Belt Three

The ship was a spindly two-ring clipper, tacking against orbit as it dropped sunward through the main shipping lanes of Belt Three. Jonas magnified the image to fill the bridge screen, so that the insect-like body of the clipper stood out against the golden plane of its sail. The ship was battered, asymmetrical, its grav-rings and spine lost beneath a crust of repairs. There was a marking on the side of its cargo bay, a feathered spiral of white on blue, presumably the logo of some minor shipping company. Apart from its heading, it looked like any of the other ageing tramp freighters that plied the orbits of the inhabited belts.

‘Ayla, is that course reading correct?’ Jonas asked.

The pilot jumped in her seat. ‘What was that, sir?’

Ayla often became so lost in her connection with the ship that she stopped paying attention to her physical surroundings, but she normally hid it better than that. Jonas made a mental note to give her some time off when they reached port. The stress of the evacuation was getting to all of them.

‘That ship,’ Jonas said, indicating the screen. ‘It looks like it’s heading for our rock. Can you get its transponder data?’

Ayla’s eyes defocused for a moment as she checked the Coriolis Dancer’s sensors. ‘Yes, sir, the course reading is correct. It’s the Remembrance of Clouds, a private trader registered out of New Calais.’

Jonas frowned. ‘Clouds? Odd name for a ship.’

Ayla consulted her implant again. ‘That’s not its original name. The transponder has been hacked. With more time I could tell what the original name was.’

‘No, don’t worry about it,’ Jonas said. A hacked transponder was a warning sign, but if the ship really was heading into a Worldbreaker Red Zone, time was the last thing it had.

He looked back to the local belt chart. His abandoned uranium mining outpost, LN-411, was a day’s orbit behind the Dancer, deep inside the conical Red Zone that marked the probable course of the Worldbreaker. Warning glyphs flagged that the rock was forty-five hours from Black Line. The trajectories of dozens of ships traced curved lines across the screen, abandoning rocks in the Red Zone and fleeing towards distant cities.

There were the usual couple of Scriber Immolation ships heading back into the Red Zone, cheap eggshells filled with suicidal cultists on their final pilgrimage. Jonas stabbed a control to filter them out of the image. With the Scribers gone, the only ship moving into the Red Zone was the Remembrance of Clouds.

Something was wrong here, and if it might affect the Dancer’s safety then Jonas wanted to know what it was sooner rather than later.

‘Hail the Remembrance of Clouds.’ Ayla spoke quietly into the air, letting her implant pick up the words. ‘Remembrance of Clouds, this is the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer. Please acknowledge.’

A woman’s face appeared on the screen immediately, as if she had been waiting for the hail. She looked perhaps thirty, square-jawed, with a mass of unkempt blonde hair and a web of pale scars across one side of her face like an impact crack on glass. Jonas could make out a blue-and-white circular symbol behind her, the same one that he had seen on the side of her ship. She looked at him with an unfriendly smirk, not speaking.

He ignored the woman’s expression and put on a business-like smile. ‘This is Captain Gabriel Reinhardt on the Reinhardt Industries mining hauler Coriolis Dancer.’

‘Captain Keldra ’82-Pandora, Remembrance of Clouds.’ Her voice had the coarse accent of a Belt Three tank-born.

‘Captain Keldra, it looks like you’re heading for the LN-411 asteroid. Are you aware that rock is in a Worldbreaker Red Zone? All the mining stations have been evacuated, so if you’re going there to trade…’ Jonas left the sentence hanging. The woman’s smile was unnerving, and she had shown no surprise at the mention of the Worldbreaker.

‘I’m not heading for LN-411 right now,’ Keldra said. The transmission shut off.

Ayla swivelled in her seat to face Jonas, looking on the verge of panic. ‘Captain, the ship’s altering course. They’re not heading for LN-411. It looks like…’

‘They’re heading for us,’ said Jonas.

‘Yes.’

He cursed under his breath. ‘Pirates.’

Ayla’s eyes widened. ‘Pirates?’

‘Full burn. Evasive manoeuvres.’

Ayla closed her eyes for a moment, and Jonas felt the deep rumble and the shift in gravity as the hauler’s ponderous engines fired.

‘I can try, but we’re overloaded, and there’s nowhere to run to, even if we went deeper into the Red Zone,’ she said.

‘No, stay out of the Red Zone.’

Ayla nodded, relieved. She was no Scriber. Even with pirates bearing down, no normal person would willingly head into the path of a Worldbreaker.

Jonas swung out of his chair and headed for the door. ‘You have the bridge. I’ll be back soon.’

From the outside, the Coriolis Dancer resembled a fat metal mushroom. A single grav-ring ran around the outside of a domed cargo bay, with the fuel tank and chemical reaction drive protruding below the bay like a stalk. Jonas kept the grav-ring spun up at a quarter gee to match the home gravity of most of the miners. Normally on a homeward run the cargo bay would be packed with canisters of uranium to sell at the nearest city, but today it was crammed with the mining and hab equipment they’d salvaged from their hurried evacuation of LN-411, with their last haul of uranium nestling forlornly in the centre.

Jonas’s two dozen mining servitors stood in a row along the ring’s orbital corridor. He tried not to meet their blank stares as he ran past. As Gabriel had, Jonas made sure only to use legal servitors – condemned criminals, or tank-borns who had been unable to pay off their cloning debt – but he knew there was a thriving black market in the mind-wiped victims of pirate raids. That would be how Ayla and the rest of his crew would end up if the Remembrance caught them, and Jonas as well, if Keldra learned his secret.

Most of the free-willed personnel were crammed into the crew lounge, almost the only room on the ship not filled with hastily rescued mining equipment. There were six Worker-caste mining supervisors, and a couple of Engineer-caste members of the Dancer’s regular crew. They looked up from game pads as Jonas opened the door. He found Matton, the huge red-bearded mining foreman, and gestured for him to come out into the corridor.

Matton waited until they were in the corridor and the door was shut before he spoke. ‘We felt the engines fire.’

‘Ayla’s putting us on an evasive course,’ Jonas said. ‘Pirates.’

Matton had worked for years to build up his physical strength, but he still moved with the grace of someone who’d been raised in quarter gravity. Now he closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath, and Jonas could tell he was suppressing an urge to punch something.

‘Damn scavengers, picking us off at a time like this. Well, we had a good run while it lasted. Do you know what to do?’

‘I want you to jettison the cargo. Empty the bay.’

Matton sighed. ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘It might make us light enough to outrun them.’

‘Wouldn’t work. What kind of ship is it?’

‘It’s a two-ring clipper. Salamander class, I think.’

‘No, it wouldn’t work. The Salamander has some of the best engines outside of a Solar Authority cruiser. If they’re looking to rob us they’ll be flying with an empty cargo bay. We don’t have the acceleration to evade them.’

‘It’s still worth a try. What if we strip out everything non-essential? Empty the grav-ring. We just need engines and life support.’

‘That would take hours. The pirates would be on us before we were done.’

Jonas frantically tried to think. ‘We’ve got a servitor combat programme, haven’t we?’

‘A basic one, yes, but we’ve no weapons. The servitors couldn’t repel a pirate boarding party.’

‘No, of course not, but they could be a diversion. If we tie the pirates up in a fight, the rest of us can escape in the shuttle, and if we jettison some junk at the same time then they might not notice us.’

Matton shook his head. ‘They would notice us, and we’d be lucky if they stopped to pick us up rather than shooting us out of space. Sir, you’ve got to surrender. Pirates don’t hurt true-borns. They’ll ransom you to your family – that’s how it works. You can’t save us, but you can save yourself.’

‘I’ve got to try something. Give me a programming spike.’

Matton drew the device from the pocket of his overalls and handed it to Jonas. ‘It’s up to you, sir, but it’s a bad idea. I should get back in there and tell the men what’s happening.’