Clive noticed the ship, screaming past the Sword, out into the black, its blooming radiation cloud announcing its presence as loudly as possible. What Clive didn’t notice, because he was too busy trying to get the multiple robot bodies he was controlling to do as he told them, was the sensor sweeps the courier ship did, taking in everything it could about the Sword.
Its mission complete, the small ship, a rusted teardrop-shaped object, peeled off, activated its jump drive, and launched itself across the cosmos, towards a very specific place.
Meggok turned the mushroom over in his hands. He was sick of the things and their dull grey lifeless taste. The Merydians had at least given them a supply of food before banishing them from their planet but had given them exclusively boxes and boxes of the boring fungus. Meggok had cooked them every way he could think of, fried, sautéed, boiled, but nothing helped the thick earthy taste they had.
“I’m so sick of these things. We need to stop somewhere we can get actual real food. Something with some flavour. Maybe some spice? Wow, when was the last time we had spices? We’ve gone right from the gruel they fed us at the arena to bland mushrooms. Really going up in the world.” Meggok tossed the mushroom onto the counter before him with a wet thud.
“That might be nice. With what money though?” Kestok was sitting just before the large counter that ran the length of the long galley. His husband was stood on the other side, in the impressive kitchen. Kestok’s head was down, reading from a tablet he had found in a storage cupboard, information about the ship scrolling across the screen.
“The speaker-bird has money, how else would he pay for those mercs?”
“I don’t think the money is here. I think it’s on Cortica.”
Meggok picked up a large cleaver, and with a single swift blow cut the mushroom in two. The knife made a loud clang as it struck the counter. “So, what are we going to do? Once we get there? What’s our next step?”
“Find passage home? Maybe we can argue for a cut of selling the Sword, assuming they do that.” Kestok placed the tablet onto the counter. “Would be a shame though, I would love to spend more time on this ship. Everything about it is a marvel.”
“Any luck finding any weapons? Seems odd they would build something this big and leave it unarmed.”
“There’s nothing. There are energy projectors of some kind on the hull, but they don’t switch on, and there’s no weapons targeting systems I can find. I have no idea what they are, but they aren’t guns.”
“I’m fine with that,” Meggok said, leaning across the counter and placing his hands onto his husband’s. “We’ve seen enough fighting for one lifetime. I would be happy to never see a weapon again.” He let go, picking up the cleaver and another mushroom.
“You’re using a knife right now.”
“Ah, this isn’t a weapon, it’s a tool. Are spanners and wrenches and whatever else you use weapons?”
Kestok shrugged. “Can be, if you hit someone hard enough with them.”
“Fair point.” Meggok struck again, slicing another thick mushroom in half. He picked up the sections he had cut, and the knife flashed over and over, slicing thin strips from the fungus.
“What are you making anyway?”
“I’m trying to make this stuff palatable. I think maybe if I cut them thin enough, I can turn them into something a bit like pasta? Of course, I can only make a mushroom-based sauce, I’ve used the handful of ingredients that were on the Seeker. It’s a good thing the Merydians gave us these, or we would have run out of food five, maybe six days ago.”
Kestok’s nose wrinkled. The mushrooms had a damp smell he found nearly unpalatable. “Well, honestly, that might have been preferable.”
As the courier ship raced through its jump corridor, its two-man crew reviewed their scans. Sensors were powerful things, capable of collecting vast amounts of information. Normally, a ship would try and scatter a scanning beam with its own countermeasures, distorting the information. The massive ship had done nothing of the sort though, allowing them to scan unimpeded. It was as if it hadn’t even noticed.
“Whoever is running that ship, is an idiot,” the ship’s pilot said. His skin was crimson red, though blotches of black stretched randomly across parts of it, the price paid on his body for his courier work. The small courier ships were fast, the mass of a ship seemed to affect how long a generated jump tunnel was, but they were poorly shielded. The strange effects of jump space were a little different for each person, and the marks were the pilot’s issue, growing in size with every jump.
“Who doesn’t block a scan? We could hear them talking inside their ship!” The ships other occupant was a thin reptilian creature, its bottom half a single long tail rather than legs. His green scales were faded in some areas, becoming a dull grey. The faded scales flaked off as he moved, his own personal price.
“This is goods for us though! Now, we know where they’re going. Imagine the bonus!”
“Does it matter where they’re going, if we know where they are now?” The reptile held up its hands. Plots and plans weren’t its thing. That was why it had chosen to become a courier instead of a salvager. Get the message, deliver the message, nice and simple.
“Look, I don’t care. Extra money is extra money. We could use it; this ship is falling apart. I mean, Rhythm help me, maybe it might be enough to buy a whole new one.” The pilot leant back in the chair, placing his hands atop his head. “I mean, Greddog is one wealthy pirate, I imagine he’ll pay generously.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Commander Orson held on tightly to his chair as the Gallant raced through jump space. Around his small patrol ship was an armada, thousands of ships strong, a collection of strength beyond his reckoning. Each ship had hundreds of crewmen, and the largest of them carried entire battalions of marines. There were millions of lives, crammed into the corridor cut through a strange dimension, racing towards a place where some would never return.
The Substrate had finally come, their fleets crashing across the border into Council space. It had been a plot, a clever one. By placing their fleets so close to Earth, the Council had assumed the Substrate would aim to wrest its newly found holy world from its grasp. Instead, they had allowed the Council to gather there in number, before splitting their own fleet, sending smaller battlegroups lashing out at undefended worlds. By the time couriers and drones started arriving, carrying with them messages of carnage and destruction, the Substrate had razed dozens of worlds, killing billions in the process.
The sheer scale of the conflict made Orson sick to his stomach. Entire planets were being scoured clean of life, the Substrate casually annihilating the populace from orbit before moving onto the next. The worst of it was that Orson knew the Council was no different, and that the counterattack, and there would certainly be one, would be just as devastating. Humanity had found itself pulled into a war where genocide was a casual everyday thing.
Before the Gallant had left, drafted in to join the fleet, Orson had done something. He felt like in the last few weeks, he had made one mistake after the other, chasing down the knower and his crew, getting involved with the pirates on Ossiark, and stealing classified information. He almost wished now that he hadn’t, that he remained ignorant to the atrocities that his new commanders had committed. Still, Orson and his crew were soldiers, the first humans in the Council fleet, and he wasn’t going to turn away from a fight. Not when the Earth was still very much under occupation, even if the governments and populace didn’t realise it yet. That’s why, before the Gallant had moved into formation, Orson had sent a message to a former commanding officer, one he trusted implicitly. Within he had included all the information Nguyen had obtained from the Watchtower database. At least now people would know exactly what the Council stood for.