Fish and Ships

From Wormhole Sci-Fi MUD Homepage

Pirrip Flek had just collected a credstick from his latest employer, following the delivery of a small crate of archaeological relics to the University of Leiton. It was the third such shipment that his company had delivered; the kind of charter to which the Splinter Group was ideally suited. Miranu government regulations demanded that any shipment of important historical material could only undertaken if escorted by a fleet of not less than three armed vessels, and with its two fighters the Frankenfreighter fitted the bill nicely, particularly while the Zacha mercenaries were being kept so busy on the northern frontier.

Enjoying a beer at the Plug Inn, the spaceport’s most popular bar, Pirrip and his officers discussed what job opportunities they might find in the region. ‘I’d been hoping we might pick up a few crates of luxuries for the return trip,’ he said. ‘But have you seen the kind of crap that they call luxury goods around here? Sonic cutlery! Automatic potted plant watering devices! Musical toilet paper dispensers!’

‘They certainly don’t show much restraint when it comes to electronic gizmos, do they?’ Bullert replied. ‘I think we’ll just have to accept that this place is the arse-end of nowhere, and run empty, back to Saalia.’ After several swallows of his beer, he added: ‘We made enough on the trip here, after all.’

‘There was a time when we couldn’t afford to be so extravagant,’ Heegel chastised. ‘Times may come again when a few thousand extra credits may be critical.’

‘If we could find a small job, it would pay for another load of missiles...’ Bullert acknowledged. With its twin launcher installation, the Frankenfreighter could launch impressive volleys of needle missiles, but buying the reloads was always an expensive prospect.

Pirrip knew this only too well. He wouldn’t have his crew trying to save money in a battle situation, but he sometimes had difficulty squeezing a profit from the trips that involved combat. ‘We won’t find needles at any outfitter this far to galactic north,’ he said, ‘but perhaps we could put some money aside, and buy in bulk next time we find a supplier. Do we have any chance of picking up a cargo here?’

Finding a cargo had been Heegel’s responsibility. He had learned that Port Leiton only had a single mission computer, but at least he hadn’t had to queue for access. In fact, he doubted if anyone else had used the thing for weeks. It had held the details of a single client; a regular advertisement for bulk cargo hauliers. ‘Steady work’ it said, which meant badly paid. ‘We can get a cargo, and you’ll be pleased to hear that we won’t be dumping toxic garbage this time,’ he said.

‘If that’s the good news, I still don’t like it,’ the captain responded.

‘I admit, it is little better,’ Heegel replied. ‘It’s a shipment of live fish, to be delivered at First Centauri within nine days.’

‘Live? You mean suspended animation? You know we’re not rated to run those units, even for livestock.’

‘Indeed, Captain. No, this contract is to transport them live, in water. Oxygenation plant included. If we fill our hold completely, we could transport enough fish to get 12,500 credits for the job.’

‘Good grief,’ said Pirrip, ‘Live fish!’

‘Like I said. Arse-end of nowhere planet,’ Bullert grumbled. ‘Hold on... we can’t haul liquids! What’s to stop the water leaking through our hull partitioning and into the crew and passenger accomodation?’

‘Ah, well, I am assured by the fish exporter that his other hauliers have found a solution to that problem. Apparently, they...’

Bullert interrupted him. ‘They reconfigure their shields to operate inside the cargo bay?’

‘Yes.’

Bullert just groaned.

+ + +

There had been no other offers of work posted on the terminal in a year, so Pirrip decided that they would carry the fish. Heegel went back to the mission computer and completed the preliminaries, returning with instructions. In a few days, they were to rendezvous with a trawler that had been catching fish. It would then pump these into the Frankenfreighter’s hold along with some seawater.

While they were making ready to collect the cargo a message arrived from a group of Miranu requesting passenger transportation to New Tokyo. Pirrip sighed; a passenger charter would be much more lucrative, but they were now committed to carry the fish.

“Why don’t we do both?” asked Heegel. The Splinter Group crew would be delighted at the prospect of travelling with two cargoes – and earning a double bonus as a result.

A few hours later Pirrip introduced himself to the leader of the Miranu group. Vidral Krralt was tall and lean. He moved with the conscious caution of a person familiar who has experienced many different levels of gravity.

‘Pirrip Flek, commander of the Splinter Group. I believe you represent a party called MiraGE?’

‘Yes. The Mira Gravball Establishment, to use the full name. Some of us have enjoyed your sport for many years, and we wish to promote it among our own people.’

‘You’re a government official?’

‘I’m a player. We intend to compete in the coming season.’

Krralt didn’t look much like a player. Gravball players tended not to look like ordinary people. They had wide shoulders, and scars... and they didn’t usually have any sort of neck, to speak of. Still, Pirrip didn’t mind how deluded the passengers might be as long as they weren’t fugitives from justice, and they could pay for the journey.

‘As good a way as any to generate interest, I suppose,’ he mused.

‘Indeed. With the added advantage that it will be the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition of mine.’

‘So you need to go to New Tokyo?’

‘Actually that is only the first journey for which I would like to engage your services. We have arranged to play in a pair of... I believe the term is “friendly matches”, before the season begins. The fixtures are at Kono District on New Tokyo, and New St. Emilion on Saalia. I can offer you fifty thousand credits if you will take us to Saalia, via New Tokyo.’

‘New Tokyo and Saalia? Damn far apart. Practically opposite ends of human space.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Well, good coverage I suppose. How many of you are there?’

‘Just the team, plus a support staff of two.’

‘Eleven of you?’ But that’s... uh, if you’ll forgive me for asking, why not travel on a regular liner?’

Pirrip regretted not having Heegel with him. If Krralt was a typical Miranu he would be a very persuasive negotiator... yet he had already offered a very generous price for the journey proposed. The captain was confused, wrong-footed.

‘There have been some... incidents. Nothing significant enough to attract the attention of the navy. Our training has been disrupted, and some equipment has been stolen. We were due to play a fixture here last week, but we arrived to find it cancelled. The promoter won’t explain why. In fact, he won’t speak to me. And I should tell you that several other captains have refused to transport the team.’

‘Hmm... You expect further trouble?’

‘I have to say it’s a possibility. Perhaps if I offered a bonus of twenty-five thousand credits, to be paid if there is combat as a result of our presence aboard your ship?’

Pirrip was amused by this, the most honest (which is to say, the worst) attempt at negotiation that a Miranu had ever conducted. He raised his eyebrows, and avoided answering this offer directly.

‘What are you doing after Saalia?’ Pirrip asked.

‘If we qualify for the Gravball League then secure transport will be provided,’ the Miranu replied. ‘If we don’t qualify, we’re a group of nobodies and we can travel home on a scheduled liner... Until that’s decided, if anybody wants to spoil our chances we are an easy target.’

‘Do you really thing you’re good enough to qualify for the League?’

‘Oh yes.’ There was no doubt in the Miranu’s tone at all.

Pirrip began to suspect that the credits on offer might be hard-earned after all. ‘Who might want to stop you reaching New Tokyo?’

‘Presumably one or more of the gambling syndicates. I don’t know much about United Earth institutions to be honest. We just want to play gravball, and unfortunately, it appears that to do so we must have an armed escort.’

‘I could take you to New Tokyo but we will be flying via the Centauri system. We have a cargo to drop off.’

‘Not a problem. Just as long as you can get us to New Tokyo by the 28th.’

‘All right then. We’ll try to leave the trouble behind. Tell nobody outside your team that you have found transportation, and have your people ready to go in two hours. Any equipment or personal effects that can’t be loaded in that time must be left here.’

‘Accepted, captain.’ They shook hands.

Returning to his cabin to stow everything safely for their departure, Pirrip’s terminal showed that he had a call waiting. Messages coming straight to this terminal were always from family members, so he was smiling as he keyed the ‘answer’ function.

A unfamiliar face stared out at him, faceted and clearly computer-generated. It’s voice was also false, distorted and anonymous.

‘Flek? You would do well to forget about conveying Vidral Krralt and his team.’

‘And you are...?’

‘I am giving you some friendly advice.’

It didn’t seem very friendly to Pirrip. ‘You’ll be pleased to know then, friend, that I’m here for a cargo of fish.’

‘Good for you,’ the face grinned, ‘because it will take more than two wooden fighters to defend you if you decide to start meddling in things that don’t concern you.’

Pirrip frowned, but decided not to retort. ‘Like I said, we’re only here for the fish.’

The face nodded, and the connection was cut. There was no trace of the call’s origin.

+ + +

The cargo transfer from the trawler was difficult. On the surface of the sea, the Frankenfreighter bobbed around like a cork. By the time the trawler had managed to pump fifty tonnes of seawater and fish across nearly everyone was suffering from seasickness, particularly the passengers. It was an inauspicious start to their expensive voyage.

In the hold an egg-shaped, pearlescent shimmer was all that held back fifty tonnes of seawater. Bullert’s hands were darting over the controls, keeping the cargo centred, suspended in mid-air. If it touched one of the bulkheads the shields could be earthed, sending the water and the fish cascading through the ship.

Occasionally the ovoid of water would bulge as one of the fish attacked the boundary. The crew would see a flash of sharp teeth, and a flurry of fins. Everybody stared in appalled fascination.

When Bullert had made the cargo as stable as it was likely to get, they took off, and headed for their jump point.

The flight went normally until a few minutes from the jump, when Frell gave the alarm: ‘There’s an asteroid heading toward us.’

‘That’s odd’ said Pirrip, ‘We’re well out of the ecliptic...’

Almost all routes through planetary space were defined by centuries of gravitational sifting. Most asteroids were to be found in a single plane, several kilometres below that presently occupied by the Frankenfreighter.

‘Another asteroid coming up out of the belt, Captain. Impact in twenty-five seconds... suggest you steer one four five degrees.’

‘There’s something strange going on here. Very well. Steer one four five and rise another twenty kilometres. That should do it.’

The deck heaved underfoot as the ship lumbered onto a new heading. Just as a third asteroid left the belt below, on a collision course with their new heading.

‘Increase speed,’ the captain ordered, ‘and stand by to launch fighters.’ Their heavy rockets would reduce an asteroid to confetti.

‘More asteroids climbing out of the ecliptic, Captain.’

‘Are they on a collision course?’

‘No they... wait... they’re accelerating towards us.’

The bridge crew studied the asteroid belt, looking for ships that might have nudged the asteroids towards them, or the tell-tale corona of a repulsor beam. Nothing.

The first asteroid sailed by, just two kilometres off the port beam. It was lit by the flare from a starship engine, mounted directly to rock. As they watched, small thrusters fired and the asteroid began to turn, perhaps for another attempt at smashing into them. It was clear that they couldn’t survive an impact with one of the asteroids. Not without shields.

‘Give me manual control,’ Pirrip called, and the alien control column swung up into place at his seat. Pirrip had to sit on a cushion to reach the pedals. ‘Let’s see if I can remember how this is done... How far until the jump point?’

‘Fourteen hundred kilometers, Captain.’

Pirrip grunted acknowledgement, and pulled the massive alien control yoke hard over. He demanded maximum acceleration from the engines, and almost immediately fired the retros. An asteroid tumbled by, a few hundred metres in front of the bow.

‘Fighters ready to launch, Captain,’ a voice came over the comm channel.

‘Belay that,’ Pirrip grinned, ‘We can manage.’ They might need the fighters’ ammunition for nastier targets, later. He made the ship roll about its axis, presenting a smaller cross-section and causing an asteroid to pass harmlessly below them. It bumped one of the others and a scattering of rocks flew lazily outwards from the impact point. Both asteroids ceased to manoeuvre. Pirrip gunned the engines and flew through the edge of the debris cloud. Small scraping noises could be heard all over the ship. Flipping end over end, he brought the Frankenfreighter to a halt behind the two ‘dead’ asteroids.

A nasty-looking nickel-iron one headed straight for the Frankenfreighter. It was dense, and its touch would have been like a blow from a giant hammer. It clipped one of the stationary rocks first, though, and went rolling away into deep space.

‘Distance to jump point?’ Pirrip asked.

‘Seven hundred kilometers, Captain,’ Frell replied.

Pirrip studied the oncoming asteroids, and made a quick mental calculation. He turned tail, and boosted away at full speed. ‘They won’t reach us before we make the jump point, so unless they’re equipped for hyperspace...’

+ + +

In the next system, everybody breathed a sigh of relief. Putting simple steering gear and engines on a mass of asteroids had been a clever trick; if the Frankenfreighter had been destroyed in this way, would the navy suspect foul play? It was more likely that nobody would ever have bothered to investigate.

Pirrip considered dumping the seawater and the fish before they ran into any more trouble. Heegel was horrified at the idea, having calculated the penalties they would have to pay for abandoning the job. Pirrip asked Bullert to look into the possibility of retaining the fish by some means other than the shields, or coming up with a way to dump the fish in a hurry if they came under attack again. This ship hadn’t been turning properly with the liquid aboard. Bullert replied that it would take at least an hour to re-establish shields, after ceasing to use them on the inside of the ship. Not a useful combat tactic, therefore.

‘We’ll just have to trust to luck then,’ Pirrip decided. ‘We’ll be rid of the fish in a few more jumps, anyway...’

The next two jumps were uneventful, but then as they arrived in the DSN-90210 system, the Splinter Group met more trouble.

Even before the navigation computer had rebooted following the jump, a phased beam scored into the wooden hull, routing out a blackened groove that glowed briefly before the cold of space extinguished the embers.

‘Damn it!’ the Captain exclaimed as one of the consoles on the bridge suffered a power surge and sent sparks everywhere. ‘If this barrage continues, we might be safer inside the shields!’

Heegel blinked. ‘I can tell by the fact that you still have all your limbs, you’ve never swum in the seas of Leiton, Captain.’

‘No. Why?’

‘Imagine a shark, only with teeth that could bite through aluminium and psychology to match. I wouldn’t want to go for a swim in the hold right now, even in a space suit.’

There were three attackers, a large mothership and two fighters, all painted in a garish red and purple colour scheme. They circled the Frankenfreighter, occasionally darting in to shoot with their phased beams, always careful to avoid the Freighter’s field of fire.

‘Who the hell do you suppose these guys are?’ Pirrip asked. Nobody had any ideas beyond the obvious one: bounty hunters.

Pirrip decided not to launch his two fighters if he could possibly avoid it, since they would clearly be terribly outclassed. Instead, the Splinter Group flagship sent out a stream of needle missiles, causing the enemy fighters to back off momentarily, although most of the missiles seemed to wander away aimlessly, detonating when their fuel ran out. The bounty hunter had great ECM. The only good news was that the rockets fired by the large enemy ship seemed to detonate just short of their target for some reason. They fizzled, failing to do much more than scorch the wooden hull of the Frankenfreighter.

In addition to a sullen red dwarf star, the DSN-90210 system boasted a single planet. This was what Pirrip needed; some terrain to give him more options. The fast enemy ships would have their advantage degraded if they had to manoeuvre in a gravity well. Pirrip headed for the planet at top speed, then let the ship drift so he could turn about and fire at his pursuers. His freighter was throwing out clouds of needle missiles, and the mass-driver weapons were firing indiscriminately. The hostile ships darted around too quickly for his gunners to select individual targets in the usual way.

Just as the Splinter Group were beginning to think they might be able to even things up a little, disaster struck. Two phased beams struck the ship at once, both at the root of the port nacelle. From a ruined conduit, fuel boiled away into space.

‘Losing fuel pressure to the port engine, Captain,’ Bullert reported. ‘She’ll run dry in a few seconds.’

Pirrip used those seconds of thrust while he could, sending the ship down towards the planet’s surface. When the port engine failed, they went into a flat spin. A UE Navy beacon flashed them an urgent message: ‘You cannot land on DSN-90210/01. The planet’s environment is too hostile.’

Pirrip used the few thrusters that would still respond, to get the Frankenfreighter into an attitude that gave a passable impression of the glide angle for re-entry with aerobraking. Without the benefit of shields, the hull had to bear the brunt of the temperature. It charred as they sank into the planet’s thick atmosphere, and they left a bright trail like a meteor. Still, the wood saved them, performing far better than any metal would have done. Indeed, many of the metal fittings on the hull were glowing white hot. Some were starting to deform and flow, like soft putty. Most of the sensors on the underside of the ship were completely blacked out, overloaded or destroyed by the heat.

At the communications console, Adams was losing his nerve: ‘Captain, we have to slow this descent!’

‘Not until we’re over the horizon.’ Pirrip held tightly to the armrests of his seat as the ship was buffeted. Flames licked at the ship’s windows, and it was getting uncomfortably hot. ‘Can anybody get me a view forwards?’

Only the rearward-facing cameras on the uppermost parts of the ship were still sending pictures.

‘Captain,’ Bullert reported, ‘the retros are still primed with fuel, but only enough for one shot. I can’t guarantee the structural integrity of the hull, but, uh... you’re going to have to decelerate sooner or later.

‘Thanks Bullert.’ Pirrip forced himself to sound calm. ‘Adams, how long until we’ve got the planet between us and the enemy.’

‘Still two minutes,’ the junior officer croaked. Pirrip asked him to count it down. This wasn’t really necessary, but it gave him something to do, making him less likely to panic.

‘One minute thirty seconds. Altitude ninety-six kilometres.’

‘One minute. Altitude seventy-four kilometres.’

A small piece of the nose structure broke away, smacking into the cockpit glass and starring it crazily. Everybody winced, but the thick glass laminate held.

‘Thirty seconds. Altitude forty-nine kilometres.

‘Zero!’ Adams exclaimed with relief. Then: ‘Captain?’

‘You forgot the altitude,’ said Pirrip.

‘Twelve kilometers!’ exclaimed Adams. ‘Eleven, ten...’

Pirrip thumbed the retros, and the whole ship shuddered. All over the ship people felt their safety straps dig in savagely as the ship was, finally, slowed. It wallowed through the air, poorly-shaped for flying in an atmosphere at the best of times, and especially on partial power.

‘Captain to all hands. Crash-landing imminent. Brace for impact.’ He didn’t have time to spare any more than the briefest thought for the passengers, who must have been terrified.

The antigravity generator hummed into life, masking the Frankenfreighter from much of the draw of the planet below, but it could do nothing against the remaining forward velocity. With no sensors relaying a forward view to the captain, he was flying blind. To fire his single functional engine would only have made matters worse.

Adams stared through one of the undamaged windows, but could make out little other than swirling yellow clouds, until:

‘Mountains!’

They had burst down out of the clouds, finally being given a clear view of the terrain. Ahead was a massive outcropping of rock, just a few kilometres away.

Alerted, Pirrip did the only thing he could think of. He cut power to the antigravity generator, and the ship dropped fast. After a heartbeat he started the protesting device up again, and their fall ceased. Twice more he repeated this tactic, and they lurched lower.

‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’ he ordered, and cut the antigravity generator for a final time.

The Frankenfreighter skipped, and then carved a long furrow into the soil of the alien world. Something caught, and the ship swung hard to port. Small fittings and personal items bounced around the bridge, but they were down. Alive.

The damage control console was lit up like a Christmas tree. In addition to the abuse suffered by the port engine nacelle, the hull was showing a severe reduction in integrity all over the underside. It was still smouldering in fact. The ventral blaze turret had been ripped away during the landing, and most of the sensor array had been ruined, although some of the sensors from the top and rear of the ship might be relocated to cover the blind spots. The antigravity generator would never be the same again, clearly, and the cracked window was leaking slightly, a foul greenish gas seeping in. No doubt more problems would be reported once the crew had made a thorough inspection.

Pirrip evacuated the bridge, and convened a meeting of the ship’s officers in his cabin. He also had Krralt join them.

‘Here’s the situation,’ he summarised for the benefit of those who had endured the descent to the planet’s surface without knowing exactly what was happening, ‘We were ambushed by superior enemy ships that we have to assume weren’t just ordinary pirates. We sustained damage that made fleeing impossible, so I put us down on this planet. It’s listed as too hostile for landing attempts, by the way.’

‘What does that mean?’ Krralt asked.

Pirrip regarded the passenger, and decided he could handle the truth. ‘We’re on a world with a thick atmosphere that isn’t merely toxic; it’s corrosive to the ship. If we stay too long, the ship’s hull will become pulpy, until it reaches a point where it won’t be able to withstand the pressures you would expect during spaceflight. On the positive side, we gave a very good impression of being a dead duck on our way down here, and the enemy will be unable to find us as long as we remain powered down. They ought to assume that we smacked in, and move on to collect their bounty.’

‘So we wait here?’

‘We make all the repairs we possibly can, but in any event we lift off before the corrosive rain damages the hull of the ship too badly. Then we’ll continue on to First Centauri. We’ll need to refuel there, anyway.’

Nobody had any better ideas, so they formed working parties, and began their repairs.

+ + +

Pirrip was with Bullert, regarding the ovoid of seawater in the hold. Miraculously it was intact despite their tribulations. Only Bullert’s brilliant work in programming the shield generators had prevented a spill that would have seen the crew and passengers engulfed in water and killer fish in the immediate aftermath of the crash landing.

‘You did well, Bullert. I never could have... What the hell?’

A thumping sound reverberated through the hull, accompanied by splintering cracks.

They hurried to a porthole and peered out.

‘Natives!’ Bullert exclaimed.

‘What?’ said Pirrip, ‘But the environment here is way too hostile!’

‘For us maybe. Not for them.’

There were about a dozen of them; fierce-looking primitives almost two metres tall. Their heads were large, with bony ridges that might protect their deep-set eyes from the worst of the planet’s foul weather. They were barrel-chested, with huge lungs to extract some benefit from the foul atmosphere, and they yelled to one another as they worried at the hull of the Frankenfreighter with an assortment of simple tools. One of them was dressed in more brightly-coloured rags than the rest, and decorated with what looked like small bones. He was apparently the leader. He yelled at some of the primitives, and they loped away. When they returned, they carried a pair of axes. In time with a chant from the leader, who pranced in front of the ship and made gestures with what Pirrip had to assume were his sex organs, two of the largest beast-men swung the axes. These bit deep into the hull of the ship, again and again.

Pirrip could not use the shields without dumping the fish. One of his blaze turrets was a mangled ruin, buried beneath the ship, and the other could not be depressed far enough to aim at targets at ground level. He considered starting up the thrusters to scare away the natives, but rejected the idea almost at once. If his enemies were still in orbit they could easily detect the heat plume, and deduce that the Splinter Group weren’t yet finished. He wasn’t about to order his crew into their space suits, to go outside and fight the monstrous creatures...

What then?

He thought fast, as the splintering groans sounded, his ship being torn apart by simple brutes who threatened to finish the job that the bounty hunters had started. His gaze came to rest on the ovoid of seawater, still suspended in the centre of the hold.

‘To hell with this. Those fish have brought us nothing but trouble. Let’s get rid of them. Bullert!’

‘Captain?’

‘Suit up. In about five minutes those monsters outside will have breached the hull. As soon they break in, you’re to switch off the shields. We’ll either feed the primitives to the fish, or the fish to the primitives. I don’t mind which.’

Bullert hurried to comply. A lifetime’s experience in space meant he could get into a spacesuit faster than most people thought possible. Even so, he only just had enough time. With a crash, an axe smashed through and the greenish gas of the planet’s atmosphere flooded into the hold. Within seconds, brutish hands were tearing at the edges of the opening, and then one of the monsters tried to squeeze his way inside.

Bullert lowered the shields.

For a split second, the massive droplet of water hung in the air. Then it lost cohesion and splashed onto the deck. Bullert had to reach out and grip his captain tightly, who would otherwise have been swept away. A whirlpool developed, and the seawater gushed from the wounded freighter. Something tried to fasten its teeth onto Bullert’s leg, but it disappeared with the swirling water.

Outside, it seemed that the natives were stung by the seawater. The salt burnt their skins, perhaps. Many of the beast-men also found themselves assaulted by the strange creatures that were deposited when the water drained away. The grey, sinuous things flopped around on the soil, writhing with increasing desperation and savagely locking their teeth into the flesh of any nearby natives. The fish bit indiscriminantly, even at each other. Despite being tremendously powerful, several of the natives received nasty wounds before they fought their way to safety.

Within a minute all the fish were dead. They could not survive out of water, still less in the corrosive atmosphere of this planet. Bullert and his captain manhandled a hull repair patch into place, and vented the foul gasses from the hold. The repair was relatively flismy, but the natives did not appear ready to assault the ship again. At first they were scared, then one of them discovered that the fish were edible, and all thoughts of attacking the ship were forgotten while the natives gorged themselves.

By the time they began to regard the starship in their midst once again Bullert had recalibrated the shields. A low-level field covered the whole ship; not enough to be detectable from orbit, but enough to give an inquisitive native an electric shock. They continued to chant and throw things at the ship, but they no longer represented a threat.

Heegel regarded them from a porthole. ‘I cannot imagine how much damage we’ve just done to the local system of religion,’ he observed drily.

+ + +

Making the ship spaceworthy again took longer than expected, and it was almost two days later that the Frankenfreighter returned to orbit. Partially repaired, she was just about spaceworthy enough to fly onward to New Tokyo. With the fish gone there was no longer any reason to visit First Centauri; nor was there enough time to do so. After the mauling he had been given, Pirrip was grimly determined that his passengers should reach their destination on time. After his next jump, he hailed a UE Navy ship and requested assistance. They sold him some fuel, albeit at an outrageous price. The destroyer’s crew goggled at the poor condition of the Frankenfreighter, but Pirrip didn’t report the attack that had taken place in the DSN-90210 system; better for those responsible to think that the Splinter Group had been destroyed. The rest of mankind would not learn from him that the planet below could be landed upon, and that there was (somewhat) intelligent life to be found there.

With the cost of the fuel, the anticipated cost of spare parts for the Frankenfreighter, plus the penalties for failure to deliver the shipment of fish, the Splinter Group might – if they were really lucky – lose only half a million credits on this trip.

Fortunately, the rest of the journey to New Tokyo was uneventful, and they arrived with a few hours to spare.

+ + +

At the Kono District Gravball Dome, the Miranu faced a team called the New Tokyo Welders. It had originally been made up of workmen from the orbital fabrication facility and the team had kept the name though they had gone professional more than twenty years before.

The Miranu put on a good show; even the most most ardent Welders fan would have to admit that the aliens looked splendid in their green team colours as they ran out of the tunnel and took up their places in the arena. Many people in the crowd applauded their arrival politely.

As visitors, the Miranu did not begin the opening third with the ball in their possession. For the Welders, a burly fellow with ‘03’ on his shirt took the ball. Pirrip checked the programme and saw that this was Marik Flint, the team captain. In earlier years he had played a few matches in the Main League.

On the ground, the Welders played a fast-paced game with lots of sprinting but minimal passing. It was clear that they were weakest in the air, where they had placed their youngest players. These players concentrated on blocking off any opportunities for mid-air play by MiraGE, and if they happened to get the ball they immediately passed it to ground.

The Miranu were clearly keen to do the opposite, which led to a bizarre situation where it was almost as if each side was playing a different game. If the humans could force a ground play, they would usually score, and likewise if the Miranu could force an air play, they would usually score.

What ultimately tipped the balance and won the home team the match the was not the superiority of the humans’ tactical plays, or the skill with which they were executed; it was a steady wearing down of the alien team. The Miranu style was one of elegant passing and dodging, never seeking physical contact when it could be avoided. In contrast, the Welders would never miss a chance to slam into a willowy Miranu, who was often bowled over by the impact.

This is, of course, perfectly legitimate in gravball, and the few supporters of the Miranu team could not have said that their side had been treated unfairly. The match was refereed by the station AI entity, which viewed the action simultaneously from sixty-four different angles.

By the time the middle third had ended, the Miranu had used both their substitutions and several of the remaining players were looking groggy. In the air they were still supreme, but on the ground there was a distinct danger that they might run out of players if the Welders continued their ruthless tackles. Still, the humans weren’t having it all their own way, and in the last minutes of the final third, the Miranu closed the points gap tremendously. The final score was 77 to 59, in the home team’s favour.

MiraGE did not stay on New Tokyo, but returned to orbit as soon after the match as they decently could, without appearing impolite. Pirrip sat with Krralt on the shuttle.

‘I enjoyed the game,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the tickets.’

‘You’re most welcome, Captain. We receive an allocation at each venue, and we have few friends to give them to, so far from home.’

‘It was a game like no other, but the result must have been a setback for you?’

‘Not really. Personally I had expected a worse defeat in this first match.’ Krralt delicately probed the swellings around his eye as he spoke, then winced. ‘No. We can build on this nicely.’

Pirrip raised an eyebrow, but the gesture was apparently lost on the alien. It wasn’t his job to talk strategies with Krralt anyway; merely to get him to each venue on time and ready to play.

+ + +

Bullert’s engineering staff hadn’t been able to watch the match. They had remained up on Kono district’s Orbital, making repairs to some of the most damaged areas of the Frankenfreighter’s hull. Fortunately, despite New Toyko being a heavily industrialised world, it had been possible to acquire a large quantity of timber at a low price. Two years earlier, Kono District had been expanded, with a large tract of ancient forest being cleared. The wood was now nicely seasoned, and ready for use. (The people of New Tokyo weren’t very sentimental about their environment. Indeed, interlocking cities stretched their web almost from pole to pole in places.) Bullert regarded the planet below during a spacewalk, watching his team grafting some new planking in place where several centimetres of the hull had been burned away.

It’s amazing that a race as foolish as humanity has survived long enough to achieve spaceflight, he thought. In a few years time the world below would be importing oxygen. Originally an agricultural world, New Tokyo was now a manufacturing powerhouse, its economy expanding at twelve percent a year. But how will they survive if - when - the economy dips?

Moving on to replace a burnt-out sensor, Bullert wrestled with a stubborn nut. He’d forgotten momentarily that the Frankenfreighter’s alien threads all went anticlockwise. Even at the best of times, performing such operations in space was difficult because you had to brace yourself against something, or each swing of the spanner simply pushed you in the opposite direction.

'Come on you little... ah!' The tool slipped and Bullert missed his grab for a nearby cleat. He was on a safety line, of course, but the chief engineer didn’t want to be seen bobbing helplessly. He looked around self-consciously, to see if any of the work crew were looking in his direction.

Instead, he noticed an angular little fighter nosing its way towards one of the station’s smaller bays. In a bright red and purple paint-job, it matched Pirrip’s description of the ships that had ambushed the Frankenfreighter at DSN-90210. It seemed the bounty hunters had caught up with the Splinter Group.

+ + +

Back on the ship, Pirrip convened another meeting of the ship’s officers. ‘We got here through luck and cunning,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll need a good deal of both before we complete the charter.’

He went on to explain how Bullert had seen one of the ships that had attacked them, now berthed just three bays away.

‘Do you think they will attack again?’ asked Hassel, one of the fighter pilots.

‘Almost certainly, but not here. Any bounty that’s posted on us is unlawful, so they can’t attack us in full view of New Tokyo law enforcement. Although they might try to smuggle a bomb aboard, of course.’

‘I scanned all the replacement parts we’ve bought and fitted; we’re clean,’ reported Bullert.

‘Good. I think I’ll have the passengers’ cabins inspected as well, just to be on the safe side,’ the captain mused. ‘One of them may have unwittingly brought back something.’

Hassel went back to the subject of combat: ‘If they don’t manage to get a bomb aboard, those fighters will jump us again, I suppose?’ She was clearly itching for a chance to fight back against their ambushers.

Pirrip knew how frustrating it must have been to endure their combat at DSN-90210, strapped into a fighter that hadn’t been launched. He also knew how futile such an effort would have been; the enemy fighters were about twice as fast, and heavily shielded. The Splinter Group’s mass-driver weapons were built for battering armour, and would have done almost nothing against such ships.

He nodded understanding, but he was to disappoint her: ‘I’ve arranged for us to join a convoy carrying warship components, bound for Earth. That red and purple ship and its friends can follow us – hell, they can even join the convoy – but we’ll be under the protection of the Navy. At Earth we can easily attach ourselves to a convoy taking metals to the Liat system, and then we’re only one jump from our destination. It’s not exactly the boldest move we’ve ever made, but it’ll be safe.’

Krralt was delighted when he was told how Pirrip proposed to achieve the next leg of their journey. He had no wish to come under attack from the bounty hunters again.

‘Excellent, Captain. I hope this means you will suffer no further losses on our behalf. It is clear that you must have lost money on this charter.’

‘We certainly have, but I can’t say you were anything other than honest when describing the circumstances.’

‘We needed a respectable crew,’ the Miranu replied. ‘I think some would have pushed us out of the airlock when the trouble started – or at least abandoned us on New Tokyo.’

‘I wish I could tell you that we never give up on a mission,’ Pirrip said sadly, ‘But of course, there’s the fish we abandoned on DSN-90210. If we were to let you down as well, I don’t think we’d ever be welcome in the galactic north again.’

‘The flesh of those fish is disgusting,’ Krralt opined. ‘Or should I say, “an acquired taste.” You did the people of First Centauri a favour, in my opinion.’

This was scant consolation to Pirrip, who had been forced to pay fifty thousand credits in compensation when he reported the cargo as lost.

+ + +

The military components convoy jumped into the New Tokyo system, a mixed bag of transporters and freight-couriers protected by the destroyer Far Sunset and a carrier called the Elvis Aaron Presley.

‘Who’s Elvis Aaron Presley?’ asked Heegel.

‘No idea,’ said Pirrip. Adams was likewise mystified, but Bullert had studied History of Earth at school:

‘Elvis Aaron Presley was the king of a place called America, in the days before space travel. Legend has it that he was abducted by aliens.’

‘Weird,’ said Pirrip. ‘Still, Elvis has a twin hunter missile installation, blaze turrets and a fleet of fighters. If those guys will protect us for the next few days, they can call their ship anything they like.’ He gave the order, and the Splinter Group moved to join the convoy. The red and purple fighter slunk away, heading for deep space.

+ + +

Pirrip hadn’t been asleep for long when he was roused by a chime from his terminal, and summoned to the bridge. He ran along the Frankenfreighter’s main corridor, and arrived less than ninety seconds later.

The bridge crew of the third watch looked tense. Edgy. Ordinarily, having summoned their captain to the bridge, they would have immediately told him why his rest had been interrupted. This time, nobody seemed to want to speak.

‘Yes?’ Pirrip prompted.

Simona Gal Reens, the duty communications officer for the night regarded him with huge, sad eyes. In a breach of etiquette, she placed a hand on his arm. ‘Captain...’

‘What?’ Something was wrong here. But nothing to do with the ship, he saw, glancing at the readouts at the bridge crews’ stations.

‘We just received a message, relayed via the system beacon. You need to see it. I’m sorry... it wasn’t encrypted, so we...’ She gestured towards one of the display screens. It looked perfectly innocent, simply waiting to play its message.

None the wiser, Pirrip crossed the deck and stood before the screen. He hit the ‘play’ button. The screen display showed the same angular, computer-generated face that he had seen before.

‘Flek,’ it intoned, ‘We have your son. If the Miranu gravball team that you are transporting arrive in time to play their qualifying match on Saalia, he dies a painful death. If they fail to appear for their match, he will be released unharmed.’ A series of still images followed. Each showed Pirrip’s son, Mercator, shut in a cell of some kind. Emotions warred inside Pirrip as he studied the pictures. At fourteen Earth-years, Mercator would still be considered a minor in most cultures, yet here he was, being used as a hostage. He was studying at the Academy on Luna, and hoping to qualify as a pilot. Pirrip typically saw him and his mother every two months or so, when they were passing through the home system.

Somebody swung out a chair, and Pirrip sank into it, still staring at the screen. He was assaulted by guilt, that he hadn’t been there to protect the boy.

‘Bastards.’ he said indistinctly, as he gnawed a thumbnail.

Heegel bustled onto the bridge, oblivious of recent events.

‘Captain! I thought you were asleep. Some of us have been watching the passengers practice their gravball plays in the hold. It’s a fascinating... hmm?’ He sensed the tension that charged the atmosphere of the bridge, and looked from face to face.

Pirrip gestured towards the screen, and hit the ‘play’ button once again.

Heegel watched in silence, for the whole duration of the message.

‘I take it you are certain this is one of your young? The images could be computer-generated...’

‘I have to assume it’s genuine. And he’s not “one of my young,”’ Pirrip flashed angrily. ‘He’s my only child.’

‘My apologies Captain. Hmm... we will be coming out of jumpspace in one hour. Perhaps we should prepare to leave the convoy?’

‘Yes. But how do we stop the team from transferring to another ship? Kidnap them?’

‘Perhaps I should explain the circumstances to them?’ Heegel offered.

Simona handed Pirrip a flask of Saalian tea. He drank automatically, not tasting the spicy brew.

‘Bastards. Yes, yes. Go on, Heegel.’

Pirrip cycled through the still images on the communications terminal again. In the first his son was sitting on a rolled-up sleeping bag, staring dejectedly at the wall opposite. In the next three he was pacing to and fro, apparently agitated. Then he was sitting down again, eating a foodstick. At least they weren’t starving him. The next picture was dimly-lit, and his son was lying down, although he wasn’t asleep. In the last he was sitting cross-legged, performing a breathing exercise that all students were taught at the Academy.

‘When I last visited we argued,’ he told nobody in particular. ‘I told Merc we could probably find him a good first posting as a midshipman on a StellarCorp ship. He told me not to plan his future for him. Says he’s going to enlist in the Navy! What a... What a waste.’

Pirrip left the bridge. He returned to his cabin, and washed his face. He put on a fresh uniform, and felt more in control when he returned.

+ + +

Krralt had requested to speak with the captain. Pirrip was ready to summon a security detachment to detain the passenger in his quarters if necessary, but the Miranu’s sympathy surprised him:

‘Captain, we have no desire to set foot upon Saalia until we know that your son is safe.’

‘It will cost you your chance to qualify for the League, of course.’

‘If you follow the instructions you have been given, yes. But consider: other than the assurances of an anonymous face, do you have any guarantee that your son will be released?’

‘No.’

‘He has probably seen the faces of his abductors. If released he may be able to identify them, or their ship, or the place he has been taken to.’

‘I have to trust them,’ Pirrip moaned. ‘I agree with you, but I can’t do anything that will rob him of this chance.’

‘I would have thought that a person in command of three armed vessels would be able to think of something more, ah... proactive?’

Pirrip found himself being persuaded by Krralt’s argument, but he still had no idea where his son was being held. No rescue could be attempted without this information, as he pointed out.

‘May I see the message from the kidnappers?’ Krralt asked. Pirrip shrugged and indicated the communications terminal.

Krralt watched the message through twice, paying particular attention to the still images. Eventually he turned back to Pirrip. ‘There’s something curious here... I can’t quite decide what. With your permission, I’d like to have one of my people study the message closely. Our catcher was formerly a software technician. Did some work on imaging, I believe. He may be able to tell you a little more about the message.’

Pirrip considered for a moment. Where was the harm? If the gravball team occupied themselves with detective work on his behalf it would keep them busy until the day of their qualifying match came... and went. He thought of the Miranu catcher he had seen in the game on New Tokyo. So thin his face was skull-like, and with long limbs that made him seem like a spider. His funny little zero-gee dance when his team scored. A bizarre character to pin his hopes upon. Still, the Splinter Group’s very existence proved that it wasn’t always wise to judge by appearances.

‘All right. Thank you.’ He downloaded a copy of the message onto a memory stick. ‘I’d like one of my communications officers to work with your man.’ He pressed the button that would summon Adams to the bridge.

+ + +

Arriving in the Tulir system, the Splinter Group left the convoy, and went into orbit. Pirrip reasoned that there was no point moving on towards Saalia without further information, in case this was taken as a sign that they still intended to deliver their passengers on time. They loitered while Adams and Eekas, the Miranu catcher, pulled the message to pieces. Just four hours later, they had something, and summoned the captain to see their handiwork.

‘This guy’s amazing!’ Adams enthused, indicating Eekas. ‘He put together a self-configuring algorithm to match patterns in the image compression.’

‘Meaning?’ asked Pirrip, who had little time for the intricacies of software.

‘Uh,’ Adams blinked and tried to be more patient. ‘Ultranet communications bandwidth is limited, so all transmissions are encoded, and often carry more than one type of information at once. A classic one is to send billing information at the same time as a video call.’

‘You’re telling me you know where this call originated?’ Pirrip sounded dubious.

‘It’s not quite that simple,’ Adams began, then hurried on as he saw his captain’s hopes draining away. ‘Remember we don’t actually have any live video here. Just some animated junk and a collection of still images. But those still images were taken from a video feed! It was compressed at source, and then some still images were chopped out and sent to us. Eekas has thrown together some software that looks at the noise in the images – stuff left over from the compression process – and infers some of the data that was being transmitted in the carrier wave!’

Pirrip turned to Eekas, who was still tinkering with some code. ‘What have you got for me, Mr. Eekas?’

The Miranu seemed reluctant to take his eyes away from the screen where a representation of his software algorithm still writhed, looking for more secrets within the transmission. He spoke softly:

‘Some important things are now known to us. Firstly, the type of sensor that provided the images of your offspring can be determined. It is of a recent design, and still quite uncommon. Secondly, the time when several of the images were made can be inferred. It suggests your offspring was still in the Sol system at the time. Extrapolating from this, we have a partial ultranet address for the original data feed.’

‘Is there anything else you can do to trace the message?’ Pirrip began to hope that there might be a way to rescue his son – or at least to find the kidnappers and make them pay.

‘Not enough information, Captain,’ Adams interjected. ‘Unless perhaps they call again.’

‘Unlikely,’ Pirrip said. ‘What about this unusual sensor?’

‘Eastman-Valos DiamondTek space grade security scanner. Entered manufacture about a year ago,’ the Miranu muttered, still watching his software. ‘Technically very clever, but not popular due to a high price tag. I’d say another couple of years before they go mainstream...’ his voice trailed off and he began stabbing at his keyboard.

‘Which means it most likely has to be a brand new ship!’ Pirrip prompted. He got no response from the preoccupied gravball player. Adams looked embarrassed.

‘That’s the partial Ultranet address?’ Pirrip indicated a string of numbers on a screen. Some numbers were heavily underlined; others were listed along with multiple alternatives, or simply spaces marked with question marks.

‘Yes Captain,’ Adams replied. ‘It’s better than it looks. If we assume that your son was still in the Sol system when the images showing him in captivity were first made – which is reasonable, given the first time stamp we have decoded – then we can discount the Ultranet addresses of any installations outside that system. If we had access to Navy records, we might also be able to remove ships that have not visited Sol recently, but of course I have access to no such information.’

‘Which leaves us with...?’

‘About a quarter of a million.’

Pirrip sighed. He left the compartment, so as not to distract the decoding work.

+ + +

Just half an hour later, he was called back.

‘What have found?’ he asked.

‘It’s military,’ said Eekas. He looked a little scared.

‘Military?’ Pirrip was taken aback.

‘The message encoding. It’s too good for anything civilian. Your image source is military.’

‘It’s incredible,’ said Adams. ‘Like nothing we could buy. Very tight, but with fractal embedding that allows errors in the message to be trapped if it’s partially garbled. Very nice.’

‘So now I’m looking for a warship constructed or refitted recently?’ How many of those are there on the list? He studied the combinations of Ultranet addresses.’

‘Zero,’ replied Adams, smug.

‘Zero?’ Pirrip found it increasingly difficult to play these guessing games. All these dead ends, and his son in the hands of kidnappers! Then... ah. ‘Yes, of course... the Navy don’t use the Ultranet.’

‘Correct, Captain. But who has access to military algorithms, and does use the Ultranet?’ Adams looked like would burst.

Pirrip looked at him coldly. ‘No games,’ he said. ‘Mercator’s life could depend upon this.’

Adams complied at once: ‘A space station! Probably one of the naval dockyards!’

+ + +

Pirrip hired a shuttle, planning to travel to the Sol system to see if he might be able to locate his son. The distinctive Splinter Group ships would be left behind, allowing him to pass undetected while he discretely investigated the Sol system’s newest orbital dockyards.

‘You should take some of us along,’ said Krralt. ‘We don’t like the idea of being cooped up aboard the freighter while you go into danger.’

‘I can’t ask passengers to join a search for my child,’ Pirrip protested weakly, but was secretly pleased when the Miranu insisted that they could be useful. He formed a volunteer crew made up from the Splinter Group and the MiraGE.

They jumped into the Sol system, playing the part of a humble trader. Pirrip made the ship loiter while the crew scanned for transmissions, relaying everything they picked up to Eekas and Adams who studied them for similarities to the image compression in the sample they had. For eighteen hours they endured cramped conditions until at last a strong match was found in a message containing docking instructions for ships approaching the Navy station that was under construction at Earth’s fourth Lagrange point. Eekas had found the origin of the still images showing Mercator in captivity.

Now... to get aboard? Knowing he wouldn’t be able to dock at a military installation without permission, Pirrip headed for Earth instead. Touching down at the Amsterdam Archipelago spaceport, he hurried to find a mission computer, and sure enough there were lots of requests for small loads of equipment to be taken up to the new space stations. It felt odd to Pirrip, to be back in a stock shuttle again, just as he had been years ago when he had spent his inheritance to buy the Snowy Owl, straight out of the Academy. Life had been simpler back then... but no less dangerous.

Nobody paid much attention to shuttlecraft. Pirrip was assigned a simple, poorly-paid cargo run to the station at L4 without speaking to a human being at all, nor even an AI. Eleven tonnes of electronic gear were loaded into the shuttle, and he lifted off as soon as he could.

+ + +

When the shuttle reached the fourth Lagrange point, they were directed to dock in Bay 2, where a work crew was standing by to unload the cargo. The space station appeared to be about sixty percent finished; not enough to have more than a skeleton staff of military personnel aboard, but still crawling with contractors, Pirrip reasoned. He hurriedly shrugged off his jacket, and handed it to Muller. His fighter pilot would introduce himself as the captain of the shuttle, in the hope of buying Pirrip and the others some time to investigate the space station.

It worked beautifully. Nobody expected a shuttle to have a crew of more than one or two, so while the work crew were hauling their consignment of electronic gear away, and ‘captain’ Muller was being handed a credstick, the rest of the Splinter Group were able to slip away and hide behind some cargo cannisters. Muller returned to the shuttle, lifted off, and flew away.

Pirrip took stock. His boarding party consisted of himself, Bullert, Frell (a fighter pilot, and inveterate brawler... handy to have around in a scrap), Krallt, Eekas and Jalzern (the Miranu team’s blocker). Krallt had a Miranu phase pistol; Pirrip, Frell and Jalzern had stunners, and Bullert carried a nasty-looking length of iron pipe, removed from the Frankenfreighter during the repairs. He could have taken a stunner, but had deliberately chosen his primitive weapon. Eekas carried a gravity projector. ‘Not a weapon as such,’ he explained, ‘but something that might even the score, all the same.’

+ + +

The installation was huge; clearly this new orbital dockyard was going to play a major role in the expansion of the United Earth navy. Pirrip couldn’t hope to remain undetected indefinitely, so where to begin the search?

Mercator’s kidnappers wouldn’t want hold a hostage in an area that was still crawling with construction crews, Pirrip reasoned, nor would they have him in the centre section that had been completed first. There were already naval staff there. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be practical to stash him somewhere that didn’t have full life support yet; too much messing about with bottled oxygen... and besides, the images of Mercator in captivity had shown him in a room with gravity. All this narrowed it down a lot. A holographic display set up at the edge of the landing bay offered a map of the orbital facility, using different colours to denote the status of the construction project. Several areas were in amber or red, apparently denoting that they were behind schedule, but sectors that hadn’t been made airtight didn’t interest Pirrip. There was a small island of blue, and this seemed to indicate a small complex where construction had been completed early.

‘If you finished a sector early,’ Pirrip mused, ‘your work crews would leave it alone and concentrate their efforts elsewhere, right?’

‘Possibly, captain.’ Frell said. ‘And in the meantime you have a place where you can hide whatever you like?’

‘Possibilities are better than nothing.’ Pirrip glanced at each of his party in turn. ‘Any better ideas?’

There were none, so they set off towards the blue sector. This involved a walk of about a kilometre, with several detours to avoid coming face-to-face with construction workers. As they neared their destination the numbers of workers diminished, and the condition of the facility improved. Soon there were no more open access panels displaying pipes or masses of wiring, and it was clear they they had reached the blue sector.

There was a large open space, perhaps an auxiliary hangar, and set at its hubward end was a cluster of prefabricated office buildings. There were also a lot of cargo cannisters, stacked in neat rows. The whole place was only dimly lit, a fact that Pirrip’s rescue party appreciated as they slipped into the hangar, using the cannisters for cover as they approached the buildings.

A harsh metallic sound stopped them in their tracks. The sound of an old-fashioned autopistol being cocked. Then several more.

A man stepped out of the shadows, levelling his weapon at Krralt. A few moments later, several others did the same, covering the other members of the rescue party. It was a stand-off; neither side could be sure of disposing of the other without taking casualties.

‘Who the hell are you?’ the leader demanded.

Pirrip smiled. ‘Take it easy,’ he said.

‘What are you doing here?’ the man looked ready to shoot at any second.

‘We’re just looking for a place to stow some... supplies for a week or two,’ Pirrip told him. He was guessing from the mass of cargo cannisters in the hangar that this was precisely what their ambushers were using the place for. It seemed to be working; the man relaxed – just a fraction – having encountered something he understood.

‘What kind of supplies?’

Pirrip shrugged sheepishly. ‘Numbskull... Moon Dust... Virginia Gold.’

‘You sure picked a bad place, friend,’ his opponent growled. ‘This facility is being run by the Combine. And we don’t like independents.’

The Combine. One of Earth’s organised crime syndicates, but not the worst. They tended to concentrate on smuggling and counterfeiting, not killings... although every crime clan had to be ruthless in maintaining discipline, and defending its turf.

Pirrip nodded understanding. ‘Perhaps we could all put our weapons away before there’s a misunderstanding? We’d be happy to find somewhere else for our...’

‘The hell with that,’ one of the autopistol-toting gangsters interrupted. ‘You’ve seen us. You ain’t leaving.’

Frell turned to cover the man who had spoken. ‘Okay. Neither are you.’

The gangsters’ leader spoke. ‘Ain’t you forgetting something, stunner boy? You shoot me, I wake up in a few minutes...’ the smugglers’ leader said. ‘I shoot you... and you’re dead.’ That Miranu geek with the phase pistol might get one of us, but it’s four guns against one. I suggest you drop your weapons. And that includes you with the club. Lose it.’

Krralt spoke for the first time. ‘I think it’s fair to assume that gunfire in this compartment would attract the attention of station security, who would send a marine team to investigate. None of us wants that. Also, as you say, the Miranu geek with the phase pistol might kill one of you before he’s disposed of. Please bear in mind that you would be the target.’

The gangster leader swallowed. ‘What do you suggest?’

Krralt looked at Pirrip. ‘With your permission, captain?’

Pirrip nodded. Krralt caught his eye, and nodded in return. Then he returned his attention to the gangsters. He indicated the gravity projector that Eekas was holding. A gravity projector doesn’t look like a weapon. In fact, it looks more like a transport case.

‘That case contains three point eight kilograms of Moon Dust. Finest first-growth pollens from the Sea of Tranquility. Uncut, of course. It’s the reason we’re here. There’s no point dumping it on the market all at once, so we were going to stash it here, and ship out small quantities on some of the shuttles that come up from Earth with materials for the dockyard. Now, if you were to make us a mutually acceptable offer, and accept out apologies for inadvertently crossing your turf...’

The gangsters looked at one another. Greed was at work here; they were being given the chance to add a little freelancing of their own to the Combine operation. If it was a pure as the Miranu claimed, the Moon Dust might be worth half a million credits. Now... how to separate these chumps from their treasure, without firing a weapon?

First step... get hold of that case. ‘I’d have to see the merchandise,’ the gangsters’ spokesman said.

‘Very well,’ Krralt replied. ‘Eekas – pass the case to the gentlemen.’

Eekas did so. One of the gangsters took the case, and set it down to study it. ‘What the hell is this?’ he asked, indicating the array of lights and dials on the side of the case.

‘It’s just a Miranu combination lock,’ Eekas assured him. ‘But it’s not set. Turn the large dial until the row of lights above it have all gone blue. I’ll do it if you want.’

‘Stay where you are,’ the gangster replied, turning the dial. ‘Now what?’

‘Press that pair of yellow buttons, both at once.’

The gangster did so.

The gravity projector is a useful piece of technology, built into ships and space stations. It allows people who grew up in a planetary gravity well to live and work in comfort, in an environment that normally has only microgravity. The type used by gravball players operates in reverse, however. They use it to nullify the effect of built-in gravity projectors, allowing them to practice air plays and ground-air passing.

Gravity in the hangar bay ceased to exist, and chaos reigned.

The gangster leader was the first to fire, shooting off a full clip from his autopistol. Under normal gravity conditions, he’d have been able to ‘walk’ the hail of bullets across his enemies, who were bunched up. From his very first shot, however, he was abnormally affected by the savage recoil of his weapon. It flung him backwards until he struck a cargo cannister. He thought he’d got just two of his enemies; the Miranu had kicked off from the floor, hard, and disappeared upwards into the shadows.

Blood jetted from Pirrip’s hand, where half his left index finger had been shot away. It drifted around him in small red spheres that burst and stuck to anything they touched. The pain was indescribable. He shook his head, and tried to concentrate.

Bullert swung his improvised club down viciously, aiming at one of the gangsters who had been looking towards the case at the critical moment, eager for a glimpse of the ‘treasure’. It was hard to accelerate the length of piping properly, and what should have been a killing blow just broke the cheekbone of his adversary. Both men drifted apart, from the energy of the impact. The gangster was frantically trying to turn so that he could shoot Bullert, but it was clear that he had no experience of moving in zero gravity, and he tumbled and flailed.

Frell had taken a couple of rounds in his arm, and spun away from the fight, his stunner lost. Blood sprayed from him, too, as he drifted backwards.

From somewhere up near the darkened ceiling came the hum of a stunner and one of the gangsters fell, stupefied. The other gangster responded with a burst of fire directed at the approximate origin of the stunner shot.

‘No, you fool!’ The gangsters’ leader ordered. ‘Shoot the box! Shoot the damn box!’ He fumbled a new clip into his autopistol.

Bullert’s opponent finally managed to bring his weapon to bear against him, and the engineer thought the end had come. He was too far away to swing with his club. Then Eekas came hurtling down out of the darkness, slamming into the gunman with a sickening crack. Both went sprawling, the pistol bouncing away. Bullert reached out for his enemy, snagged the cuff of his overalls, and pulled himself into a position where he could hold the gangster tightly while he punched him in the face, several times.

Krralt’s phase pistol fired, narrowly missing the gangster who was still firing wildly up at the ceiling. The man kicked off from a nearby cargo crate, attempting to dodge... and cannoned into Pirrip. Through the haze of pain that had engulfed him, the captain reacted instinctively. He placed the stunner – miraculously still in his right hand – against the gangster’s neck, and pressed the firing stud. The man went limp, instantly.

By firing the phase pistol, with its distinctive yellow beams, Krralt had given away his position, and the gangster leader exploited this. Forgetting his own order to shoot the gravity projector, he braced himself against the cargo cannister at his back, and fired upwards. An agonised, alien moan echoed around the hangar.

Jalzern’s stunner took him in return.

+ + +

Silence. The Splinter Group rescuers took stock of their situation. Three gangsters had been stunned, and one had been beaten bloody by Bullert. Jalzern drifted down from the ceiling, holding his team captain, who had a bullet wounds in his leg. Jalzern laid him down gently, and then switched off the gravity projector. Bullets, spent cartridges and gobbets of blood pattered down all over the place. Krralt moaned as his body was subjected to gravity once more, as did Eekas, who appeared to have broken a rib plate and dislocated a shoulder.

Frell kept up a steady commentary of curses as he struggled to twist a tourniquet about his arm. Pirrip clasped a rag tightly in his left hand, in an effort to staunch the bleeding from his finger. With his stunner, he shot each of the gangsters in the head at point-blank range, to make sure they stayed out. Bullert hurried over to Krralt, whipping a medical kit from his belt pouch. He gave the Miranu something for the pain, and then cut away his clothing, to examine his injuries.

The Miranu had a flesh would; nothing too serious. Bullert sprayed the entry and exit wounds with genericillin, and then a clotting agent. ‘You’ll not be playing any gravball for a few weeks,’ he observed, ‘but you’re in no danger.’ He shrunk a bandage into place, and then moved on to examine Frell, whose arm was a mess and would almost certainly require some regenerative work... plus he seemed to be going into shock. Bullert reported this to his captain, saying that he wanted to get him back to a medical facility as soon as possible. Jalzern popped Eekas’ shoulder back into place, but could do little to make his broken rib plate more comfortable.

Pirrip and Jalzern pressed on towards the prefabricated office buildings, taking Krralt’s phase pistol with them. Eekas offered to accompany them, but he was clearly in considerable pain, so Pirrip waved him back.

The office buildings appeared to be unoccupied. Surely, a marine team would be here in minutes... and while the people they had fought with were definitely criminals, they still had no proof that they were Mercator’s kidnappers. Pirrip and Jalzern split up to search the complex more quickly.

‘Captain Flek!’ Jalzern called just seconds later. Pirrip doubled back, and soon found the Miranu, covering a human with the borrowed phase pistol.

‘I found this... human hiding under the desk,’ he reported.

‘Good job, Jalzern,’ Pirrip replied. ‘Well... who are you?’

‘Don’t shoot! I’m not armed,’ the man jabbered.

‘Not a very informative answer,’ Pirrip sounded genuinely regretful. He selected the lowest power rating on his stunner, and shot their captive in the crotch.

The man doubled over, gasping.

‘I’ll tell you who you are,’ Pirrip informed him. ‘You’re a Combine crime syndicate smuggler. And you’re a kidnapper, too, aren’t you?’

‘I... didn’t kidnap anyone!’ the man protested.

‘But you’re holding someone, aren’t you? Human? Fourteen years old?’

Pirrip’s victim refused to meet his eye. The captain continued:

‘I’m having what you might call a bad day. I’ve had a finger shot off, and some of my friends have had worse. Do you know what it feels like to have a finger shot off? I can offer you a demonstration...’

‘We don’t kidnap people!’ the man interrupted Pirrip. ‘We just... store things here. We were instructed to hold the kid until further orders!’

‘We?’ Pirrip grabbed a handful of hair and hauled the man upright. ‘How many of you?’

‘F... f... five!’ his victim stammered.

Pirrip grinned broadly. ‘Then you’re the last. Take me to the boy. Now.’

The improvised holding cell was only about twenty metres away. The gangster paused before operating the keypad and said, nervously, ‘You’ll let me go after I release him, right?’

‘No,’ Pirrip replied. ‘But I’ll stun you and leave you here while I make my getaway. You might be able to escape before security arrives and starts asking awkward questions. Of course, if you’ve harmed my son in any way, I’ll cut you to pieces.’

‘Your son?’

‘Uh-huh. Open the door.’

The gangster did so, then collapsed as Pirrip shot him with the stunner. Beyond, Mercator lay in a sleeping bag. He rolled over and looked towards the door, groggily.

‘Dad?’

‘Merc. You okay?’

‘Yeah, dad...’ Mercator wriggled out of the sleeping bag, and left his cell. He hugged his father. ‘How did you find me?’

Pirrip indicated Jalzern. ‘With a little help from some exceptional friends. But I’ll explain later. We’ve got to move. Security will be here at any minute, and although we haven’t broken many laws, we can’t afford to hang around and explain ourselves.’

Jalzern retraced his steps, leading Pirrip and his son out of the complex. They reached the rest of the rescue party just as a marine security team entered the hangar bay. They were suited up in powered armour, virtually impregnable.

It was this that saved the Splinter Group rescue team from being caught and interrogated. The marines had needed time to get suited up; if they’d come running at the first sound of gunfire the rescuers would never have had time to find Mercator. Even so, they had to move carefully, keeping to the darkest recesses of the bay and using the cargo cannisters for cover. Bullert and Jalzern carried Krralt between them.

The marine team moved into the bay in an efficient deployment that offered overlapping fields of fire, and left no blind spots. They rapidly worked their way among the cargo cannisters, pausing when they discovered the scene of the battle, and the four unconscious gangsters. One of the men regained his senses just as the marines reached him, and tried to make a run for it. He was brutally pinned down by a pair of armoured marines, but this distraction, plus the need to watch the other three unconscious men, allowed the Splinter Group party to slip back into the corridor.

They headed for the nearest aid station. Since the dockyard was still being built there were several of these, where construction workers might go with injuries.

The party staggered into the aid station, and were relieved to find that it was manned by construction company employees, not naval personnel.

‘There’s been an accident...’ Pirrip explained, and the two medical technicians on duty flew into action. There was an awkward moment soon after, when the technicians realised that the ‘construction accident’ they were treating involved gunshot wounds. Pirrip solved this by waving a fistful of credsticks under their noses. The technicians agreed that perhaps they ought to focus their attention on urgent medical matters, rather than alerting station security... in exchange for 75,000 credits. Each.

Pirrip grimaced, but handed over a credsitck: half now, half when they left. The medics determined that Frell’s condition was the most serious. They hooked him up to a transfusion machine that would restore his lost blood and warm him at the same time. He was fading in and out of consciousness, but the medics said he would soon be stabilised... although the regrowth of his shattered ulna would require many weeks. They placed his arm in a partial splint, supporting it and preventing further damage until they had time to do more.

Krralt’s wound was found to contain no foreign bodies, so the medics did little other than to apply a new dressing.

Meanwhile, Pirrip reached for his videophone. He knew transmissions from the dockyard were likely to be monitored during an emergency, so he deliberately used an unencrypted channel. He dialled another videophone, which had been left with Muller. He kept his voice light, as if he hadn’t a care in the world:

‘Hi, Herbert! How are you?’

‘Oh, fine,’ Muller replied. ‘Nice to hear from you. How’s the family?’

‘Oh... everyone’s well. More or less. Thanks for asking. My boy sends his regards.’

Muller beamed. ‘Good! That’s good...’

‘Thought you might like to come to his birthday party?’ Pirrip enquired.

‘Sure!’ Muller smiled broadly. ‘Where and when?’

‘I was thinking... in four days’ time... right here? And could you bring Frankie and her two friends with you?’

‘Sounds like fun. We’ll be there! Any... special dress code?’

‘No, Herbert. We’ll take care of everything. Just bring yourselves. Out.’

‘Out.’

Pirrip shut the videophone, and was relieved to find that the medics were ready to get to work on him. The stump of his finger felt as if something was chewing it. They put him under...

+ + +

When Pirrip awoke, only a few hours had elapsed. Mercator was by his bedside, apologising tearfully for all the ‘trouble’ he’d caused. Pirrip hushed him, and inspected the damage. He found that he’d been left with just the first joint of his finger, but the medics had done a neat job... perhaps neat enough for a cloned replacement to be grafted on, when time permitted.

Eekas was in the room as well, sporting some kind of inflated support vest that was meant to reduce the discomfort from his broken rib plate. He explained that the rescuers had been hastily bundled into an empty emergency ward so the medics could deal with a ‘genuine’ construction accident.

This emergency ward was to be the rescuers’ home for the next four days. The medics grumbled, but an offer of another 50,000 credits prevented either of them from having an attack of ‘conscience’ and calling station security.

Mercator watched the dockyard’s news channel, which revealed that five bogus construction workers had been apprehended on board. They were being shipped to Earth for interrogation, but it appeared to have been the result of a falling-out among thieves. Most of the cargo cannisters found at the scene had contained stolen property or contraband.

Pirrip liked this. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ve hurt them. But I’m not done yet.’

‘Dad?’ Mercator asked, but the captain looked grim, and remained silent.

+ + +

The Frankenfreighter followed instructions, and docked in Bay 2. It unloaded forty-four tonnes of metal for the dockyard construction project. Then it failed to lift off.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Heegel explained to an irate space traffic controller. ‘We seem to be experiencing a manifold pressure fluctuation in the starboard what-you-may-call-it. I don’t know... something to do with manifold pressure anyway. We’ll be on our way as soon as possible, I assure you!’

The space traffic controller raised his eyes heavenward, and broke the connection. ‘Jeeze,’ he complained to his colleagues. ‘Have you seen this piece of shit in Bay 2? And I think I’d rather let my dog fly a ship than that clueless alien. A wooden space ship!’

Within minutes, there were a dozen crew members clambering all over the decrepit-looking wooden ship, performing ‘maintenance’ that seemed to mostly involve hitting the hull with mallets. The ship emitted occasional, flatulent gusts of steam.

If the space traffic controller hadn’t been so busy mocking the antics of the ‘maintenance crew’ he might have noticed that when they got back aboard the wooden ship there were nineteen personnel, not twelve. The Splinter Group was reunited... and five minutes later, they were heading for deep space.

+ + +

Straight away, Pirrip called a council of war, with all but a skeleton watch crew coming together in the ship’s hold, joined by Mercator and the MiraGE team. With fighters one and two aboard, it was a crowded space. The crew jostled to greet their returned captain, or in some cases to ruffle Mercator’s hair, and welcome him aboard.

With their distinctive support casts, Krralt, Eekas and Frell were given plenty of room, but the atmosphere was electric. Everybody wanted to know what had happened at the dockyard, and what the Splinter Group would do next.

‘Here’s the story,’ Pirrip addressed the assembly. ‘We know that the attacks upon us in the Leiton and DSN-90210 systems – as well as the kidnapping of my son – were conducted with the express aim of stopping our passengers from playing a pair of gravball games, in New Tokyo and Saalia. The people who were holding Mercator claimed they were working with the Combine... which may or may not be the whole story. At the dockyard they had a smuggling operation going, and we’ve busted that open. We’ve hurt them. But they’ve hurt us, too. We’ve suffered almost half a million credits’ worth of damage to the ship – and we’ve incurred expenses of over two hundred thousand credits. We were forced to dump a cargo, for the first time ever...’

There was an angry rumble from the crew at this. Pirrip waited for calm, and continued. ‘One finger more or less, I can live with. Mister Frell has been more seriously injured, and could have been killed. As could our friends and passengers here. I really can’t thank the MiraGE enough for their part in my son’s rescue...’

Pirrip paused to shake hands with Krralt, Jalzern and (gently) Eekas. The sincerity of the gesture was not lost on the aliens.

‘I can’t thank them enough... but perhaps I can offer them the chance to get even. Perhaps we can all get even, in fact.’

‘How captain?’ It was Simona Gal Reens who spoke.

‘You might not like it...’ Pirrip cautioned. ‘Still, here’s my plan. We know that somebody will pay a lot of money to make sure that the MiraGE don’t appear at New St. Emilion on Saalia, to play their gravball match... but we can ensure that they do appear for that match. And we can bet on the Miranu team.’

All eyes turned to the MiraGE team. ‘Captain,’ Krralt protested, ‘With myself and Eekas injured, I don’t think we can have any confidence in securing a win, even in a friendly game.’

‘No?’ Pirrip prompted. ‘I watched the match at Kono district. You were supreme in the air. On the ground you took a beating, sure, but your air plays were superb.’

‘Two of us are not fit to play,’ Krralt countered. ‘That leaves the team with no substitutes. We cannot afford to take that beating again.’

Pirrip conceded the point. ‘Indeed. But who says the MiraGE has to be an all-Miranu team?’

Krralt started. ‘You mean...?’

‘I know it’s odd, but it might work for one game. Surprise value!’

Jalzern interrupted: ‘You think we might be able to hire some human players to join the team?’

‘No. At top speed we’ll arrive in the Saalia system with only four hours to spare,’ Pirrip explained. ‘Your human players would have to come from this crew.’

‘Alright!’ Jackson, an environmental systems technician was elated. ‘I played gravball at college!’ Several other crew members were clearly enthusiastic at the thought of playing in a major gravball match.

‘We will be playing against skilled professionals!’ Krralt protested.

‘Good,’ said Pirrip. ‘We’ll get better odds, then. And I’m not asking you to train up the human element of the team to a professional standard. They’ll just lob the ball upwards every time they get it. Once it’s in the air, you can do your stuff.’

‘I doubt it will be that simple,’ Krralt pondered.

‘We will be in transit for several days,’ Heegel observed. ‘In that time, you will be able to select from among the volunteers, and work out some plays. And what have you got to lose?’

‘Well... nothing.’

‘Which brings us to the most important issue for this meeting,’ Pirrip interrupted. ‘Since Cerberus station, this crew has jointly owned these three ships, and shared in their profits and losses. If we’re going to bet on the outcome of the match - if we’re going to bet big enough to hurt whoever was behind the attacks - it’ll require every last credit in our accounts. We’ll either win big, or we’ll be flat broke. You must decide, friends.’

+ + +

The Frankenfreighter flew in towards Saalia with her fighters deployed, but nobody attempted to intercept them. As soon as they were in videophone range, Heegel began making calls. He placed eight different bets, all on the MiraGE team. Total value, something over one and a half million credits.

In the hold, the hybrid MiraGE team went through key moves one final time, then paused for a talk on team tactics from Krralt. He was a good gravball player, but it was as a leader that he really excelled. The Miranu team had been re-jigged to cover the gaps left by Krralt and Eekas, with two of the other Miranu being moved into the ‘in air’ positions, while the ground element was replaced entirely by volunteers from among the humans of the crew.

Their arrival at Saalia caused a stir, not least because Pirrip didn’t announce their arrival until he was safely in orbit. The Saalians had a hard time making room for such a large ship to land at short notice, but the team and their supporters were whisked away to the sports stadium with a couple of hours to spare. Pirrip and most of his crew took their seats, while the MiraGE went to change. Local news services reported the arrival of the visitors, and fans began to appear at the stadium in droves.

The local team, the Brandybucks, had a good track record. They’d made it to the quarterfinals the year before, and they were looking forward to the new season. If anything, their fans had been disappointed that their team had been drawn to play an exhibition match against the alien ‘freak’ team, instead of having a more interesting challenge.

As before, the home team began the match with possession, but their captain immediately made the mistake of attempting a ‘long bomb’ to his forward runner, and one of the Miranu team darted in to seize the ball. He handed it off to Jalzern, who streaked past the dazzled Brandybuck defence to score. The Brandybucks were stunned; the MiraGE looked grim, knowing it wouldn’t remain so easy. Soon the home team would learn that air plays were too risky, and would concentrate on groundwork.

Commentators babbled, trying to figure out if the MiraGE goal constituted some kind of new record.

Play resumed, with the Brandybucks back in possession since they had just conceded a goal. ‘02’ – a giant of a man – swept straight through Jackson, the Splinter Group technician, and was rewarded with an easy goal. The crowd jeered; this was more like it!

Dobson, Splinter Group cargomaster (second grade) brought the ball back into play, took one step and lobbed it straight upwards. A Miranu grabbed it, completely faked out the Brandybuck who was supposed to be marking him, pirouetted... and scored.

The Brandybuck response was another brute-force charge down the centre of the field at ground level, to score... and so it went on. At the end of the opening third the score was 24 to the Mirage, 23 to the Brandybucks. The amazed commentators pointed out that this was the first game they’d ever seen in which a team hadn’t had so much as a touch in the air, in an entire third.

In the dressing room, Krralt made one or two suggestions about plays that might be getting a little ‘tired’ – too predictable – and proposed a couple of simple adaptations. Mostly he left the team to rest and focus on the task ahead.

From the dressing room next door came muffled shouting.

The Mirage began the middle third in possession, and made the most of it with another upward lob, an interception and a bouncing shot for a flawless goal. One of the Brandybuck team punched a Miranu in the face in return, and received a warning.

The Brandybuck team captain took the ball, and waded up the field with Dobson and Mackay (a drive specialist from Huron) clinging to his legs, unable to bring him down. He inched his way forward, the crowd roaring their approval as he humiliated the human members of the MiraGE. He struggled his way to the edge of the scoring zone, bellowing his triumph... and one of the Miranu darted in and stole the ball from him.

It was so audaciously done, nobody believed it for a second. Hugging the ball to his chest as the Brandybuck team captain should have done, the Miranu hit the turf, rolled, and launched himself back into the air.

It got bloody after that. Jalzern was attacked by three Brandybucks at once, even though he didn’t have the ball. His face was badly bruised, and one of his eyes had to be treated for a swelling that threatened to close it, but he wanted to stay in the game, earning the grudging respect of many of the fans. Dobson received a blow that left him unconscious, obliging the MiraGE to field one of their substitutes to play a ground role. The unfortunate Miranu, a fellow called Relgian, lasted just one play, being given injuries which matched those that Eekas was suffering from. The Brandybuck responsible was sent off, and the MiraGE fielded another substitute, Nareb, who clearly did not relish the prospect of trying to work ground plays against the Brandybucks.

At the end of the middle third, the score stood at 44 to the MiraGE and 42 to the Brandybucks. Again, Krralt talked relatively little, concentrating instead upon a few words of encouragement.

Several people were heard shouting in the other dressing room.

Opening the final third, the Brandybucks had changed their formation, in an effort to reduce the effect of their missing man. They chose to weaken their ground team, focusing upon their defence in the air.

Perhaps this was a mistake; the ground team had been their goal-scoring machine, and it was now weakened. Against this, the MiraGE found the Brandybucks’ new, purely-defensive posture in the air made it much harder for them to get through to score – and they were getting mauled when they tried. In desperation, Jalzern passed the ball back down to ground level, throwing it ahead of Jackson, who had to run to intercept it.

Throughout the match, Jackson’s job had been simple; get the ball and throw it into the air, for the Miranu to do the rest. He caught the ball... and hesitated. The air above him was filled with Brandybucks. Surely Jalzern didn’t want him to return the ball to the air?

No. For over an hour now, the human element of the MiraGE had done nothing in the game, except get the ball and lob it skywards. The crowd had begun jeering every time he or Mackay got the ball... No. This time, Jackson ran forwards.

The Brandybuck defender was completely surprised, and Jackson almost managed to dodge right around him. The defender snagged him, just... but not before he could pass the ball to Nareb, who ran a few strides, and then handed it off to Mackay, before being taken down in a brutal tackle.

Unable to believe his luck, Mackay stepped over the struggling pair, into the scoring zone.

The Brandybuck team lost all cohesion after this, their air defence becoming porous again. At one point, a fight broke out between two of the Brandybucks. Their ground team rallied, and scored twice more, but each goal simply gave the MiraGE another chance at an air play, and the demoralised defenders failed to prevent a goal on each occasion.

The buzzer sounded, signalling the end of the final third, and ten thousand disgusted Brandybuck fans pelted the field with litter. The score for the match was 61 to 52, in favour of the MiraGE.

The winning team elected not to give any interviews, but returned to orbit as soon as possible, and began a rowdy zero gee party in the cargo bay, including re-enactments of notable plays. Many people began to get very drunk, although Krralt stayed (almost) sober, and took a few comm messages on his videophone.

The story of the Brandybucks’ defeat was all over the United Earth News, and messages began to flood in. Messages of congratulation from expatriate Miranu... from people who wanted to join the team and play in a ground position... from people who wanted to know how they could sign up a Miranu player or two for their own teams' air positions... from sponsors...

‘You realise,’ Pirrip said to Krralt, ‘that the beautiful game will never be the same again?’

‘I never expected this!’ Krralt replied. ‘We wanted to qualify for the Gravball League; we never expected that we’d be wanted in so many different teams!’

‘Well,’ Pirrip said, ‘Someone is going to make a killing introducing Miranu gravball players to teams all over UE space, and it might as well be you.’

‘Not you, captain? It was your idea to form a mixed team.’

Pirrip shook his head. ‘Not me. I’m in the transportation business; not sports management.’

Heegel bumped into them both, unsteadily. ‘Actually, captain, today you’re in the gambling business. Do you know how much we took them for?’

Pirrip smiled bashfully. Krralt indicated that he did not.

‘Oh...’ Heegel paused and swigged from a ‘liberated’ bottle of Saalian brandy, ‘Eleven million, two hundred and thirty-one thousand, nine hundred and two credits. After taxes, of course.’

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Category: Fiction

Fish and Ships

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