Starship Repo Ch 5-6 (Patreon)

Didn't get quite as much done today as I had hoped, but I had to do a little extra planning for the short arc that's happening. I know where we're going, but finding out how we get there is most of the fun!

I'm not completely happy with the scene at the end of chapter 6 - I think in a later draft it will probably get a little more complicated. For now it works though!

I'd still love to get as many comments as you folks feel like giving. Feedback is super useful as I power through a short term project like this and also keeps me motivated.

Cheers!

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Chapter 5

Superlight

A third all-hands crew meeting within six hours, even if the crew was only four beings deep, never boded well for a ship's situation.

“I know it means that we’re not doing what we were ordered to do,” Rake continued his explanation, mostly talking to Brick. “But it is a distress call and we’re allowed to break orders to check them out.”

Brick sighed, his shoulders slumping down as he rolled his head back to look up at the ceiling of the main room. “Your father generally expects a salvage fee to be made when his crews go to a distress call, and unless we get way lucky…” He sat up again, holding out one of his big hands towards Emerald. “Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t do this. Even if it wasn’t your sister, it’s the right thing to do. It’s just also very out of the way, and the distress call does say they came under fire. What’s our plan for that?”

Rake chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment as he considered the problem that he’d been grappling with as well. “Well… I thought we might just, y’know… wing it.”

“Wing it?” Brick asked.

“To be fair, we don’t know what opened fire on them,” Emerald said. “UEN science vessels aren’t known for being particularly well-armed, though they are highly durable. And they’re out in a farflung system that’s flagged as dangerous. It’s possible they stumbled across some ancient automated defensive system or something.”

“Or maybe it’s pirates!” Widget said, making the possibility sound exciting rather than dread-inducing like the others felt.

“Let’s hope it’s not pirates,” Rake said. “They could’ve also come up against another military vessel. The Vexin Conglomerate controls most of the space rimward of the Cluster, right? Or it could have been one of the big mining Corps that have been working the system and don’t want the UEN to know.”

“Neither of those options actually make things better than pirates,” Emerald pointed out with a scowl. “The Conglomerate might ignore us, but they also might think we’re UEN Intelligence and pick us up to bring us across the gulf so they can interrogate us at their leisure, or just shoot us down so we can’t tell tales. Same with any mining corp that has the nuts to fire on a UEN ship.”

“There’s another problem, too,” Widget said.

“Well, what if we end our superlight jump out of system and send in a probe to check things out?” Rake asked. “That could get us some info.”

“A probe would get picked up and we’d be spotted anyways,” Emerald said. “Plus we lost our last one on that job with the Kibblite warren. They chewed it to bits, remember?”

“And Seller hasn’t replaced it,” Brick grumbled.

“But what about the other problem?” Widget asked.

“We could try to do a flyby,” Emerald suggested. “Three or four superlight skip jumps through the system, soak up as much data as we can and then review it on the other side.”

Brick had already been looking at his data tablet and what little they knew about the system they were jumping to. “We have no idea whether we’ll have a straight shot through the gravity well,” he said. “Not to mention we would need to jump very close to the core planets to get anything useful unless there’s some massive space station out there.”

“What if we-”

“Guys!” Widget yelled, interrupting the brainstorming of the adults.

Rake turned to his sister with a bit of a glare. “What, Widget? We’re trying to work on the problem. We know.”

“No, not that problem,” Widget said. “The other problem.”

“What other problem, kiddo?” Emerald asked.

“Engine One is gassy and farting plasma,” Widget said.

Rake and the others were silent for a long moment. “What?” Rake finally asked.

“Engine one has a tummy ache and is farting plasma. I think when we fixed the powerturbine for the other engine it made him gassy and now he's farting plasma out his butt.”

Rake ran a hand down his face as he tried to parse what his sister was saying. “So we’re leaking plasma fuel?”

“Ah-huh,” Widget nodded.

“Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Rake asked.

“Why didn’t you tell me about being all gross with Booster?”

“That was a private thing, Widget!” Rake said.

“Well, this was private between me and Engine Two! He feels bad about his farting and is embarrassed.”

“Kiddo,” Emerald said, sitting forward in her seat and taking a deep breath. “How bad of a leak are we talking about?”

“It’s just little toots, mostly,” Widget said. “I can fix it easy-peasy, but we need to shut down the engines to do it.”

“What do our plasma tanks look like?” Rake asked Brick. The big Yauk had gotten up and gone over to a diagnostic readout near the main door to the engine compartment.

“We’re down to about a third,” he said. “Should be somewhere around two-thirds after the heavy lift through atmo.”

“We would have gotten home fine and I could have fixed him then,” Widget said. “But someone made us go superlight.”

“Widg, you heard what I said about my sister being on board that distress call, right?” Emerald asked.

“Well, yeah,” Widget said.

“And if you were on a ship that needed help, you would want your brother to do everything he could to come get you, right?”

“I wouldn’t need him to,” Widget said. “I’d fix the ship myself. And he’d be there anyways.”

“But what if he wasn’t, Widget,” Emmie said. “What if he was… in port at a station, and you were on the ship, and someone was trying to break in.”

“I’d blast ‘em with the turret,” Widget said matter-of-factly.

Rake closed his eyes and tried to keep from yelling at his sister. She had a bit of an ego, and even though it was somewhat well deserved with her mechanical skills, it made the ten year old really frustrating to deal with sometimes. “Widg, if I needed help, would you come get me?”

“You never need help,” Widget said. “You always figure it out. Except with Booster. You need big help with your girlfriends.”

Talking with Widget was like trying to punch a Deileran martial arts master. There were just too many arms to get to the point of things.

“Widget, I love you like Emmie loves her sister, OK? We’re going to help her,” Rake said.

“Well, yeah, I know,” Widget said.

“Then what are we arguing about?” Emerald asked.

“I don’t know!” Widget said, throwing her hands up in the air. When she did that she looked a little like their father, and Rake definitely didn’t like that.

“If we’re going to be heading out of the Cluster on less than half a tank, we could probably get there and get back to civilization,” Brick said, doing some quick calculations on his data tablet. “But if we’re picking up survivors, or hopefully finding something big enough to salvage and tow back, we’re going to need to stop for fuel.”

“Shit,” Rake groaned, then looked at Emerald. “Are there any fuel depots out here?”

Emerald closed her eyes for a moment to think, but shook her head and reached for her tablet and hooked it wirelessly over to the navicomp to get its processing power and memory. “Looks like we could make our second jump around the edge of the Cluster a bit more, there’s an independant depot that won’t take us too far off course.”

“Alright,” Rake nodded. “So we jump to the fuel depot and moor up, and Widget can fix the… farting engine. I’ll go in to see if I can figure anything out about what might be going on out there, and see if I can pick up some more emergency ration blocks or other supplies to help the survivors we find.”

Brick and Emerald both nodded, agreeing with the plan, and Widget yawned. With the meeting over, Brick went back to check on the ‘farting’ while Widget curled up on the couch looking like she was going to take a nap right there.

“Rake,” Emerald said, standing up and touching his arm as she looked at him seriously. “Thank you.”

“For what?” he asked.

“For assuming we will find survivors,” Emerald said.

Rake smiled and took a chance, pulling her into a proper hug, and was almost surprised when Emerald hugged him back. “She’ll be there,” Rake said. “And she’ll see you, and be shocked and surprised and amazed.”

“I hope so,” Emerald whispered

“One quick stop,” Rake said, letting go of Emerald and looking her in the eye assuredly before moving to scoop up Widget and carry her to her sleeping pod. “That’s all that’s between us and them.”

Chapter 6

System: ETS8833.4R Undesignated

Planet: N/A

Rautto’s Pump And Dump Independent Fuel Depot

“Well, fuck,” Rake groaned as he looked out the cockpit window from the copilot seat.

The second jump had gone off without a hitch, and Brick had reported that the leak was small but stable - it was the worst on the run-up to superlight, but was likely just a cracked stopper inside the system that needed replacing. The fix itself would be annoying but manageable within an hour as long as the engines were off. There was no way to do it with the engines on.

Ending their jump brought them within a dozen kilometers of the fuel depot, which turned out to be one of a very few celestial things orbiting the trinary stars of the system. The triple stars were  in a constant gravitational battle with each other which seemed to wreak havoc on anything that got too close in their orbit - there were a few massive gas giants on the edge of the system, and then there was the asteroid on which the fuel depot was built. It wasn’t particularly large, and would have likely been slowly sucked into the pull of the suns except that it had five starship engines cemented to it acting as directional thrusters to nudge it around and fix it’s orbit as needed. The core fuel depot was carved into the interior of the asteroid, a cavernous maw with a magnetic atmo field keeping the space breathable for most beings. There were also several spike-like anchors for larger ships that couldn’t reasonably doc inside the depot.

There was only one of those larger ships in residence at the moment, but it was that ship that brought the curse out of Rake.

“It looks like it’s a Galleon-class superyacht,” Emerald muttered as she quickly brought up the scanners. “But it’s been heavily retrofitted. It’s got a third engine port, and the luxury pods got ripped out and replaced with a fighter bay on one side and I think storage on the other. Plus a half dozen quad turrets. Not to mention the kaligula cannon.”

“Yeah, not to mention,” Rake said. He had recognized the notorious shape of the kaligula on the first sensor readout of the ship even though he’d never seen one in real life before. Most starships were equipped with energy shielding that helped protect from micro-meteor impacts, along with the most common sorts of weapons systems used in space - lasers were the most common, followed by rocket propelled torpedoes and concussion mines. The kaligula fell into the rare fourth category of weapon; the kind that could be as dangerous to the user as it could be to the target. Anything that shot or flung plasma was usually in that category, along with crude nuclear-powered weaponry and psy-cannons ever since the Treaty of Vensille three centuries ago during the downfall of the Civil Union. The kaligula was a different kind of weapon, however - it was a railcannon. Rake wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, but he knew it flung some sort of spinning ammunition with a speed that could shred through conventional shields and tear a hole straight through a capital class ship the long way. It just also had the notorious tendency to blow up spectacularly when it misfired.

“It’s fine. We’ll be fine,” Emerald said as she gave the throttle a touch and started moving the SolaRepo towards the fuel depot.

“The only people who would use that sort of weaponry are mercenaries or pirates,” Rake pointed out, trying to stay calm as he pored over the passive scans to try and glean any more information. It was likely that an active scan of the ship would alert whoever was on their bridge that they were being looked at.

“I know,” Emerald sighed. “But this is an independant depot. If it is pirates, then they wouldn’t do anything to anyone here anyways. Half the Cluster would turn on them.”

Rake knew she had a point. Pirate crews varied - some of them claimed to be vigilantes striking against only the rich, other were marauders who would blast colonies off of planets if they weren’t paid a tribute, and still others were politically-motivated terrorists that targeted the UE, or the Banks, or any number of Corps that had likely done something terrible enough to cause a whole group of people to want to kick them in the dick. Methods, levels of brutality and care for collateral damage all depended on the crew and the captain, but there was one thing that was universally true for pirates, mercenaries, thieves and even bounty hunters.

Don’t fuck with fuel depots.

Every spacer with half a point of IQ knew that fuel depots were the only thing that would likely keep them from a cold, lonely death in the depths of space at some point or another. No matter who you were or where you were going, you needed to be able to get reliable fuel. Even pirates. If fuel depots were fair game, then no one would want to run them - the independants would pack up shop and leave their depots dry, and the chain depots would stick to only the safest, most travelled and protected space routes. The unwritten code of the spacelanes and superlight was to leave the depots and whoever was at them alone, or else everyone would suffer.

Rake sighed and reached for the comm unit, finding the frequency the depot projected its info out on, and then swapped to their hot channel. “Rautto’s, this is SolaRepo IV. We are a Irrimidian-class tug requesting clearance to land, affect minor repairs and fuel up at your lovely station.”

There was a brief moment of static before the controller responded. “SolaRepo IV, you are cleared for entry on vector two-alpha and may set down at birth two-niner. Try not to ding the paint and watch your heads, there’s a lip on the entry port.”

“Noted on the lip, Rautto’s.”

Rake left Emerald to take the ship in and went down into the hold to let Brick know what was going on, then went to Widget’s sleep pod and knocked softly.

“M’What?” Widget groaned through the little speaker grill next to the lock, the sound of interrupted sleep in her tone.

“We’re at the fuel depot, Widg,” Rake said through the door. “I’m going to head in once we land. Can you try and get the engine fixed super quick?”

“You fix the engine super quick and I’ll go into the depot,” Widget grumbled.

What is getting into her? Rake wondered. She’d been getting more and more aggressive since the Talis III job when their fathers intel turned out to be complete bogus. That had been the start of their string of bad luck, and his sister’s spiraling mood hadn’t been helping things.

“You know you’re better at the engine than me, sis,” Rake said, trying to stay calm. “Do you want me to pick you up anything on the station?”

“No,” she said. “Just leave me alone.”

“Alright,” Rake sighed. “Hey, you know you’re not just the best engineer on the crew, right? You’re the best in the whole galaxy. And I love you, Widg.”

“Whatever,” the ten-year-old grumbled through the speaker grill.

Shaking his head, Rake headed back up to the cockpit to make sure Emerald didn’t need any help with final landing.

- - - - -

The interior of the fuel depot was about what Rake had expected, which was to say it was straddling the line between piecemeal and slapdash repairs, and decrepit rust. It was the way with most independent depots - someone, somewhere had decided to make a go of it and put all of their savings into establishing the depot. Over the years it expanded in one way or another as new owners took over, either by inheritance of trade, and for every new owner another piece of the place fell into disrepair as a new one got added.

What Rake was pleasantly surprised to find was that Rautto’s Pump and Dump wasn’t just a fuel station and shop, it also housed a small mechanical bay, a 24 hour diner that Rake would buy some take away from for everyone back on the ship on his way out, and a gloriously dingey but decently busy bar.

There had been a half dozen ships parked out in the cavernous landing bay as they’d pulled in, which could probably account for about half of the denizens of the bar. The other half likely came from the big superyacht, though as Rake walked into the dark space he found little to tie the various beings into groups. No one was wearing uniforms beyond the general spacer jumpsuit on about half of them, which felt like a good sign. Pirates and mercenaries who developed their own uniforms were one step away from megalomania and attempting to conquer some moon or another.

Working his way through the crowd to the bar, Rake spotted a half-dozen humans in the room amongst the myriad of other beings. Out here on the edge of the Cluster there weren’t many human populations - even Rake’s father had been something of an outlier in terms of where he decided to set up shop orbiting the moon of Terth II. The entire system of Terth was dotted with colonies of all shapes and sizes, including humans, but for the most part humanity remained gathered along the old trade routes that had been popularized and populated by the Civil Union and were now the core holdings of the UE.

What that meant for Rake in the moment was that his universal translator was working overtime trying to invert speech patterns and translate them all at once. Rake winced as he passed by a particularly loud being that had some sort of avian background as it was complaining about whatever had just happened in a game of tiles at its table. Reaching up, Rake double tapped above and behind his ear and then pulled her finger down about half the length of his ear, tuning the translator to only attempt to translate from sources within five feet of him. It didn’t help with the overall volume of the room, but it did help narrow down the number of conversations buzzing through his head.

At the bar Rake leaned in and called his order of an ale on tap to the Koswaki who was working behind the bar. The lupine-like being nodded and quickly filled an iced glass for him, and Rake took a long sip of the drink and closed his eyes to savour the frosty bubbles playing along his tongue. He hated to admit it, but every time he tasted frosted ale it reminded him of Booster and the fun they had before she’d gone and fucked it up. Though, if you asked her, Rake knew she would claim he fucked everything up by becoming boring and needy.

With a cold drink in his hand, Rake sat his ass on the stool closest to him and turned, leaning back against the dented metal bartop and looking out through the crowd of beings. Any number of them might have received the distress all, but it was actually something of a crapshoot whether they had or not even though they were likely all closer to the origin source than the SolaRepo had been when it came through. You couldn’t receive any communications while in superlight, and you also needed to be paying attention and care about a distress call to begin with to even check one out. Deeper in the cluster that wouldn’t be so rare since there were simply more ships flying around, but out here on the fringe the spaces between things were farther, and the lack of density meant less opportunities for strong trade. Ol’Ton’s shipyard might have been the only place to buy a starship for six systems or more in any direction.

Most of the ships back on the landing pad had been small freighters, likely hauling goods long distance with crews of two or three. One of the ships had been a colony hopper that taxi’d folks between colonies for a fee, which accounted for a decent number of the people in the bar. None of those ships were likely to respond to a distress beacon, especially one from a UEN ship, since it would eat directly into their profits. That left the pilots of the two single-being ships he’d seen, and the workers from the mining supply shuttle that had been parked near the back, who might have heard something about what was going on locally. Or the pirates.

Rake decided that since he was working on a time limit he didn’t have time to try and shmooze his way through the crowd to find the miners or the pilots, and he definitely didn’t have the time or the units to try and ingratiate himself by losing at some games of tiles. That left him shouting his questions from the top of the bar, which was likely to get him shot for disturbing the wrong person, or eavesdropping and only possibly getting shot if he got caught. Since Rake wasn’t planning on being on the losing end of a bar fight, he went for the second option.

It took him about ten minutes of slowly maneuvering around the bar from one little unoccupied pocket to another to finish his first glass of ale, and he ordered a second as he leaned in and listened to the conversations around him, trying to isolate something that might be of use. It was down at the far end of the bar, deep into the dark and only illuminated by the soft glow of murky, grime-covered lighting from under the bartop, that he finally heard something interesting.

“Six weeks is too long, wrenchjockey,” a female voice growled. “You think my crew wants to wait around here for six weeks for you to ship in a part from across the Cluster?”

“Can’t do anythin’ about it, miss,” said a male that spoke with something of a lisping gate. “Yer ship is a right hummdinger, and souped up to all suns, but whatever yer was doin’ yer’ve got laser scorin’ right in the housin’ chamber of yet coolant pumps. I could rebuild the housin’ out of scrap, but the pumps ‘emselves are gonna need replacin’ an’ I can’t get pumps that size anywhere near here.”

Rake shifted and bit more and hopped up on a stool, leaning back against the bar much like he did when he’d gotten his first drink. There were a couple of big, mean looking beings in the dark between him and the conversation, but his lean cleared his field of vision to the speakers.

The mechanic was a Towalthian, a humanoid known for their big mouths and long, quad-jointed fingers that made them naturals at working with machinery. Well, the fingers did. The mouths were known to get them into trouble since they were just as likely to keep talking and talking as they were to perform a mechanical marvel. He was wearing a set of coveralls with the faded red and yellow icon of Rautto’s on his back, though it had been splashed and covered with an untold number of layers of greases, oils and other liquids.

The woman he was talking to was what really caught Rake’s attention. She was of a species he had never seen or heard of before - she was humanoid, but with milk-white skin with very slight luminescence and dark black eyes. She was beautiful by human standards, though there was no telling if that held true for her own species, and her figure spoke of definitely being compatible with human desires. She had a crest of white hair standing straight up and running down the back of her head, the tips either naturally or dyed a vibrant purple, and her delicate ears and each nostril were pierced with an eclectic mix of earrings, dangling chains and gem studs that made Rake wonder if she would jangle softly up close as she walked or talked. She was also wearing a large, puffy leather jacket with a furred collar, the arms of it patched and slashed, and she wore it open to reveal a pearly white strip of smooth skin from her collar down to her waist, where she wore a crossed pair of belts and with a pair of blasters on her hips.

There were two options in Rake's mind. This woman was either some sort of eclectic, rakish smuggler with her own ship… or she was some sort of leader for the big ship outside.

“That’s not good enough,” the female growled. “We came here because you’ve never let us down on repairs before, Malik. How do you think my father is going to react if I can’t get my ship running and my crew on the move? We’ll be sitting hull-slugs if a UEN patrol comes through.”

Rake had an idea, and that idea made him gulp down the rest of his frosted ale and close his eyes to try and figure out how crazy he was being.

“Well, if yer turn over yer engines with the way things are, yer like to start suckin’ radiation before yer hit superlight again, Cap,” the mechanic said. “It’s honestly kind of amazin’ yer even made it here in one piece. Yer engines are like to eh-splode. If’n y’do get yet ship outa here I can still keep yer order in place an’ you can come get er when it’s here.”

“How the hell am I supposed to get my ship anywhere, let alone out of the Cluster, without any engines!?”

Rake coughed. He didn’t mean to. He still hadn't decided on whether his idea was insane or not. He definitely hadn’t figured out how to pitch the idea to anyone.

“Who the fuck are you?” the female said.

Rake slowly looked over and saw that the two big guys that had been between him and the conversation had shifted to give the female captain a clear look at him. And she was holding a blaster pistol pointed right at his face.

Well, I guess that makes my decision for me, he thought.

“I’m, ah, well I couldn’t help but overhear your… rather loud question,” Rake said as he tapped the side of his frosted glass nervously, hoping it wasn’t showing through his face or in his voice. “I was just thinking… you could always hire a tug to get you to where you need to be. That way you and your crew are, y’know, not stuck on this asteroid. And if you’ve got any mechanics where you’re going they can probably get that issue fixed for you there instead of waiting out here.”

The female pursed her pure white lips and Rake noticed that the inside of her mouth, and her tongue while she was talking, was a deep aquamarine colour. “And where the hell am I supposed to find a tug out here in the middle of nowhere?” she asked. “No one pilots a tug outside of major ports except for scavengers.”

“Well… there is one other kind of crew who does that…” Rake said. And then he reached up and tapped the icon embroidered on his breast right above the pocket.

The female lowered her blaster and pushed past the two big members of her crew, who backed away but kept their five eyes trained on Rake, and the Captain leaned in to read the icon on Rake’s chest before she sneered and pulled back a little. “Repo?”

“Hey, I’m just saying,” Rake said. “We’re bonded workers to a company, so any contract is guaranteed and confidential unless one party breaks it. But we’re freelance so even if your ship also happens to be in arrears with one of the big banks, I’m not bound to try and repo it. Not that I would ever think of swiping a ship like yours out from under a woman like you.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked Rake up and down, then turned to the three-eyed being next to her and said something in a chirping sort of language that Rake’s translator couldn’t identify. Then she turned back to Rake. “You’re bonded?” she asked.

“We are,” Rake said. “Thirty years with no faults on our company record, and it’s a family business. I’m not looking to steal shit and piss off a lady like yourself, and we don’t talk about our jobs.”

“How much for a tow?” she asked.

“Depends how far we’re going. I assume yours is the big ship with the kaligula mounted to the front?”

She smirked. “You know who we are and what you’re getting into here, yes?”

“I have no fucking clue who you are, but I have a pretty good guess about what you do,” Rake said.

“And you’re not worried about what happens at the end of the tow when we get where we’re going?”

“Oh, I’m worried as shit about that part, but the way I see it is doing you a favour and maybe cutting you a deal on the cost might just buy me some good will in return so you pay my crew and maybe keep our names in the back of your mind if you ever need another friendly tow. It’s, uh, all in who you know, right?”

The pirate captain looked Rake up and down again, her smirk getting a little bigger as her blue tongue licked across her pure white lips. She turned to her two bodyguards. “Take him,” she said, then pushed past Rake and headed for the door.

“Wait, is that a yes?” Rake called after her. He didn’t get an answer, but he did get one strong pair of hands and one equally strong but much sharper set of talons gripping his arms as he was dragged in her wake through the bar.