the secrets the Kaedan Vault held, just like there were to the truth of their real parents.

His fingers tapped twice on the right arm of his throne. There were... contradictions in their father’s accounting of events, ones that he’d become more aware of over the years. Stories from the rest of the Family, comments they made when they thought he couldn’t hear or understand. Little cracks and discontinuities that didn’t add up.

He’d passed them off for a long time, but they’d always niggled and nagged at him. Caitlin didn’t see them and if she did, she dismissed it saying ‘it was a long time ago’, insisting that nobody’s memory of those events would be perfect. Half the contradictions came from older members of the Family who’d spent the intervening years imbibing, smoking or injecting various narcotics – with all the side effects that such long-term use carried with it. To her, Jivek was their father and not the people who’d abandoned them in a dumpster and she didn’t understand why he needed to dig up the past.

Calvin couldn’t really explain it, either. He just knew there was something wrong, just like he’d felt it that day with Breclinson. That was something else that they didn’t talk about. Caitlin didn’t believe the stories around the Vault. To be fair, most of them were bullshit. But there was something off about this sector, something that made even hardened, well-travelled spacers take gossip seriously and otherwise brave, boisterous men and women grow quiet.

Don’t listen to the songs.

“How long are we supposed to be out here?” Caitlin complained.

“Until we find something,” he said. Caitlin always had to be in motion. The only time she was still was when she was she was sleeping. When they’d been younger, she’d only be quiet when she could be with him, the young boy reading to his twin from one of the handful of children’s books they’d been allowed, or that he managed to steal. Father had said he didn’t want them to grow to be soft and useless like other Broken. He’d always figured out whenever Calvin had gotten his hands on something new, but if the boy could steal it without being noticed, Jivek would allow him to keep it. Just as when Caitlin had beaten down one of the other children in the Family; she’d taken a beating the first time and come back with a crowbar.

The boy’s father had come to Jivek demanding that Caitlin be punished. The Family’s patriarch had laughed in his subordinate’s face, pleased with his adopted daughter’s viciousness and cunning. “Your boy was stupid not to see what my girl was. He picked a fight without realizing not all Broken are mewling slugs. He’ll live and he’ll be smarter for it. Some things that look like prey will bite you back. It’s a good lesson to learn,” he’d told the other man. He’d thrown a knowing smile at Calvin, fully aware that Caitlin hadn’t been the one to unlock the tool chest and get the improvised weapon out of it, nor the one to know when the other boy would be alone.

Some of the others in the clan called Calvin a gelding, but that was fine with him. Let them. Out of all the Family, only Caitlin and Jivek really understood how dangerous the quiet young man could be. That had saved his life more than once. The first time had been when one of the other youths decided to remove an annoyance, not realizing that Calvin had been ready for him and that he didn’t need his sister to fight his battles. She just liked to, often sharing a quick grin with her brother before entering the fray.

So while Caitlin paced as a restless ball of energy, Calvin was still and quiet on the bridge, showing no signs of his own boredom and irritation. “This system is dead,” he finally announced. “Let’s move on to the next.”

Hopefully there’d be something interesting there. If not, this was going to be a very boring punishment. Which was, he assumed, part of the point.

~

“I’ve got something,” Comms reported. They were seven hours into their sweep. This system had once been home to several small mining colonies. One had disappeared several centuries ago after reporting some kind of discovery. The others were abandoned shortly thereafter, the colonists relocated to another system. No one was sure what had happened here, but that was a very familiar ending to any of the Vault’s mysteries. “Very weak signal. I can’t make much of it out.”

“Play it,” Caitlin ordered, tilting her head as a scratchy, staticky sound filled the bridge. It sounded like voices overlaid with machine language, like a voice transmission and telemetry were bleeding over one another. The language was Compact Standard, but she could pick up a few words from another language in there. It sounded like Prolocutor, but she didn’t know much of that tongue. She looked over at her brother. Calvin’s brow was furrowed in concentration, but he couldn’t follow much through the interference, either.

“Can you clean that up?” Caitlin asked their comm officer, already aware of what her brother was about to ask.

“Working,” Yanloladaughter affirmed. “Trying to screen out the worst of it, but it’s pretty heavily garbled. Trying a new algorithm... there, that should be most of the interference.”

The voice was still faint, fading in and out but it was marginally more audible now. Calvin frowned as he listened carefully, reading the computer’s transcript. “It sounds like a prospector,” he said at last. “It’s a comm request for an update from someone else on their find.”

That got Caitlin’s attention. “Find?”

He nodded. “It’s a low-power signal from a shitty transmitter, but I think what we’ve got are some wildcat miners.” Ever since the original colonies were cleared out, all resource extraction and exploitation here fell under the remit of the Ryal-Valo Consortium, a long-defunct company whose licenses and territories were scattered between several different highly litigious concerns with no interest in allowing anyone else to romp around their territory, even if they couldn’t or wouldn’t use it themselves.

Several of the moons and planets were still orbited by centuries-old sentry satellites, all of them long dead and not even worth stripping for parts. The site of the first disappeared colony was a toxic, lifeless hellscape choked by radiation and chemical soup when untended power sources and mining equipment ran amok. Even centuries later, the planetoid was still uninhabitable.

Occasionally, some enterprising soul would decide to skip the quagmire involved in legally settling within the system and establish a squatter’s colony. None of them had latest long. Most pulled up stakes, citing various reasons. At least two had suffered fates similar to the first colony and simply vanished, but it wasn’t unheard to find someone trying to scratch up a hold full of raw, valuable ores in an otherwise abandoned system.

Calvin met his sister’s eyes. A wildcat miner was the perfect prey for Sky Spider, and the perfect tribute to bring back to their father after being sent out here. “Do we have a source on that transmission?” he asked.

“Unknown at present. Permission to deploy drones?” Sky Spider was a small ship and it carried only a single courier drone – that father had said had better only be used in the most dire of emergencies, else its cost was coming out of the twins’ hides – and four small sensor drones. Civilian ships didn’t usually carry the latter... but Unbound vessels hunting for prey would. It was a mark of the Family’s success that they had those available, but even then they were difficult to replace and generally only deployed when absolutely necessary.

Triangulating the source of a radio transmission qualified there. Calvin looked over at Caitlin. Sky Spider’s co-leader gave him a single brief nod. Aboard ship, Calvin usually took the lead, but he didn’t disregard his twin’s opinions. “Deploy them,” he ordered. The ship was already running under emissions control, but he gave the order to cut thrust and further reduce signal leakage. It was time to hunt.

Caitlin circled the bridge at a slower, more measured pace as the small recon platforms boosted away from the corvette. She bit her lower lip. “Run fast, little mice,” she whispered to herself. “See what you can bring us.”

“We’ll let them do the heavy lifting,” she said after a few moments. “They can finish mining and once they’re done and outbound-”

“-we’ll pounce on them once they’re committed to the course,” Calvin finished. “We don’t have the cargo space, so we’ll put a prize crew aboard.” Wildcatters were usually self-owned ships, so there likely wasn’t anyone to ransom the ship and crew back to. Once the Family had the cargo, they’d let the crew go on their way. If they behaved, they’d be left enough of a cut to cover their expenses. If they didn’t, then the Family would have their fleet grow by one ship.

“Additional signals detected,” Comms reported after some time had passed. “Trying to clean it up and boost.”

“Did you get the source triangulated?”

“I believe so. That’s coming next.”

This one sounded like a reply from the mining site, but it was just as patchy and disordered as the first signal. “Whoever’s out there,” Caitlin complained. “They’ve got real crap gear.”

“And here I expected an illegal mining operation desperate enough to operate out here to have state of the art tech,” Calvin joked.

Caitlin made a face and a yak-yak-yak gesture with her left hand, then pantomimed slapping it with her right. “They better have good digging equipment and a big hold. Coming back with a starved alna is worse than coming back with nothing at all.”

Comms brought the suspected origin points of the signals up; one was orbiting the innermost gas giant and the other was its largest moon, the site of one of the abandoned colonies. The moon was three and a half thousand kilometers in diameter. Records suggested it was a fragment of one of the rocky inner worlds that broke away late enough in formation to still be rich in heavy metals, but not enough that the planet or moon were completely wrecked by whatever event had torn it apart. Captured by the gas giant’s gravity, it had become a strange sentinel ever since, waiting for someone to come along and harvest its riches.

That appeared to be whoever these miners were doing, but harvesting was one thing. Keeping that wealth... well, that was quite another. Sometimes you were the wolf and sometimes you were the keb’esh. Caitlin and Calvin never wanted to be the keb’esh. That was why they’d been thrown away like garbage. Father had made them wolves.

“That,” Caitlin whistled. “Is a big boy.”

Calvin nodded along with his twin sister’s assessment. As Sky Spider crept in-system so too were its recon drones closing with the prey. They were getting some images of the mining ship. The vessel looked exactly what they expected a wildcat miner to look like: worn paint, obvious signs of jury-rigged repairs and though the wildcatter was obviously functional, it had definitely seen better days. It was also huge. At least three kilometers long, it had to be nearly a hundred times the corvette’s mass, but size wasn’t everything. Sky Spider certainly outgunned it; most of the miner’s mass was taken up by cargo holds and onboard processing equipment. A ship like that didn’t just carve up asteroids, but it could land prefab complexes for planetary extraction operations and carry out preliminary purification and refining within its hull.

It might have a large crew to go with that, but none of them would be soldiers. The corvette would be able to pacify that ship easily and bring it back to the Family. A haul like this would be almost as much as whatever father would take from the convoy raid.

“Let’s keep it slow,” Calvin insisted. “We don’t want to spook them. Let’s give them all the time they need to fill their holds before we introduce ourselves.”

Caitlin nodded. She was always ready to leap feet-first, but in situations where there was a clear goal in sight, she could be as patient as her brother. “Any sign they’ve detected us?”

“None so far,” Scopes reported.

“Then let’s keep it that way, just like Calvin said. Slow and steady.” She sat down in her own command throne, looking over at her brother. “This’ll be fun.”

Calvin smiled back, but it wouldn’t be long before they knew this mission was going to be much more interesting than they’d hoped... and not at all in the manner they wanted.