Scornful Stars Read online

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  FOR ALEX AND HANNAH

  Be fearless, but remember to be kind.

  The world needs a little more of both.

  A shadow down the sickened wave

  Long since her slayer fled:

  But hear their chattering quick-fires rave

  Astern, abeam, ahead!

  Panic that shells the drifting spar—

  Loud waste with none to check—

  Mad fear that rakes a scornful star

  Or sweeps a consort’s deck.

  Now, while their silly smoke hangs thick,

  Now ere their wits they find,

  Lay in and lance them to the quick—

  Our gallied whales are blind!

  Good luck to those that see the end,

  Good-bye to those that drown—

  For each his chance as chance shall send—

  And God for all! Shut down!

  —Rudyard Kipling, “The Destroyers”

  PROLOGUE

  DS Carmela Día, Bursa System

  The pirates’ third shot cracked Carmela Día’s warp ring. That was the moment when Master Pilot Jimena Marron knew that the big freighter wasn’t going to get away after all.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” Captain Varga slammed a meaty fist on the arm of his acceleration couch as alarms wailed all around the bridge. “We lost the warp ring!”

  No kidding! Jimena wanted to scream back at the freighter’s captain. She hardly needed Varga to tell her what the shrieking alarms and flashing lights meant. The first shot, of course, had been a warning. She’d ignored it, running for the safety of Bursa’s inner system and ramming the throttle to the stops to coax a few more g’s of acceleration from the straining drive plates. She evaded the second shot with an emergency deceleration, but there was no hope of dodging the third.

  “Mayday, Mayday!” Second Officer Molnar had started calling for help the minute they’d spotted the strange ship. “This is the Pegasus-Pavon drive freighter Carmela Día, eight point seven AU from Bursa Primary! We are under attack by an unidentified ship and urgently require assistance. Please send help! Mayday, Mayday!”

  The pirate vessel—an old drive tug refitted with heavy armor and military-grade kinetic cannons—had been waiting to ambush ships arriving in the outer reaches of the Bursa system. If Carmela Día had cut her warp generators just a few seconds early or a few seconds late, she would’ve unbubbled millions of kilometers farther away from the pirates, and they might have had a chance to outrun them. Instead, Jimena’s accurate navigation brought them back into real space less than two light-minutes from the spot where the pirate vessel sat drifting cold and dark, waiting for a potential victim to show up within a potential pursuit envelope. Given the immense size of any star’s outer system, she had to imagine that a hundred ships arrived in Bursa for each one that happened to cut their generator in a spot where the pirates had a chance to attack. Today, it seemed, Carmela Día was that one ship in a hundred. Unless they knew our sailing plan, in which case bad luck had nothing to do with it, she fumed.

  Jimena drew a deep breath, fighting the wave of pure panic threatening to freeze her where she sat. She was a professional, after all, and she meant to do her job until the moment it became absolutely, finally clear that there was nothing more she could do. Recharging the warp ring for a microtransit had been their only real chance to escape the attack—there was no way Carmela Día was going to outrun anybody with a full load of ore on board. “Think, Jimena, think!” she berated herself. “If the warp ring’s gone, what’s Plan B?”

  “Mayday, Mayday!” Molnar repeated, beginning his distress call again.

  “Good luck with that,” Jimena muttered under her breath. The nearest outpost was forty-five light-minutes away; Carmela Día wouldn’t receive an answer to Molnar’s distress signal for an hour and a half. Even if one of Bursa’s patrol cutters was on the right side of the planetary system, it would take thirty or forty hours to reach Carmela Día. Whatever was going to happen would be long over by then, which was why Captain Varga had been trying to get the ship into the safety of a warp bubble.

  Until, of course, the pirates blew a hole through the freighter’s warp ring.

  “Helm, come left to course three-four-four, and cut your thrust fifteen percent,” Varga ordered, recovering from his frustration. “We need some spare acceleration for evasive maneuvers. They’ll be aiming for our drive plates next. Do your best to dodge their fire.” He really wasn’t a bad captain, not in Jimena’s eyes—he’d spent a few years in the Bolívaran navy a long time ago, and he’d been working freight runs since she’d been in diapers. What Emil Varga didn’t know about being a merchant spacer wasn’t worth knowing; as a rule, Pegasus-Pavon hired good skippers.

  “Three-four-four, eighty-five percent thrust,” Jimena echoed automatically. She fixed her gaze on the sensor display and let her hands hover above the helm panel, already planning the next move she’d attempt to make the pirates miss. Unfortunately, bulk freighters weren’t built for the sort of maneuvers needed to dodge a slug of tungsten alloy moving at a couple of thousand kilometers per second without extreme good luck. And it seemed they’d just used up the last of that.

  “They’re signaling us, Captain,” Molnar reported, his voice shaky.

  “Goddamn it.” Varga sighed, bowing to the inevitable. “All right, Luis, patch it through. Let’s hear what they’ve got to say.”

  “Carmela Día, this is the ship twenty-five thousand kilometers on your starboard quarter,” the pirate said over their comm, addressing them in Jadeed-Arabi. He had a Zerzuran accent and a cold, smug tone that sent a shiver down Jimena’s spine. “In case you haven’t noticed, I just shot out your warp ring. You aren’t going anywhere, so cut your acceleration to zero, stop calling for help, and stand by to be boarded. Do anything stupid, and I’ll punch holes in your ship until you’re helpless and board you anyway. But that would piss me off, so I don’t recommend it. You tell me how you’d like this to go.”

  Varga activated his comm unit. “This is Captain Emil Varga. Who am I speaking to?”

  “You can call me al-Kobra. We’re the Balina—maybe you’ve heard of us.”

  Jimena didn’t recognize the ship’s name, but her Jadeed-Arabi was good enough to decipher the captain’s alias. The Snake, she noted. Of course. What else would a pirate captain be called?

  “We’re a bulk freighter hauling a hundred and forty thousand tons of ore,” Varga said. “You’re hijacking crushed rocks, al-Kobra. Our cargo’s not worth your time.”

  “I know a market where I can get five hundred credits a ton for the refined rare earth ores you’re carrying. I’m not real good at math, but let m
e see … that’s about seventy million credits of crushed rock. And I’m sure we’ll find something else worth our while over there once we have a good look around—spare parts, whatever lithium-c you’ve got left in your magnetic bottles, maybe someone worth holding for ransom. At least, you’d better hope that we do. Oh, and I’m still waiting for an answer, Captain. How do you want to do this? I have to tell you, I’m not a very patient man.”

  Varga hesitated.

  “Don’t do it, Captain,” Jimena said, keeping her voice down to avoid being overheard if any of the mics were hot. “You let them on board, they’ll gut our engines, empty the bottles, wreck the comms, and leave us adrift and helpless—and that’s assuming they don’t murder each and every one of us for the pure fun of it.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Luis Molnar shot back. “If we don’t put up any more fight, they’ll have no reason to kill us. They’ll take what they want and go.”

  “Including any crew members that happen to catch their eye,” Jimena said. “Thanks, but no thanks. I say we break out the small arms and fight it out when they try to board us. Let me throw the ship into a three-axis tumble, it’ll take them an hour just to get a launch alongside an airlock.”

  “Help’s too far away, Jimena,” said the old captain. He punched his armrest one more time, and then shook his head. “They can spend the rest of the day holing each compartment in the ship if they want, and I’ve got to think about saving lives. Helm, cut acceleration to zero. Luis, secure the distress calls.”

  Jimena scowled at her helm panel as she zeroed Carmela Día’s induction drive. “God, I hope you’re right.”

  “Me, too.” Varga tapped the console again. “Balina, this is Carmela Día. Hold your fire. We’re complying with your demands.”

  “Smart choice, Captain Varga,” al-Kobra replied. “Leave your bridge, and assemble your crew and passengers in the mess deck, unarmed—and I mean every single soul on board. If we find that one person stayed at their post or tried to hide, you’re all going to pay the price. Do you understand?”

  “Assemble in the mess deck, aye. I won’t be able to hear your communications there.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Captain. We’ll be face-to-face in just a few minutes. And, just in case you’ve got any funny ideas, remember I’ve got charged and loaded K-cannons pointed at you. At the first sign of trouble, I open fire, and I won’t stop until I’m certain that I’ve killed every living thing on your ship. Now get moving.”

  “We’re leaving the bridge now,” Varga replied. He cut the comm pickup, and shifted to the ship’s internal announcing system. “All hands, this is the captain. Report to the mess deck, everyone. We can’t stop the pirates from boarding us, so we’re complying with their demands. We’re going to be robbed, but there’s no reason to get ourselves killed. Stay calm, do what they say, and we should get through this. Varga, out.”

  “Balina is maneuvering to match course and speed,” Jimena reported. “I think they’re going to send over a launch instead of docking ship-to-ship.”

  “No resistance, Jimena,” Varga said. He got up from his acceleration couch with a heavy wheeze. “Secure your helm, and clear the bridge. Mess deck, everybody—now.”

  Jimena locked out the ship’s helm, resisting the temptation to throw the freighter into an awkward tumble despite the captain’s order. She didn’t like their chances, but Varga had made his decision, and it wasn’t her place to take that choice away from him and the other twenty people aboard Carmela Día. That didn’t mean she’d go along with anything the pirates cared to do to her or her shipmates, though. When she left the bridge, she turned to the left and headed for her stateroom instead of going straight back to the mess deck.

  “Jimena,” said Varga, pausing to look after her.

  “Give me a minute to get myself together,” she told him. “Balina is still twenty-five thousand klicks behind us. If I’m going to spend the rest of the day standing around in a compartment wondering when I’m going to be raped or killed, well…”

  He winced. “Ten minutes, then. I’m not going to give them any reason to fucking kill us, okay?”

  “I know.” She hurried back to her room while the other two members of the bridge team headed aft. She could hear other crew members sobbing in panic, shouting in anger, or clattering around their own rooms as they tried to hide their valuables or do whatever it was they thought they had to do before the pirates boarded.

  When she reached her quarters, she changed into the dirtiest jumpsuit she had in the laundry bin, rubbed grease into her hair, and threaded her brown ponytail through a battered old ball cap. She didn’t think she was any great beauty, but she had a feeling that pirates who spent weeks waiting in empty space might not feel terribly picky about female companionship. Jimena didn’t have any special valuables in her stateroom—at least, nothing that would interest a pirate looking for loot—but she rolled up a wad of Bolívaran bills and tucked it into one sock in case she needed a bribe later. Then she slipped a snub-nosed 6.6-millimeter mag pistol into an inner pocket of the shipboard jumpsuit. She’d owned the gun for years and hadn’t ever needed it before today, but a woman working in rough-and-tumble spaceports needed to be ready for anything. I don’t care what the captain says, she told herself. If it comes down to it, I’m not going down without a fight.

  She heard the thump of a boat at the superstructure airlock just as she reached the mess deck. At a quick glance, all twenty-two crew members appeared to be in the compartment; no one was missing. Carmela Día’s hands sat at the mess tables, some silently staring at the bulkheads, some sobbing softly, a handful murmuring prayers. About half were Bolívarans and half were Velarans, with a few Zerzurans and more exotic nationalities mixed in. A couple were new faces Jimena didn’t know very well yet and a couple were frankly assholes she wished she didn’t know, but overall it was a good crew, responsible and well-seasoned. They’d never had any serious trouble before; the sight of her shipmates scared out of their minds did more to unsettle her than anything else that had happened yet. She took a seat at the end of a table, and jammed her hands under her arms to wait.

  “Oh, God,” someone whimpered. “What are they gonna to do with us?”

  “Steady, there,” Varga said. “Keep it together, everybody. We’ll get through this.”

  “They’re here,” one of the engineers said, and nodded at the starboard-side passageway.

  The pirates sauntered into the compartment—eight of them, carrying flechette guns or mag pistols to cover Carmela Día’s crew. All of them were men, some young and cocky, a couple old and gray-bearded, and to Jimena’s surprise they didn’t look all that different from the freighter’s crew. They wore battered old spacer’s jumpsuits, work boots with magnetic soles, tool belts from which dangled the same sort of hand tools Carmela Día’s deckhands often carried, and vac helmets clipped to shoulder straps just like ordinary spacers. But they’ve got K-cannons on their ship and they’re all carrying guns, she reminded herself. And there was no mistaking the cold confidence or the predatory grins they wore.

  One of the pirates—a tall, fit-looking fellow in his thirties, with dark hair and a short goatee—stepped forward. “Very good,” he began. Jimena recognized his voice: al-Kobra, in the flesh. “A smart decision. Which of you is Captain Varga? Stand up and let me have a look at you.”

  Varga pushed himself to his feet. To his credit, he didn’t hesitate a moment. “I’m Varga.”

  “Have your people line up against the bulkhead, there,” al-Kobra said, pointing with the muzzle of his gun. “Face the bulkhead, hands on the bulkhead above your heads. You stay where you are, Captain. No tricks, now.”

  “You heard him, everyone,” Varga said in a weary tone. “Everybody line up.”

  Silently, the freighter deckhands got up and shuffled over to the bulkhead, finding places to put their hands up. Jimena followed her shipmates, preparing herself for the worst. Several of the pirates hung back, keeping Carmela
Día’s crew covered, while the others holstered or slung their weapons and moved up to begin searching their captives. They weren’t gentle about it—wallets, billfolds, jewelry, and the occasional knife or hand stunner clattered to the deck, and at least one of Jimena’s female shipmates farther down the line yelped in pain as the outlaw searching her gave her breast a hard squeeze.

  “Hah! Look at this one!” one of the pirates gloated. Halfway down the line from where Jimena stood, the big bald-headed man yanked Szonja Hadik—the ship’s third engineer, a slender blonde with a pretty face—out of the line and spun her around by the arm to show her off to his fellows. “I think we’ll have some fun with her. What do you say, al-Kobra?”

  “Not bad,” the pirate leader allowed. “Get her out of those overalls, I want a better look.”

  The big pirate grinned and reached for Szonja’s zipper. She screamed in fright and tried to pull away, until he cuffed her with one hard fist. “Stop that nonsense, you little bitch,” he snarled.

  “What the hell is this?” Captain Varga roared. He wheeled on al-Kobra. “You said you wouldn’t hurt anyone if we gave up. Get your hands off her!”

  Al-Kobra frowned. “Huh. I don’t remember saying anything like that.” Then he raised the muzzle of his flechette gun and fired two blasts into Emil Varga’s belly at a range of less than a meter. Blood and shredded flesh splattered the deck behind the freighter’s captain, who staggered back and collapsed with a horrible groan.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jimena snarled. She reached for her hidden gun—

  —and the rest of the pirates opened fire.

  1

  Srinagar, Kashmir System

  Sikander Singh North reined in his roan quarter horse at the top of the ridge and gazed out over the spectacular red-rock mesas of the Kharan Desert. The morning air was cool and clear, but he could feel the first warm stirrings of a breeze that would blur the horizon with orange dust by midafternoon. Over the course of geological ages, that same wind had carved the sandstone hills dotting the rugged landscape into weird spires and fluted curves; he’d spent many long days in the saddle exploring the picturesque rocks as a boy, pretending they were castles or alien ruins. That was a long time ago, he reflected. He hadn’t visited the North estate at Chittar Creek since the summer he’d turned fourteen, and that was more than twenty years behind him now.