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Emancipation

IV

Deep in the rear of the engine bay Commodore Bochas stood before more than twenty other people looking utterly confused. All of them had received communications from the commodore hinting at a possible mutiny with the mutineers as yet unidentified. All of those contacted, Bochas had assured, were above suspect and would be needed to secure the ship of anyone tried anything.

Only Bochas had never issued such an order, nor had the engineer who sent the communication to the commodore. Half of the engineering crew had gone missing, as well, and no one knew why but everyone had suspicions; another mystery communication from their commander.

And then everything went very, very dark indeed. Tomb dark; dead ship dark.

And silent, because the plasma intermixers threaded throughout the engineering bay to feed the prodigious appetite of their reactor core had suddenly shut down. Bochas stumbled to a nearby maintenance console, a moment before the internal power kicked back on and offered the wan illumination of emergency lighting. He slapped and stabbed and cursed at the console until an explanation of the failure came up. He could not hail the bridge, or security, or anyone outside of the crew already standing around him with varying expressions of growing fear.

It appeared that one of the magnetic containment systems for the antimatter fuel feeds had suffered a runaway power oscillation, overloaded, and shut down. The fuel, by that point, had been shut off by automated systems. Normally an overload would be contained by the line conditioners but, somehow, those in proximity began to oscillate as well, and overloaded. Those had, in turn, propagated the failure outward until the safety system had just thrown up its figurative digital hands in frustration and shut the entire reactor down.

One of the men, who had gone down the single long access corridor that had brought them to the aft fuel management bay, came pelting back once the emergency lights came back up to inform them that the pressure bulkhead into main engineering had closed during the failure and sealed. His command codes would not override it. Nor, when they all trooped down to it, would the commodore’s. There was no loss of atmosphere detected on the opposite side; it would simply not open.

The diagnostic display podium a few paces down the passageway lit up, but not with the expected overlay of the fuel system.

“Crew and cargo of the vessel Commodore’s Choice,” Said the ragged, snip eared raccoon that looked out of the display, the collar of his blue shirt crisp against the gray and black fur of his neck. A single black epaulette could be seen on a shoulder at the edge of the frame but there was not enough to see a rank insignia, nor were there any on his collar. “I am lieutenant commander Hrask True of the Free Colonies. I have disabled your ship, as you can plainly discern.” The image blinked to the internal view of a cargo bay. Not one of the huge containers anchored to the ship’s hauling framework, but a smaller bay used to load and unload palletized freight. Each was accessed by the cargo tenders via massive lock doors that retracted outward, and an energized plasma shield to maintain atmosphere.

It was into one of these bays they were now viewing through the display, the outer lock door fully retracted to show a field of stars beyond. Stacks of pallets could be seen here and there, but there were also a number of humans and, surprisingly, a gaggle of moreaus all pounding on the inner lock door. “We have been observing your ship, and your crew, for a number of months and have identified those among you who would be least likely to accept a change of command. Others of you are less… shall we say, intractable? To further emphasize our desire that you accept our terms –” The voice cut off, and through the tinny little speaker on the diagnostic panel they heard the shrieks of the scrambling bodies in the cargo hold.

Bochas recognized a number of his engineering crew, some of his command crew, and some of those he had hired to manage the cargo on the trip. With a flicker and a sudden roar of sound that overwhelmed the tiny speaker in the console the bodies in the cargo bay surged violently into the star speckled darkness beyond the cargo bay accompanied by several tons of unsecured freight. The briefly gyrating bodies quickly stilled, drifting along with the same inertia as the Choice until the impetus of their ejection took them beyond sight. “Consider our terms, Commodore’s Choice.”

“Who the fucking hell is that raccoon?” Bochas bellowed when the screen abruptly flickered back to the fuel system schematic. “I brought no raccoons aboard in cargo! I’ve seen the manifest, there were no gods damned raccoons!” None of the stunned crew around him had an answer, except one of them had a thought.

The stocky, ginger haired Scott, leaning against one of the safety railings and peering morosely into the bowl of his pipe, opined; “Ya did bring someone aboard, tho.”

“The data jockey!” Bochas roared, throwing his arms in the air furiously before hammering them against the immobile pressure door.

“That damn rescue pilot!” Sub-commodore Tillman, trapped on the bridge by another pressure seal, railed at about the same time, trying to figure out who the intruder was. It had taken her a few moments to query the quartermaster on the number of raccoons in cargo, which turned out to be none, before she remembered the human who had sparred with her and a few others barely two days before. “Where the hell is he?”

Ancillary to the bridge was their security monitoring station, which was sealed behind the same pressure door with them, so getting an answer was almost immediate. “Just stepping out of his shower.” He flicked the video display that was being displayed over to the main view screen. The naked human was, indeed, stepping out of the shower stall dripping with lathered soap. In the corner near the kitchen the moreau that they had allowed him the use of was curled up with his arms and tail around his legs. “Banged the absolute hell out of that skunk thing during transit then just, I’d have to check the buffer, looks like he tossed it into a corner, there.”

“You saw this?” Tillman snapped, incredulous that the human was not their infiltrator. She figured the raccoon was on a ship, very nearby, and somehow that human had put it onto them.

“Didn’t watch all of it, he was pretty rough on the furball. But yeah, until the power went out I kept the view where I could kinda watch.”

“…ind that domino masked motherfucker and skin it alive!” bellowed abruptly through the bridge making everyone jump as if plugged into a wall outlet. Poor Senatar, trapped with them by a summons of the commodore that was never sent, actually fainted on the spot.

“Commodore!” Tillman called out when the channel finally went silent.

“Tillman!” the bellowed reply was no less deafening than his previous tirade. “Do you still have command of the bridge?”

“Yes, sir, but we’re locked in by the pressure bulkhead. Did you see -?”

“Fucking yes, I saw. Whoever that stripe furred bastard is, I’m going to wear his hide for a jock strap! Find out where the fuck all everyone is and try to get these bulkheads down!”

“I’m sorry, commanders, but I’m afraid I cannot allow that.” The raccoon’s trilling voice stepped over them, muting their respective bellowing retorts to less than twenty percent volume. “Until I have rounded up all available unsecure personnel I will have to request that you remain where you currently are. I will allow you to maintain command until such time as I require it. True, out.” The line went dead, utterly. They could not raise the commodore, and vice versa, anymore. The voice piped in almost as an afterthought, “Oh, and those pressure seals are for a reason. I’d rather avoid having to repeat the earlier display. True, out.”

“Who was that?” Salen, seated at the kitchenette desk, stared at what had been a star field display up until the raccoon’s rather terrifying display.

“An actor.” Johan, relaxed back on the bed propped up on his extended arms but still naked, replied.

“What actor? This one did not see any of that species among the cargo.”

“That, my handsome monochromatic not-quite-a-skunk dog, is Jorvald Avalon-Amber.”

Salen’s brow twitched, his ears backing and springing up before backing again. “Jorvald was human, though?” With a wing Johan reached up a hand and tapped his temple with a finger. The dog’s lush, faux-skunk tail bushed in alarm. “How - ?”

“Why do you think I had a splitting headache? I was setting up the script, and acting my part.”

“So there’s no raccoon? No other ship out there to take over? Just you?”

“And that prop of wreckage anchored to the outer hull with a high bandwidth connection to this ship via the power induction cable.”

“How, then, are you going to get us to… wherever it is you’re going?”

“With its current crew, of course.”

“You can manage that?”

“Would they argue, given the choice?” He waved a hand toward the view screen which was once again filled with stars though, if one peered very closely, some of those glimmering objects were moving along the ship’s trajectory, slowly fading.

“We doubt.”

Johan dipped his head with a wink and a smile, thinking inward at the ghost; the quasi-AI filling the computational space on the hulk lashed to the hull. It lacked any degree of self-awareness, rationality, or conscience but it was, by no means, stupid.

“Act two. Identify –”

But the ghost interrupted him, which came as quite the surprise.

“Alert. Container seals have been activated. The central hold vault has been ordered evacuated.”

“Clarify? Override? By whom?”

“Containment system appears to have been manually overridden. The moreaus in cargo are being secured in their cargo pods.”

“Secure cargo docking systems! Lock out the decoupling routines!” Johan almost shouted it, lurching forward on the bed to drop his hands to his knees and stare at the hatch of his cabin as if his eyes might burn a hole through it. “Status of background talent?”

“Evacuating toward engineering and bow as are human overseers in accordance with evacuation protocols. Humans in cargo vault were primarily alpha and charlie assessment, secondary segregation area, all subgroups.”

“Once they’re clear, activate pressure seals.”

“Pressure seals have already been activated via manual controls, awaiting complete evacuation. Video indicates that they are allowing all evacuating moreaus unable to reach cargo pods to evacuate to inner hull areas. Cargo coupling systems locked down.”

“Who is manning interior seal controls?”

“Unable to resolve. Video resolution damped by outside code source; unable to rectify.” Ahh, their little surprise package from the ship’s data storage, then.

“Are you able to identify and break script editor?”

“Negative. Data channel cannot be identified for infiltration.”

Cannot be identified, Johan thought, chewing the inside of his lip. How does anyone hide a data transfer path well enough that his sophisticated systems could not detect its traffic? “Work them into the script, then. Have remaining off-script actors been identified and secured?”

“Twenty eight remain in unsecure areas. Four from x-ray group, three from alpha and charlie, and twenty-one from security detail. Bilge, port side hull access corridor, and dorsal concourse remain unsecured.” The first because there were likely no automated pressure doors save immediate access passage to that deck. The second did likely have automatic seals, but ones that were designed to be easily overridden so that crews could utilize the corridor, rather than the hull, to access areas of the ship for repairs in the event of a breach. That meant that someone had accessed that corridor to move about. And then, finally, there was the concourse which meant that the only thing between the unsecured actors and Johan was a single door. “Fuel system flow management limiters have been disengaged.”

Johan groaned, feeling the warm presence of Salen kneeling behind him, gentle hands tentatively on his shoulders. His head was beginning to ache trying to keep up with all of the permutations taking place on his carefully written script. “Manually?”

“Manually. Schematic indicates manual fuel control systems in primary segregation area, charlie group.” Great, the one place he figured would keep the mid-level threat group contained turns out to be the most dangerous place on the ship to lock them up. Charlie was tagged ‘ambivalent’ to the fate of moreaus, in which despite his trade plans with the Sangan, Bochas had been classified. Nothing in his behavior indicated an active malevolence toward moreaus; those had been in x-ray group now on an unscheduled EVA. Alpha group, the hardest to identify because their sympathies were expressly covert, had been the hardest to tag accurately.

“Commodore, commodore,” Hrask True clucked his tongue and shook his head sadly via every diagnostic console on the fuel systems decks. “that is a very, very bad idea. Blowing up the ship will serve neither of us.”

“Then give me back my ship!” Bochas bellowed, spittle frothing past his lips and sweat pouring from his brow. There really was no actual fuel management manual override; there was merely an on and off safety throw which was currently in the off position. But with the plethora of tools, his remaining engineering crew, and a commander who had worked the guts of freighters for decades before buying his own, they had figured out how to re-route the primary fuel lines. Once they threw the flow switch back ‘on’ the antimatter would come pouring from its magnetic bottle and into the engineering guts of the ship.

And, as everyone knew, matter and anti-matter did not mix without violent consequences. In the carefully managed core of a reactor light atoms – hydrogen, typically – were spat into an antimatter bath. The heavier the atoms, the more potent, and potentially uncontrollable, the results. Dump a few thousand cubic meters of the stuff directly on structural mass and they would, however briefly, become a very small, very bright star.

“I’m afraid that is beyond my current ability, commodore. Your crew are actively attempting to circumvent my attempts to maintain control through peaceful measures.” The raccoon sighed with a backing of ears and whiskers. “I do not, truthfully sir, in any way wish to harm any more members of your crew.”

“Peaceful?” Bochas roared incredulously, “What about them that you fucking jettisoned?”

“Our information led us to believe that they were inimical to our kind, and gleefully went about persecuting us via torture and death. In turn, I meted out justice as I saw fit.” The raccoon leaned closer to his video pickup, black eyes earnest. “Listen, commodore, let us parlay. I do not want your ship, and I am more than willing – happy even! – to give it back to you.”

“Without the cargo.”

“Without the cargo, yes.”

Looking back over his shoulder at the knot of, for the moment, still and silent forms watching him from the voids and hollows of the fuel systems superstructure. “Parlay, you say?”

“Parlay.” The raccoon nodded sagaciously. “When I am able, which should be soon depending on the actions of your remaining crew, I will unseal the pressure locks keeping you in place. But, be advised, someone has manually closed the cargo pods and sealed the vault pressure bulkheads. I fear that they may attempt to jettison the pods, or evacuate the atmosphere in the vault. If you can communicate with them, advise them not to. Without atmosphere I cannot open the engineering deck to allow you out.” His teeth gleamed in a brief, predatory smile. “I will try to prevent that, commodore. Give me… how long before you expect you will be finished there?”

“Two hours, stripes.” Bochas growled, wagging a spanner at the domino masked image, “You got two hours.”

“Two hours it is, then. True, out.”

Johan fell back against the furry body kneeling behind him, his hands going to his eyes as his head pounded. “They’re all completely off script!” He groaned, gentle fingers quickly making their way to his temples and brow to massage at the twitching muscles there. “And that commodore, he’s taken a line directly from Boarding 101! Blow the reactor, destroy the ship to kill everyone foe and ally alike!”

“Alert. Cargo vault secure, venting atmosphere.”

“What?” This time Johan was unable to stop himself, he spat the word out vocally even as he shouted it at the ghost. “Is the cargo secure?”

“All transit pods have been fully secured and pressure locks engaged. Each has internal atmosphere scrubbers that should sustain breathable atmosphere for approximately six hours under current cargo load.”

“Cargo load under stress, in an already compromised atmosphere?”

“Four hours ten minutes.” Oh, delightful. Johan felt his headache throb all the harder and regretted not, at least, stashing some analgesics among the nothing whatsoever he transferred over from his ship.

“Find out how to get pressure back into the vault, bypassing the manual overrides. Disable access to them if you have to! Vent the corridor they’re in!”

“Thus far, all manual override actions have originated from bilge level, forward structural member six-oh-seven.” The ghost paused for a few moments, “Correction; statement of ‘manual control’ inaccurate. All systems have been overridden remotely via ship command systems on an encrypted sub-channel that can be detected by its activity alone. It has no presence on the ship’s system nor, thus, to this system’s protocols.” Without coming right out and saying it, the ghost couldn’t see whatever channel they were using at all. Like a blind man who can feel sunlight but can’t see it. “Telemetry of origin location hypothetical, reverse tracing each command via power transfer as it is initiated.”

Pushing up from the bed, away from the talented ministrations of the skunk, Johan stood. He gathered up the neatly folded coveralls from where they lay on the kitchenette table and shuffled them on while Salen snatched up his shorts and tugged them on. “Going to have to be an active member of the cast, it seems. Nothing so simple as being the director.” He stepped up to the door and spun the hand wheel, opening it with a momentary hiss of seals. The spinal concourse appeared to be vacant, the false sunshine gone leaving it dimly lit by emergency light strips along the ceiling. “Need to find out who’s mucking about in the bilge.” Salen stuck close at his side, ears erect and posture alert as they paced toward the forward stairwell. “Can you fight?”

“One must learn what one must, Joh. Yes, this one can fight.” His teeth gleamed from the black of his muzzle as he held up one hand and flexed his grip. His black claws, Johan knew, were smoothly blunted but they were still claws all the same.

He was glad of that, because approaching them from the opposite direction was a trio of humans. Two were in the colored coveralls of crew; brown and green respectively. The third, however, was naked from the waist up and covered in glistening blood. In one hand he carried a fire axe as bloody as he was. “Who th’ fuck are you?” The bloodied man snarled, eyes flitting from Johan to Salen and back. Johan recognized one of the clad members as a sparring partner; moderate skill. The other two he had not encountered before.

“Identify!” He stabbed at the ghost.

“Warrngton Taft, laundry. Emerald Gray, agroponics. Sevis Marl, livestock management.” As the ghost spoke each was highlighted by a bracket superimposed on Johan’s vision. The man with the axe and the aggressive posture was Taft, from laundry. A bright red ‘x’ crossed the bracket on him. The other two were tagged with ‘C’.

“Johan.” Johan replied neutrally with a shrug, then hooked a thumb at the faux-skunk beside him, “And my servitor.”

“Ship’s been hijacked.” Taft snapped, thrusting the axe toward Salen, “By them mutated bastards.”

“Oh, really?” Johan sidled forward half a step to put himself slightly between Taft and Salen. “You sure about that?”

“What, think someone else scrammed the reactor and left us adrift? Some fuckin’ ‘coon did it.”

Johan shook his head, “Nope, some fuckin’ ‘coon didn’t, actually.”

Taft’s eyes narrowed and the two other men looked confused, and wary. Clearly they were following the bloodied human simply out of self-preservation rather than allegiance. “Sayin’ you did?”

“Sayin’ I did.” Johan echoed in a perfect imitation of Taft’s half-crazed snarl. “You should’ve taken the same walk among the stars as the rest, as I had it. So, now what?” With surprised blinks the other two humans faltered, fists clenching fearfully as they both looked to Taft for direction.

“Well then, now you die, that’s what.” And, raising the axe, he lunged. The other two, after a moment’s hesitation, waded in a couple of paces behind their blood covered alpha.

“Figured you’d say that, thanks.” Johan said to no one in particular as he jumped at the chance to exert something other than his cerebral data link. The axe swept down and across in a vicious chop but its target, by that time, as far too low to strike. Johan dropped and slid toward the man, one foot lashing out to strike the man’s leading knee with a powerful kick that crumpled the joint with a meaty pop. Taft bellowed and collapsed, lashing out with the axe clumsily. Still on the floor, Johan rolled and captured the haft below the head and jerked. Though slimed with the blood of whatever hapless moreaus Taft had already encountered, Johan’s grip was secure. It slid up to the head and jerked the weapon from Taft’s grasp.

Turning it about and rising to his knees, Johan brought it down with a violent overhand swing that terminated, after a momentary startled cry, with a wet crunch in the center of Taft’s face. Another body fell nearby but did not lie still. Marl, the livestock manager, was scrambling to get away from the snarling black and white dervish going at the third human with the furiousness of a cornered rat. Gray was screaming, unable to do anything but try to cover his face as blow after blow hammered his midriff. A final, brutal knee to the crotch sent him keeling to the floor before Salen stepped back.

“Cut! Salen, cut.” Johan actually managed to laugh as he stood and put out an arm to keep Salen from launching in once again. The man named Gray was holding his crotch and moaning, blood flowing freely from his nose. Marl was found cowering behind the nearest agroponics rack, also bloodied about the face. “You two.” Johan said once he had hauled Marl back to his companion. “Take a cabin and dog the hatch closed tight. There is CODA and mercenary infantry all over the ship with orders to contain any humans they find. But, all things considered, I imagine they’re more in a kill order frame of mind.”

“CODA? Where the hell did they come from?” Marl gurgled, nursing the gap in his mouth where several teeth had been before encountering Salen.

Johan leaned down, resting his hands on his knees, to put his face on level with Marl’s, “Your cargo.” He thrust an arm toward a nearby hatch. “Now get your butts in there and stay low. Maybe you won’t be lunch.”

Salen watched them go before padding over to the unmoving form of Taft, the human’s face barely recognizable around the blade moored in it. Without aplomb he grasped the butt end of the axe handle and drew it free. Taft’s head rose as if he wanted to protest, only to fall back with a broken-melon swat when the blade of the axe slipped free. Propping the dripping thing over his shoulder he trotted to catch up with Johan. “Why’d you kill him?

“He would’ve killed you, and me if I tried to stop him.” They reached the stairwell and started down. Johan tapped his temple, “I had my assistant director separate the crew into two broad groups; one to kill, one to preserve alive if I could. The survivors were further segregated, in case I needed to repeat the display from the cargo hold. One of those sympathetic to you moreaus, and one of those who just didn’t much care whether you lived or died but who were not actively persecuting you; the ambivalent.” He glanced back, and up for once, at the moreau. “I would’ve done my best not to kill the sympathetic group, but my assistant director is a bit less dispassionate.”

“Your computer?”

“Exactly.” Reaching the bottom of the stairs they were presented with no further descent options but the elevator shaft. Unfortunately a pressure door had closed and sealed that off as well. “Damn.” Johan muttered as he stared at the huge red warning ‘x’ painted on the hatch cover. “Alternates?”

A glowing green line appeared in Johan’s vision, leading him toward the port side of the ship. They encountered no one, but heard a chaotic event echoing down one of the corridors. Apparently a group of uncontained humans and moreaus had encountered each other and were violently attempting to determine pack hierarchy. They did not, at least, hear any weapons fire. Johan was pleasantly surprised, but deeply concerned, that they had not encountered any of the armed, voiceless mercenaries; not even the one posted at his cabin. Johan had told Salen’s sister to surreptitiously send word through the feline moreau sign language that all military moreaus should prepare themselves to escape the cargo area and be ready to fight. The unscripted closing of the cargo pods had, unfortunately, prevented very many from doing so.

Against twenty soldiers armed with squad assault weapons hundreds would’ve likely died, but at best less than a hundred had made it out of the cargo vault. Far too few to scour and secure every meter of the ship. Too few, even, for Salen and Johan to encounter as they followed the green line in Johan’s augmented sight. Seventy meters down the dim corridor the green line took a ninety-degree bend into a wall. It proved to be a maintenance access ladder that was secured by nothing more than a hatch cover.

It was not even dogged shut, rising noiselessly when Johan pulled on it. The slim descending tube was far better lit by emergency lighting than the open decks and rungs ran entirely around its interior circumference. The ghost informed him that it descended one hundred ten meters, and rose sixty, to allow access from spine to keel. Salen muttered as he had to abandon the bloody axe; the tube was too narrow for him to carry it and climb. Johan had to admire the monochromatic moreau’s courage, though, as he set the axe aside and scrambled into the tube above the human without hesitation. The tube ended at a vertical hatch that stood open to the darkness of the bilge deck. This was where every drop of waste liquid went, mostly in the form of water condensation. Typically inefficient systems, due to low maintenance priority, would ostensibly collect and reprocess the waste but all too often did little to nothing.

Such as aboard the Commodore’s Choice.

The stench of sewage clobbered them both with such potency that they reeled and clamped hands over noses. Salen squatted and leaned one hand against the bulkhead as he fought, unsuccessfully, not to vomit. He did, however, manage to keep his gagging retches muted. They had no idea how far away their mystery problem was.

“Sitrep?”

“Atmosphere is being restored to cargo vault, estimated time to completion forty-three minutes. Bridge crews have attempted to infiltrate the lock-outs via computer but taken no other actions. Judging by activity of background talent indicates probable detainment of seventeen security detail; background actors have appeared with weapons carried by security personnel. All weapons storage areas remain secure. No active weapons discharge has been noted. Two x-ray actors remain unaccounted for due to interference from unknown protocols. Remaining security forces remain unaccounted for due to same. All other actors have secured themselves or joined the background talent attempting to re-take the bridge. I am preventing these attempts but cannot prevent access if they utilize more dramatic methods.”

“Reduce atmosphere outside of bridge by thirty percent. That should send them to safer areas of the ship.”

“Initiating transfer. You have forty-seven minutes before established deadline.”

“Who is re-establishing vault atmosphere?”

“It would appear that moreau technicians are working on the problem in main engineering. With assistance from alpha group liberated from their primary segregation area.” Apparently the food storage bay was not as secure as Johan would have thought, they escaped or were freed in less than three hours.

“Not our unknown third party?”

“No detectable response from third party.”

“Monitor and advise if anything changes to affect ongoing script negatively.”

Once Salen had sufficiently recovered from voiding the small meal they had shared hours before, and Johan’s sinuses had simply stopped bothering to report to his brain, they resumed their search for that unknown third party. The schematic in Johan’s eyes labeled the salient parts of the ship that he could see; sump lines, bulkhead struts, and the like. Water sloshed lazily in the low points, calm with the motionless Choice coasting dead in place. As far out as they were from the system’s gravity wells, balanced between them, it would take centuries for the ship, in its current state, to be tugged into a cometary orbit. Johan hoped to be underway just a shade sooner than that.

Dim, barely functional emergency lighting lent them just enough light to see where they were placing their feet or paws but beyond that they could barely see twenty meters. The constant moisture left a haze to the air and the only discernable sound, beyond the steady plop of condensation and louder splashes of other unidentifiable, noisome things seeping from the decks above was the slow, slumbering groan of the hull as the stresses of star travel slowly relaxed. Somewhere behind them the clatter of metal on metal echoed, joined by an angry hiss, but it was too far along the ship’s nearly kilometer long fame to be of immediate concern.

“That was human.” Salen whispered fearfully, glancing back. Johan was not sure how well his eyes could see in the dark, the corporations vacillated between acute and near blind in turns. They wanted the moreaus dependent on their human overlords, and making them damn near blind in the dark was one way to limit their movements. At least his ears were keen enough to discern a human’s voice hissing and a moreau. “And not really far back.” He added a few moments later as they stealthily waded through a calf high pool of vile, luke warm water. The ammonia in the air made Johan’s eyes water, even if he could no longer consciously smell it. The small bobbing masses in the water hardly made him want to identify what they were wading through, either. Viscid scum oozed down the metal pillars between floor and ceiling and huge bilge recyclers stood silent in their lakes of muck.

Up ahead, only a few structural ribs ahead, Johan saw a brighter light. It was obscured by the bulk of the rib but it was certainly not an emergency lantern; it was too bright, too white, and flickering. It took him a few seconds to figure out it was the glow from a tablet of some sort. He grabbed Salen’s shoulder and the faux-dog stopped looking behind them to peer in the direction Johan was pointing. “There!” He whispered into the soft, rounded ear atop the moreau’s head. “You’re black, you can blend in. Try to find a shadow to disappear into where you can see that glow, and see who’s trying to come up behind us.” He pantomimed a circle with one hand. “I’m going to try getting around to the other side and see who, or what, that is.”

Salen nodded swiftly and they parted ways. Within moments he could no longer see the skunk-dog when he looked back, though the dim lighting and sweltering haze hardly made that easy. It took him more than fifteen minutes to work his way across the bilge and down three more ribs until he could see the source of the glow. It was a large terminal suspended from the hull by a cantilevered arm, which kept it free of the swampy floor and muck oozing down from above. There was a human, judging solely by the fact that the brilliant glow reflected from pale skin rather than diffused through fur, bent over it. Johan crept up to the adjacent rib, hardly twenty meters away, and made ready to step out and confront the unknown shape.

“There you are you little fuck!” A deep voice roared from the direction they had come. Johan reflexively ducked back down behind the heavy metal rib. Peering over he saw a dark shape darting and ducking, charging pell-mell toward him with great splashes of water and a shrill, ululating scream of terror. Behind it was a far larger form, bellowing and stomping where the dark shape jumped and slid. The human at the terminal also ducked at the initial sound, peering over the rib near its console as well, until it identified the source of the cacophony. Where Johan had taken almost twenty minutes to reach his concealment, Salen was covering in seconds. The terrified moreau, sopping head to tail in the unmentionable effluvia of the bilge, was running flat out to escape the towering hulk of a human chasing him.

The hulking form at the terminal crouched at the noise, a sidearm drawn so quickly it looked to have materialized in his hand. Both arms rested on the ridge of the rib as he took aim at the approaching pair.

“C’mere, you freak! I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your scrawny neck!” Morgan Bex, the deer slayer from the engineering deck, was even more fearsome than the blood soaked Taft had been. In each hand he carried lengths of salvaged piping, swinging them at the moreau each time the poor dog slipped in the muck and fell back into range. The dog proved to be amazingly nimble prey, dodging the heavy blows delivered by those massive arms. Each strike sent up a small geyser of viscid liquid that further soaked the fleeing moreau. “Just hold still and die, you mutant vermin!” Armed or no, Johan stood and charged the other direction, releasing a bellow of his own.

“Keep running, Salen! I’m coming!” Johan abandoned thoughts of the man at the terminal, who spun from his secure position at this new sound, raising a large sidearm to level it at Johan. The weapon tracked him perfectly as he leaped over the rib he had hidden behind and charged toward the pair bearing down on them. When he drew abreast of the unknown human’s position Johan realized three things almost instantly, though did not slow.

The first was that the human was the scar faced chief of security looking no less angry than he had previously. If anything could make that ravaged visage any more intimidating it would only be finding it staring down gunsights at you. The second was that he was armed, and the pistol that had been pointing at Johan was swinging away. And the third was that the pistol was swinging toward Salen and Johan had no time to either reach the moreau or the scar faced man with his gun.

“Salen!” He half bellowed, half screamed, and the deafening shriek-bellow of the gun lit the bilge with the brilliance of a short-lived flare. A wave of water rose up, briefly obscuring Salen and his pursuer as Morgan pounced forward onto the stumbling, terrified moreau. Johan tripped, staggered, and halted in shock before turning on the human.

The steaming bore of the scar faced man’s gun leveled at his head stopped him where he stood. “Damn.” The man growled, straightening from his shooting crouch and popping his neck. “But did I really want to kill that son of a bitch.” Johan’s chest swelled and his weight shifted forward, ready to charge, but the words that followed brought him up short once again. “Go fetch your pet, son, before he drowns under that sack of useless meat.” His eyes cast around the bilge and a short snort of rueful laughter escaped his nose. “Proper place for him to die, too; in shit.”

Confused, Johan looked from the security chief to the unmoving back of Morgan. Only then did he realize that the human was missing his head as well as much of one shoulder and a fan of darkness was spreading from the shredded remnants. Some of that darkness, however, was not moving. And it was striped with muck stained white.

Jumping through the morass Johan made his way quickly over the rib between them and shoved Morgan’s unmoving bulk aside to haul Salen up by one arm. Luckily the poor moreau had landed on a bit of long forgotten machinery with his head above the tide of filth. Though it had knocked him unconscious he had not drowned. After a careful examination of the unconscious moreau and finding nothing broken Johan carefully hefted him into his arms, carefully couching the dog’s head on his shoulder. He carefully made his way back toward the security chief at his unorthodox terminal installation. Only then did he observe that the thick cable of a data trunk ran directly above it, coated in noisome slime, and the terminal was tied into it.

The scar faced man stared flatly at him as he eased himself down to sit on the soiled metal rib, shifting Salen’s unconscious weight in his arms. “Uh, thanks?” He managed after wiping sweat and unmentionable grime from his face. The stuff dripped from the unconscious weight cradled by one arm against his shoulder. He imagined that it would take days for Salen to bathe enough to rid himself of it.

“Thank me, will ya?” The chief groused, pale scars wrinkling as he glared over at Johan, “You’re the one responsible for the reactor, I take it? Got your computer artefacts all over the place, I can’t even pin ‘em down long enough to figure out what the hell they’re doing.”

“Securing the ship, just like you intended to.”

The man’s glare could’ve driven nails if Johan had been a bit of lumber. “Aye, yeah, and I damn well would’ve if we’d jumped into the ships I had waiting!” He bellowed, rocking Johan back on his heels. Salen grunted, moaned, and raised his head feebly. Johan eased him down onto the relative cleanliness of the rib’s spine. “Now we’re fucked! My fleet won’t know where we landed for another damned month, and by then they’ll have just jumped out! You locked the captain in a powder magazine with a signal flare!”

“Well, that wasn’t my intention.” Salen moaned and slumped a little deeper into the support of Johan’s arms. “I guess you’re not Leon, really, are you? I’m Johan?”

“Yeah, I know. Rashid, fuckin’ porn star.” The man glared, though less menacingly. “A bad one at that. Shit you imaged and simmed was what, twenty years ago? Look different, tho. Guess I’d have to see yer dick to be sure, unless you modified that, too, eh?” He shrugged and finally slammed the huge sidearm into its holster before extending one battle scarred hand. “Daeron Bander, commander of the Black Eyed Dogs.”

Johan gaped and rocked back as if the offered hand had struck him in the face instead. Salen’s weight almost bore him over entirely before he recovered, belatedly reaching out to grasp the offered hand tightly. “I- I, uh – see that you did, you know, actually survive?”

Daeron’s thick brows beetled together, “Huh? Yeah, I guess I did. What do you know if it?” He cocked his head, one eye half squinted. “The truth?”

“Your book, sir! I read it! Hell, I made a script out of it!”

“A script, huh? By a washed-up porn star.” He grunted in what actually seemed humor. “Didn’t know I had a fanboy.” The humor faded, however, when waved his hand at the screen, “Well, fanboy, what the fuck do we do now?”

Commodore Bochas, leaning against the safety railing staring at the quiescent diagnostics terminal, looked up when a distant clunk and hiss reached his ears. A moment later the raccoon’s visage appeared once more. “As promised, commodore, I am extending an offer of parlay. In the end, you keep your ship, and you won’t be out of pocket. I’ve convinced a concerned second party not to take your ship for their own, so long as we reach an accord. If you would, make your way to the bridge. I will be there within the hour, or so. True, out.”

The ship was quiet, the vault air pristine but bitingly cold, only recently fabricated from the ship’s water supply. With the cargo pods closed it looked like an abandoned aerial city of walkways.

In the corridors of the crew residences he found an incongruous, rather alarming, sight. His own security detail standing, unarmed but apparently unrestrained, with fully armed moreaus. The animals, despite being aged and half-starved, appeared to be fully conversant with the operation of those weapons. None of them looked upon him with charity, not even his own hired guns.

That was little different when he reached the bridge. Most of his crew were still at their stations, harried looking but unharmed. Among them and at unmanned stations, however, were moreaus as equally comfortable with their new tasks as the armed ones outside. A subtle stench tickled his nose but he managed to let it pass; after all the shit that just went down the stench of it was bound to pervade everything. A tall canid moreau stood up from the command chair and, stepping off the dais, waved an arm for him to sit. He did, dubiously settling into it and peering at the control panel – it was dark, locked out.

No one spoke. Not his crew, not the alert moreaus, the guards; nobody. The only sounds were control systems, the occasional cough from one of the unkempt, sickly looking moreaus, and the soft hiss of the atmospheric systems.

“Akehn, hai!” A harsh voice barked loudly, startling Bochas when every moreau on the bridge moved sharply, swiftly, and simultaneously. To a one they stood and locked at rigid attention, as had the guards, facing the entry at the rear of the bridge. His own crew, somewhat more reluctantly and looking confused, eventually assumed the same posture. Bochas turned to see who had entered and received such respect, and was profoundly rocked by what he saw.

The human he had rescued from the wrecked data courier, hair wet from a recent bathing and dressed in a plain brown coverall stood at the hatchway, clearly the recipient of the moreau crew’s response. Beside him was the skunk-modified canine moreau he had called a ‘tuxedo’, he did not know its name. It, also, was damp from recent bathing and its fur showed the chaotic results of air drying. And behind them both was the broad-shouldered frame of his own hired security chief. Bochas’ eyes riveted upon the one human he actually knew, if not as well as he had thought.

“Explain this!” He snapped with a wave toward the rigidly posed bridge crew.

The younger human raised one hand, slightly, and one of the moreaus barked something in the bastardized, guttural language they used; “Rhuet!” The moreaus smoothly resumed their stations.

“I think, what the guy said was, ‘Atten-shun!’” His chief drawled with a shrug as he followed human and moreau onto the bridge. “Isn’t that customary when a commander enters the room?”

“Be serious, Leon! You’re in league with… whatever the hell this is?”

“And ‘rhuet’ means, if I recall, ‘at ease’ or somesuch.” The other human, Johan, replied.

Bochas was bordering on apoplectic, wagging a finger at Johan as he spluttered and gasped, trying to find the right words. “You! You, I pulled your carcass out of space! And this is how you repay me?”

“Commodore, you did not pull me out of anywhere. You recovered a carefully staged prop, nothing more. And, if you’ll sit down, I’ll tell you how this is going to play out.” Johan wandered past the command dais and, turning, rested his backside against one of the subsystem panels. The moreau manning it did nothing more than sidle slightly to one side to give him room. “Firstly, your man Leon there had nothing to do with it at all. His mercs were going to storm the ship by force when you jumped into his carefully staged ambush, which your navigator was unaware of. Unfortunately, I had other plans, and modified his plot to put us here.” The man raised his arms theatrically with a mocking bow. “And here we are. I had already spent considerable coin and time to learn of your itinerary, get my prop in place, pay one of the specialists going over your systems at your last fuel port to reset your distress beacon routine to positive, and finally sit in space and cry ‘help me!’. Which you did, and thank you.” He grinned and sketched another theatrical bow with a roll of one hand. Bochas, stunned to the very core of his being, fell back into the command chair gasping for breath, his face purple.

“After that it was down to scripting the shot and ensuring the actors understood their parts, that’s what took so much time before I could roll camera.” Johan leaned back and crossed his ankles. “Now, Leon there was all for taking, and keeping, this boat but I convinced him that I had the better claim on it, considering I had just spaced a number of your crew.”

“You did that?” Bochas gaped like a landed fish, “I thought a raccoon –”

“What raccoon? Hrask True? Commodore, he was just another prop, not even a real actor. Just a computer artefact with a bit of voice over work. So I gave a few butchers a spacewalk to get your attention, and I do have your attention now, right? Because Leon there, well, he’s still itching to add another ship to his fleet.”

“Yes, yes, you have my attention.” Bochas finally groaned, slumping in his seat.

“Good, good. Very good.” Johan beamed, but at Salen rather than the defeated commodore. “Our next jump, once your engineers reverse what they did to the fuel system, which was ingenious by the way, will not be Canton. But I won’t exactly say where it is, not quite yet. There you and all of your human crew will disembark. I will ensure safe and proper housing for you, with the in-cell infotainment unit active and three ration packs a day.” At Bochas growing look of dismay, mirrored by many on the bridge, Johan laughed jovially. “Commodore, you and the others will be properly housed and will not be detained in any way. If they want more work they’re free to seek it while your ship is being… leased, let’s say? Once I’ve transported these moreaus safely to a new location your ship will be returned and you will be compensated. Not has handsomely as a trip to some Sangan slaughterhouse but sufficient to say the trip was not a total waste. I might even see about bringing back some cargo to cover the expenses.” Leaning forward Johan caught the commodore’s eye with an earnest stare. “It’s not about putting you out on your ass, commodore, it’s about saving lives. Even yours.”

“How – how long will you have my ship?” Bochas asked in a small voice.

“Oh, six months, no more than eight. It’s a long journey.” Bochas muttered a curse but offered no argument to the arrangement.

Satisfied that the remainder of the trip would be uneventful Johan ambled from the bridge with a jauntiness to his step, hooking out an arm for Salen to lean on. The unfortunate moreau had suffered a concussion when Morgan’s corpse plowed him into the bilge filth and he was still a tad unsteady. Daeron caught up with them a short distance down the corridor and brought their small group to a halt with one hand on Johan’s shoulder. His face, slashed with the parallel scars that marred its craggy lines, leaned close. “I know where you’re going.” He said quietly but earnestly, “I must get there, too!”

“I’m sorry, Daeron, but even one such as you cannot go there.” Johan shook his head sadly.

“Capelli’s world!” The big man hissed, desperately. “You’ve been there, you’re going there! I know it exists! Take me there!”

“Why?” Johan replied, grabbing the man’s upper arm and steering them further down the corridor.

“My son ended up there!” He exclaimed, though keeping his baritone rumble to a low hiss. “He sired one on a willing bitch, another shep-dog from a different line. He was the only one we had, before he was killed. We kept him safe, away, with the bitch. But Thomas bin Trask scooped them up, some seventeen years ago or thereabouts. Bin Trask was like me, snatching up moreaus and shipping them… away.” He raised an arm and pointed behind the hull. “I could just move them to places like New Eden or Dawa, but Trask, he could take them much further. And you can!” He grabbed Johan’s upper arm to lean in earnestly. “But I got a signal, six years ago. A deeply encrypted data packet sent direct to the Dogs from… somewhere, untraceable. It had a gene-encryption key and my mate’s DNA unlocked it. It was a message, to me, from my son!” His hand on Johan’s arm was clenched so tight it was almost uncomfortable. “My boy’s alive. He’s there, on Capelli! The message didn’t say, but I knew. Only place he could be, ‘cause I looked. For seventeen years I’ve looked.” Daeron’s hand finally released his arm with a spastic jerk, as if only then realizing how tightly he had held on.

“Tell me something, Daeron.” Johan said quietly, the faux-skunk grasping tightly to his arm and hanging on every word, his disheveled, still foul smelling fur sticking wildly out in all directions. “Those scars, how did you get them? From a moreau?”

Taken aback the big human raised a hand to his face, tracing the ugly quartet of slashes, before he shook his head. “No. I did this.” He again traced the scars from brow to jawline. “After them salvagers pulled me out of that coffin I expected to die in. I did this so I’d remember him, every time I look in a mirror.”

Reaching up, Johan laid a hand on the blocky shoulder and they resumed walking. “Tell me about him, this dog you loved, the sire of your son who you might find on a world beyond the limits of the galaxy.” Maybe, just maybe, Jorvald Avalon-Amber would finally complete his final masterwork after all, and then some.

Fin.