Barbary Station (Volume 1) (Shieldrunner Pirates, Band 1) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

R.E. Stearns is the author of Barbary Station and Mutiny at Vesta. She wrote her first story on an Apple IIe computer and still kind of misses green text on a black screen. She went on to annoy all of her teachers by reading books while they lectured. Eventually she read and wrote enough to earn a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Central Florida. She is hoping for an honorary doctorate. When not writing or working, R.E. Stearns reads, plays PC games, and references internet memes in meatspace. She lives near Orlando, Florida, with her husband, a computer engineer, and a cat.

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Barbary Station

CHAPTER 1

Charges Accrued: Piracy, Assault and Battery, Theft

Despite the darkness, the pressure on every centimeter of skin, and the smooth, flat plastic in front of her nose, Adda Karpe was not locked in a coffin in deep space. As she mentally repeated this fact, lights in the passenger-pod lid brightened. She inhaled hard to break her chest muscles out of an achingly slow breathing pattern. The off-white foam padding that outlined her body came into focus. Dim yellow instructions formed on the inside of the lid: Hello. You have been awakened during transit. Please stretch your fingers and toes in preparation for extraction. Beneath the text, an animated hand straightened and curled. Adda imitated it as the foam sank away from her limbs.

The pod’s seal parted with a rubbery sucking sound, and she yelped as two intimate catheters withdrew. Cold air blew through the opening above her forehead, sweeping her hair out of her face. Her ears popped.

Outside, something rattled and thumped. She worked her fingers into the opening, elbows against the lit instructions, and pulled the lid toward her toes. White light assaulted her eyes. Her arms trembled. The lid’s edge passed her ribs with a hydraulic wheeze, but weeks of inaction hadn’t improved her soft physique. Her fingers slipped. The pod lid slid upward on its rail. If it closes, will I go back to sleep? She scrabbled at the smooth plastic. “No, damn it, stop!”

A hand several shades browner than hers thrust into the gap from the outside. The lid slammed on its knuckles. A familiar pained grunt emanated from above. Mechanisms squealed as Iridian Nassir shoved the lid past Adda’s feet faster than it was designed to move. Adda sat up and threw her arms around the taller woman’s neck.

Blue and yellow lights from the instrument panel across the room glinted off Iridian’s shaved head as laughter rearranged her freckles. She grabbed for the passenger pod to keep her balance and swallowed against a wave of nausea. Gravity should be low and falling.

Her other arm settled around Adda’s shoulders. Adda brushed her lips over red droplets rising on Iridian’s knuckles where the pod lid had abraded the skin. Smiling in a way she reserved just for Adda, Iridian murmured, “Hey, you. We’re right on schedule.”

Adda’s head still spun. According to the colonist literature, that was typical for Earth natives. She ruined Iridian’s balance by pulling her down for a kiss.

Iridian’s black eyebrows arched as she steadied herself and Adda in the low gravity. “How do you feel?”

The rest of Adda’s plan congealed in her waking brain, and it didn’t include time for reorientation. “Like hijacking a colony ship.”

“Thank fuck.” The man who’d spoken clomped out from behind another pod, eyes open, since he’d had hours to adapt to the onslaught of light. Magnetic boots over the one-piece hibernation suit gave him a difficult, hitching gait. Unlike Adda’s and Iridian’s green suits, his Transorbital Voyages uniform was blue-gray and tailored to complement his russet skin and wiry build. HOBAN was printed over the breast below the company logo. His real name was Reis, and this meeting marked the second time Adda had met him in person.

He tossed a cloth bag to Iridian, who caught it one-handed. “Get a move on. The day watch is gonna ask me about the pod status if we don’t reset them quick.” The four or five colony ship crew members out of hibernation were now waiting for Reis’s report after he “investigated” the unscheduled deceleration. Too many anomalies would make the Transorbital employees call for emergency aid.

The three of them would never get a place on a pirate crew after that kind of debacle. A trio of brothers had failed to hijack an NEU military cargo ship four years ago. Newsfeeds had added insult to injury by attributing the attack to a Saturnian crew the brothers had prematurely declared their affiliation with, which had claimed as much newsfeed coverage at the time as Sloane’s crew on Barbary Station did now. The brothers were still a laughingstock, in separate prisons, and nobody expected the Saturnian crew to be welcoming after they were released.

Adda took a calming breath of recycled air and the scent of Iridian’s skin. Cleanly hijacking one of the most advanced and expensive ships in the galaxy, as the first crime on their records, ought to impress any pirate captain.

Iridian helped Adda climb out of the pod. It was hard to let go of Iridian’s arm. Aside from the comfort of her presence, the walls curved instead of meeting at right angles. Projected windows showed stars between bright wall sconces. They gave her a frame of reference but reduced her equilibrium. She weighed less with each passing minute.

Reis threw Iridian a pair of boots and sent another spinning at Adda before returning to the doorway. After pulling hers on, Adda flipped a switch on the calf. Magnets inside secured her feet to the floor, and her nausea abated a bit. Iridian closed Adda’s pod and handed off the cloth bag before clomping toward the door.

The pod’s projected display was identical to the one Adda had studied to prepare for this trip. Since nobody was asleep inside, most of the pod’s rectangular display constituted blank space where information would be, although power readings and shipboard intranet connectivity blinked in the corner every few seconds when they updated. More importantly, the profiles and main setup icons were where she expected them to be for the software she’d studied.

She put on her comp glove and let the bag fall empty on the floor while she cycled the pod lid’s seal closed. While she pressed her gloved palm to the blue pseudo-organic comp cradle beside the display, her wrist buzzed with weeks of new message alerts. The comp confirmed its connection to the pod and projected message headers in a silver-lined square hole on the back of her dark purple fingerless glove.

Using the connection afforded by the gel-filled pad in the comp cradle, she fed the pod a manufacturer’s repair code and held her breath. The projection shifted to the maintenance interface. Whew. All right. She ran a test hibernation sequence with the same settings as the occupied pods at this point in the ship’s journey to Io. The pod shuddered and emitted a deep hum, joining the other pods’ background buzz. Smiling slightly, she moved to Iridian’s, next in the row of a hundred pods stretching the length of this sleeping chamber.

Iridian and Reis stood on either side of the door, angled to watch the exit and each other without turning their heads. Interpreting facial expressions wasn’t one of Adda’s strong skills, but something feral about Reis’s eyes made her wary. Since Iridian was watching him, Adda concentrated on her own work. The second pod hummed too.

She clutched its edge as her heart stuttered through four irregular beats. The colonist literature described this as well. Thanks to the pod’s chemical wake-up treatment, her body was reabsorbing iron accumulated in her bloodstream while she slept. Some passed through her heart.

When her heartbeat steadied, she announced, “All set,” left off the implied I hope, and clomped to the door. If a tech reported two empty passenger pods, the ship’s artificial...