Fool Me Once (Privateer Tales)

  FOOL ME ONCE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication / use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Copyright © 2014 Jamie McFarlane

  All rights reserved.

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  Jamie McFarlane's

  PRIVATEER TALES

  Rookie Privateer

  Fool Me Once

  Parley (coming Fall 2014)

  CONTENTS

  FOOL ME ONCE

  CONTENTS

  DARKEST BEFORE DAWN

  MISSION DEFINED

  TRIP TO MARS

  PUSKAR STELLAR

  IF THE SHOE FITS, BUY IT IN EVERY COLOR

  GONE TO GROUND

  GIVE ME A WEEK

  OH, THAT'S GONNA LEAVE A MARK

  RECOVERY

  DOMIVA'S GRACE

  FINALE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DARKEST BEFORE DAWN

  The cutter was dead in space, no more than a day away from the mining colony, Terrence. I found it ironic that my life would end so close to where it had begun some twenty years ago. The end wasn’t hard to accept and I was grateful it would come peacefully.

  I looked into the bunk room, turned brig, at my three prisoners, all awake and wanting attention. It was easy to ignore them. For the last eighteen months I had been their prisoner and shown no mercy. They could face their own deaths tied up with full bellies. It was more than they had offered me.

  I made my way to the bridge of the thirty meter long ship, kicking debris out of the way. I empathized with the ship. Pirates had used it, abused it, and left it torn and dirty. The pirates had come and gone, using whatever they wanted and then discarding it and me when their abuses made us no longer pretty. I would die with this ship – it seemed fitting.

  The armor-glass of the bridge was separated by a spider web of mullions, giving the pilot and co-pilot a nearly 180 degree view of space. I dropped heavily into the pilot’s chair on the port side of the bridge and caught a reflection of myself in the glass. I'd been told how pretty I was all my life. It made me laugh humorlessly to see my hollow cheeks and the large scar that cut across my right eye. My once long silky brown, now prematurely white, hair had been cut short and hung limply just to my jawline. Pretty was something that could be stolen, like so many other things.

  Liam Hoffen’s retreating figure arc-jetted its way back to a nearly identical, albeit better-repaired version of the cutter I sat in. He waited patiently for the airlock to cycle and then let himself into his ship, Sterra’s Gift.

  Hoffen had promised to send me the command codes for the ship I sat in once he was out of weapons range, but I knew better. Men had been making promises to me for far too long. Somehow, it made them feel better to lie. I'd also learned that men were even crueler if I pointed this out.

  Sterra’s Gift’s engines lit up. It turned and accelerated quickly on a new heading. I wondered how long I would be able to survive on this ship. There was plenty of food and the atmo would likely hold for quite some time. Maybe another ship would happen by. Hope is for someone else, I thought.

  It was completely unexpected when I heard Liam Hoffen’s voice hail me through the bridge comms.

  “Celina, are you there?”

  He hadn’t seemed the type to gloat, but nothing really surprised me when it came to men.

  “Where else?” I replied.

  Hoffen's voice came clear over the bridge’s public address, Transfer full control of cutter to Celina Dontal. Release control by crew of Sterra’s Gift from same cutter.

  The disembodied voice of the ship’s Artificial Intelligence replied, Acknowledged, Control transferred to Celina Dontal.

  “That’s it. Ship is yours. Happy Sailing!” His voice was cheerful and upbeat.

  I was taken aback. The small ember of hope I carried, protected almost entirely by self-loathing, flamed up unexpectedly and threatened to overwhelm me. My voice caught as I responded, “I didn’t think you would actually do it.”

  “Roger that, Celina. Look us up sometime. I bet we will be looking for sharp captains in the future. You know, once I get my business running full tilt.” He was clearly enjoying himself.

  “Thank you, Liam Hoffen. Someday. Maybe. Dontal out.” I closed the communication channel.

  I walked to the back of the cutter, to a door just opposite the hallway leading to the airlock. The door opened to an armory just beneath the ship’s single turret. I placed the palm of my hand on the panel next to the door which showed a red lock indicator. I felt a vibration from within the door as mechanical bars retracted. The door slowly pushed inward and stopped at five centimeters. I had to press with both hands to open the door enough for me to enter.

  The walls of the smaller five by five meter room were covered with shelves. I was very familiar with the room as it was often my duty to load those shelves with slug-thrower ammunition for the turret. When Alexander Boyarov was in an especially vile mood, he'd turn up the gravity in the ship to make it harder for me to load. He'd laugh cruelly and then berate me when I dropped the crates, sometimes using it as an excuse to beat me.

  I grabbed a blaster rifle from its cradle on a lower shelf. As soon as my right hand closed around the rifle’s grip, the face shield of my vac-suit raised. The AI projected a heads-up display (HUD) onto my retina from my suit’s helmet. Colt 2601-L displayed on the right side of the HUD, with a translucent gauge that resembled a thermometer showing 100%. The weapon was at full charge.

  Full auto, I instructed. The HUD switched from showing three bullets next to the energy meter to the word ‘Auto.’

  I entered the bunk-room-turned-brig where the captured pirates sat. Upon seeing me enter the room armed, they started talking all at once. Their words were inconsequential.

  I considered the three men sitting in front of me, begging for their lives. Olav Peetre was the one who abducted me a year and a half ago. I had known something was fishy but the promise of money lured me into a dangerous situation. It was a pattern I’d repeated since I was twelve and my father had passed away in a mining accident.

  Alexander Boyarov was a sadistic brute. He wasn’t on the ship in the beginning, but when he showed up, he took a special liking to me and made sure my every waking moment was hell. If I resisted, he would beat me and it could get real ugly.

  Jimmy Peng wasn’t that bad. He’d never beaten me, and that was something in his favor. If not for Jimmy, my decision would have been relatively easy.

  I wasn’t a model citizen. To be truthful, I wasn’t a citizen at all. Having been a working girl since I was sixteen, I'd never finished school and taken the Mars Competency Test (MCT), a requirement for becoming an Earth Mars Citizen. No, I knew I couldn’t really take any moral high ground, even though I had done what was necessary to keep me and my sister alive. What I needed now was the ability to find safe ground, and these three were anything but safe for me.

  The chattering died down and only Alexander was stupid, or brave enough to ask, “You crazy bitch, what are you doing? Let us go, you psychotic …”

  It is of
ten said that revenge is not satisfying and not a worthy objective. Watching Alexander Boyarov’s head snap back and his hateful spew stop so suddenly was the closest thing to pleasure I’d experienced in years. The look on his face was priceless, bringing a smile.

  “It seems I have your attention now,” I started.

  “I’m gonna break every …” Alexander Boyarov cut in, recovering from the shock of me firing energy bolts into the wall above his head. The wall diffused the energy bolts without ricochet.

  I fired twenty more rounds into the floor near his feet, causing him to jerk them back quickly. His face was red with anger. He was in a dangerous mood at this point. But then, so was I.

  “Look ass-hat, I’m not letting you go. I don’t want to kill you, but believe me I will. You’ve got it coming.”

  “What’s your play here, Dontal?” Olav Peetre asked.

  “I’ll launch a life pod once you’re off this boat. We’re less than one day from Terrence. I’ll make sure someone gets your mayday. You give me trouble and I’ll forget about the pod.”

  “You’re not gonna leave us here. What if no one comes for us?” Olav asked.

  We went back and forth, but in the end there wasn’t much they could do about it. I moved them into the airlock and took a great deal of satisfaction in watching them float out into space. I even waited a solid thirty minutes before launching the life-pod. It was petty, but I enjoyed it.

  MISSION DEFINED

  My only remaining family was Jenny. The last time I’d seen her we were living together on the space station of the mining colony Terrence. We were saving our money, trying to afford passage back to Mars.

  I have only a few memories of Mom. She died after Jenny was born. I used to wear a locket with a picture of her and Dad when they had first been married. They emigrated from Mars to Terrence shortly after that. Dad had it in his mind that they would strike it rich as miners. I was born a couple years after they had gotten set up. Dad was helping work a claim that paid out fairly well. He was putting money away and hoped to actually get his own claim to work.

  Mom’s accident happened when Jenny was two years old. One day we were a happy family and the next day it was all taken away. It was one of those freak accidents miners call the Fist of Fate. A small chunk of space debris, or something that broke loose from a mining operation, moving at extremely high speed, hits you. There is no protection from that. They say, for a few moments you don’t even know you’re dying. The projectile goes through you so fast, you don’t know anything has happened. We were told she didn’t suffer, but the older I get, the less I believe that was true.

  After Mom’s death, Dad pretty much lost it. He didn’t hurt us or anything, but our happy life was gone. He worked more and more hours and came home later and later. I soon found out he really wasn’t working, but was out spending most of what we had drinking. It passed to me, all of six years old, to raise my little sister. When I was twelve, Dad died in his own accident. This time it wasn’t a freak accident. He hadn’t been taking care of his vac-suit and simply died for lack of oxygen.

  For a few years Jenny and I were handed around between families. The problem was that no one has any money on a mining colony. Food, water and oxygen for two more kids is more than most people could handle. At the age of fourteen I got a waitressing job. I worked twelve hour days and Jenny and I rented the smallest room we could find.

  When I was sixteen, I finally gave in to the pressure and was turned out as a prostitute. I would like to say it was terrible, but that was only part of it. I hated myself for what I was doing and I hated lying to Jenny, but we had actually started to save money. Resisting the drugs was what I struggled with the most. It would have been so easy to give in, but I wasn’t about to repeat my old man’s sins and give up on my family. One single rock shouldn’t have the ability to end so many lives. Jenny depended on me. I was willing to give up myself, but not her.

  That was, of course, until Olav Peetre lured me onto this very ship. I had to get back to Terrence and find Jenny. With a ship, we had a chance to escape. We could make our way to Puskar Stellar on Mars. Surely there, we would be able to eke out a better life.

  I had assets if I could keep control of them. Liam Hoffen had allowed me to grab two cases from the pirate warehouse as my personal plunder. Well, technically, it was six cases and he chose two I could keep. He let the others: Olav, Alexander and Jimmy do the same. I wasn’t sure what was in them, but now I had eight cases and a brick of platinum from my deal with Hoffen. He said the platinum was worth twenty thousand Mars credits (m-creds). I thought the brick felt a little light, but he wasn’t too far off.

  First things first, however. I needed to locate Jenny. She was fourteen when I'd been taken and I desperately hoped she had been able to take care of herself. She'd be sixteen now. I wasn’t sure how to explain what happened. She was going to be beyond mad. But that didn’t matter. We were family and we'd get past it.

  For the last year and a half I hadn’t even had access to the network, one of the most unsettling aspects of my captivity. I realized that I could now see all of the communications I'd missed.

  Open communication’s queue. Prioritize messages from Jenny.

  If I’d been paying attention, I would have noticed the small throbbing glow in my vac-suit's HUD a lot earlier. The minute I’d gained control of the cutter, my AI had started all sorts of interfacing, including automatic retrieval of pending messages. AI functions were something all spacers took for granted. It was common for an AI to queue up communications for short periods of time while in flight, because the ship’s engines could cause interference. Otherwise, communications arrived at the speed of light. From one side of the solar system to the other this could be as long as three hours. I’d been out of reach for eighteen months.

  A list of more than a hundred communications filled my screen. I made my way back to the pilot’s seat and grabbed a reading pad. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but sometimes the HUD gave me a headache. I didn’t need to instruct my AI to move the projected list onto the reading pad, I had been training it since I was very young and this was a common enough event for me.

  I decided to start from the bottom of the list and move up.

  Cel. You didn’t come home last night. I have to run to school, see you this afternoon. TTFN – Jenny

  Hey. It’s getting late. Let me know what’s up. Oh and they’re saying there’s a new family setting up on claim eight hundred oh forty two. Misty says she got a look at the new boy and he looks delicious.

  Cel, I’m getting worried. Why won’t you message me back?

  Tears streamed down my cheeks at the sound of her voice. She was so innocent and happy. I didn’t want to continue because she was never be able to reach me and I couldn’t take the eventual rejection I knew was coming. Jenny continued sending several messages each day, ranging from anger, to apology, to fearful speculation. They changed from hope to a weary acceptance after a couple of weeks.

  Hi Cel – I hope you’re able to hear this wherever you are. I miss you. I was able to get a job at Magees’ Diner. It’s a little weird. I’m basically taking Mom’s and your old job. The pay is not very good. I hope I can keep the apartment. I still have most of our savings.

  Cel, had a guy grab my ass today. I told him off, but he just stared at me. Magee didn’t even seem to care. She said it comes with the job. It made me feel sad, especially after I thought about what you had to do for us. I miss you.

  Cel, I moved in with Misty and her family. We have to share a bed but she’s being a real pal. I pay rent and have to get my own food and oh-two, but at least I can make it. I love you.

  The messages continued and became more and more spread out in time. I continued to listen. The last message I received was startling.

  Cel, I can’t take it anymore. Where’s this leading to? What am I doing on this station? I'm barely surviving. There’s a family trading ship, Domiva’s Grace, docked up this week. I was talking
to one of the family members, a boy. He said they might have room for me to ride back with them to Puskar Stellar. It’s what we always wanted, Cel. I will have to give them all of our savings. I’m really thinking about doing it. I wish you were here. Love you.

  It was the last message from Jenny.

  Open channel to Jenny on Terrence.

  Jennifer Dontal is not within communication range. Would you like to send a message?

  Jenny, it’s a long story, but I’m finally safe. Please tell me where you are. I need to know you are safe. Love you.

  Open channel to Magee on Terrence.

  “This is Magee. Celina? Is that you girl?” I was close enough to the Terrence station that the communication delay was minimal.

  “Hi Magee, yes, of course. How are you?” I wasn’t sure how to handle the conversation.

  “We sure have been worried about you. You must be close, where have you been?” I figured it was natural that she was curious, but I really didn’t have the energy to explain.

  “I’m sorry Magee, I’m looking for Jenny. It’s a long story.”

  “She quit two months ago, haven’t seen her since. She said something about signing on with a family trading ship. I don’t remember the name. I told her to be careful. Sometimes those ships are dangerous, especially for a young woman, if you get my meaning.”

  “Uh, sure. So you haven’t heard from her since then?”

  “Not at all. So where’d you say you’ve been?” she asked.

  “Thank you, Magee. I really appreciate what you did for all of us.” I wasn’t about to get into it with her.

  “Okay, dear. Stop in if you’re looking for work. You Dontals have always been good help.”

  I ended the communication. Magee wasn’t much help. Maybe Misty would know something. The last time I had seen her she was thirteen, a year younger than Jenny.