Pirates of Saturn (The Saturn Series Book 2) Read online

  Through stuttering lips and a thick red tongue, he started several times to speak, finally blurting out, “I I I a-a-am all-always gra-grate-grateful tha-that whe-when you revuv-revive me fro-from cer-cert-certain de-death, th-that you-you’re nuh-nay-nay-naked.”

  She pulled his hand from between her legs. “It’s looking like it will survive.” She scanned his irises. “No obvious signs of brain damage—besides the usual. I’m going to assume this latest trauma related speech impediment is temporary.”

  He tried to force himself to snap out of the shaky speech. Taking a deep breath he started and stopped a few times before plowing on with, “Ser-seriously, thank-thank you. I lo-lo-love you yu-you kn-know.”

  She’d heard this before and still didn’t have a reaction to it that she felt satisfied with. She unquestionably felt warm and mushy with this man, but was it love or just the rush of an ongoing newness in the relationship? She’d loved other men before, only to realize each time had been a temporary high. Instead of responding, she changed the subject. She held his cheek with one hand, forcing him to take his drifting eyes off her body. “Listen. No more excuses. No more we can’t afford it. The team is getting a humanoid assistant. A bot could’ve done everything we needed out there without you or me or any of our friends taking unnecessary risks with our increasingly crappy equipment. This is going to happen. We should try that auction on Soul that Spruck heard about.”

  He nodded half-heartedly. “OK, but still nuh-not shuh-sure we-we sh-should get a-a sen-sentient wuh-one.” He noticed that among the detritus in the air, the tube of gumbo was intact. He smiled. “Lu-look, wh-who didn’t co-come home at least a suc-successful hunter?”

  WHALES

  THE BUBBLES ESCAPING from her regulator rose away from her face in a lazy silvery pattern, their shape more elliptical than round, as if the air couldn’t rise fast enough, forcing it to bend in its haste. The surrounding water was filled with motion; like embers swirling around a bonfire, it was alive with bits of flotsam, rising and falling, both living and dead.

  Her breathing was steady, the regulator making a light clicking noise each time she inhaled. Sunlight filtered through the water, broken into beams that weakly penetrated the depths until the blackness of the abyss consumed them entirely. As she looked down at her flippers gently moving back and forth, she thought she detected motion within the impenetrable blackness. She tilted her head so her chin pressed against the top of her sternum, making the bubbles dance across the lens of her mask.

  There, just a hint of something passing at the very edge of a straining sunbeam. The black object was moving fast; like a train pulling past a station. It was much longer than she expected. The skin of a vast leviathan showed itself and was just as quickly gone.

  From above, the sunbeams were abruptly blocked out, each turning off in a succession of linear movement. She tilted her head up. Her view of the blurry liquid divide between sea and air undulated and was partially obstructed by the passing belly of a giant sperm whale. Its long carnivorous mouth was just slightly ajar, revealing yellowed teeth that were intricately carved and stained with the ink of a hundred scrimshaw masters.

  What the? Who be doin' that? What bitch be spoilin’ a kickass moment wit some buuullshit artsy-ass twist?

  She thought about the back of her hand and its proximity to the abort button. Her hand bashed it in disgust.

  In a small but comfortably decorated apartment sat a hypersleep pod. The cover rose on it and Jada Temple sat up in groggy anger. She’d set the machine for one of the many hyper-reality virtual trips it was capable of. On this setting, the machine didn’t take its occupant into actual hibernation, rather; it brought the mind and body to a deep relaxing place where the brain could be manipulated into having an experience close to what AI back home could offer.

  “Fug!” She rubbed her hands over her face and mumbled to her dog, “Crappy no substitute for AI buuullshit. Can’t be feelin’ the water mush less the tempature, and I sure as shit ain’t feelin’ like I be floatin’.”

  To add to her disappointment, Jada Temple felt her whole being fall into the familiar sense of withdrawal that came from ending a virtual excursion. The trip hadn’t been what she wished for, but it still offered an escape, and its absence was painfully felt when ripped away.

  Despite the mind-boggling view outside her window display, and occasional bouts of life and death stakes, real life, real existence, was horribly terribly interminably boring. She stretched her long arms and climbed out of the pod.

  A small android dog made to look like a Skipper Key sat patiently at her feet and barked out an offer to play. It wagged its tail in exclamation. She cast her eyes down on the panting creature and scowled. “Sleep, Pebbles.”

  The robotic dog found its small bed/charging station, circled like a real dog and crouched down, closing its eyes.

  She sighed and stood while cracking back and forth the vertebra in her neck.

  She wasn’t particularly tall, but her posture lent a sense of height that was greater than her 165 centimeters. She had a broad back for a woman, with strong shoulders and long lean muscled arms that paired well with her athletic legs. Her abdomen was taught, and as once was a popular hip-hop term, baby got back. Her head was shaved bald in order to display a variable motion tattoo that usually reflected an assortment of Dantesque imps moving about her skull. It could just as easily become a pattern of roses, the thorny stems in ample evidence. At first glance, her face might be confused with pretty, perhaps even beautiful, but the confusion would be quickly straightened out by the cruel setting of her mouth. Her full but angry lips were joined to a hooked nose and a strong brow that conjured the image of a raptor on the hunt. She was 60 today. Not that she would have let her crew know. They didn’t need to know her age or that another year had passed for her. She appeared to be in her late thirties, perhaps forty at most; the year when she felt fully baked and chose to freeze the disease that was aging—at least the appearance side of it.

  She shucked her sleep suit off and kicked it to land next to the sleeping dog. Naked, she stepped to the high-def projection that stood in for a window and looked down on the colorful swirling gas of Saturn. The projection created the illusion of a window by scanning her eyes. Wherever she looked and or moved to observe the outside, the image shifted to seamlessly offer the proper angle of view. The image revealed the still distant city of Soul floating at the edge of the upper atmosphere. Ships came and went and shot between the large central node and the smaller gas refining plants that floated like small satellites around their mother sphere. The actual city was hidden behind the vast nano-bag which surrounded it, and which contained the miracle that was a breathable atmosphere. Like a bubbling gray bisque, the spherical nano cloud that surrounded Soul, and it satellites, opened and closed random irises as ships came and went, conjuring for Jada the notion of a busy beehive.

  Her ship, the Innocent, was on final approach. She knew she could count on Schafer and Chico to handle the particulars, but… the responsibilities of leadership and all that crap, she thought, dropping her peculiar street style of English. She’d picked it up as a bad habit in private high; rich bitches co-opting street to sound cool—to no one but themselves. Now it was a ruse, one that she used to keep folks not so sure about her smarts feeling confident that they had something over her.

  Her chamber was inside one of three rotating arms on the Leviathan Class Long-Ranger, each providing its own artificial gravity that kept her feet firmly on the floor. The high-def window helped offset the knowledge of this arrangement, its static image delivering the illusion that her chamber was a stable platform cutting through the void. She hated a lack of gravity, even the short stomach churning span of it when she had to float from one arm of the vessel to the next.

  She sighed and turned to her wardrobe, stopping at a table along the way to suck on a stimulant pen and inhale a little something to help her concentrate. She had a sharp-looking uniform that she wore wh
en landing in official places, but this trip was not one of those. She chose a black faux-leather jumpsuit that offered a bit of menace—the collar zipping snuggly up around her neck. A gold threaded black leather holster held her pearl handled nerve disruptor, and more menacing, a brass-knuckled combat knife sheathed horizontally in the small of her back. She placed a pre-programed hand-held make-up applicator on her face. After roughly 3 seconds, she lowered it to reveal deep dark eye shadow with a vampy almost black lipstick—her signature look. A pair of old-school shit-kicker motorcycle boots and she was ready to head to the bridge. She touched her wrist device and said, “Wake yo asses up, bitches. Cap’n comin’ up.” Which wasn’t really true; in order to get to the bridge, she did indeed have to climb up, but upon reaching the stomach churning Zero-G nexus that was the center of the three arms, she had to flip herself around and climb down, with the spinning gravity-like centrifugal force adding to her weight with each step. She hated it. It required every ounce of her will not to vomit.

  The Innocent was a pristine ship. Captain Temple required it so. Her hand-picked crew were screened for an obsessive desire for tidiness. The ship had been built in 2091 by Masters & Sparks Space Engineering, in a facility on Earth’s moon. It had enjoyed a short existence as a long range hauler between Earth and Mars until it had been borrowed by Ms. Temple and a few friends when Luna started feeling a little too close to home, and Mars wasn’t far enough. Upon reaching Saturn for the first time, Jada and her team found themselves, like so many others who had bravely headed for this final destination, wondering, now what? She had a ship that wasn’t hers (not that anyone was keeping track) and a crew who could professionally run it, and who were also skilled at handing all manner of goods. The trouble was that it was an expensive thing to drive and maintain. Built for vast distances, the machine was designed to handle enormous orders of goods and commodities. One might think that a system as large as Saturn’s would have no trouble keeping such a device busy. One would be wrong. Contracts of any significant size around the mega-planet were sewn up by the conglomerate that was Hanson Industries and its affiliates. That meant Jada Temple and her crew had to be creative.

  Carl Schafer had been with Captain Temple from day one. Prior to their absconding with the big ship, Jada had been chief quartermaster to his chief engineer. Their first trip had been a load of consumables to Mars Base 3, with a load of precious ore for the return. During the months-long trip out and back, they had discovered a love of drinking and gambling together, taking turns winning each other’s meager fortunes. It was a strictly platonic relationship. Carl was admittedly 80 (though he didn’t look a day over 60) and Jada fancied bedding men under 30. That they found agreement about almost everything didn’t mean that their chemistry had a chance of changing. They were drinking-buds who laughed when drunk and only then.

  Schafer had a wiry head of salt and pepper hair with thick sideburns. Vanity mixed with a lack of desire for exercise—much less do a sit up now and again—had him sporting a pair of Spanx around the waist, the seams of which showed through his bulging elastoware. His most prominent feature was a robust nose, pitted by old acne scars and road-mapped with broken blood vessels.

  As Jada climbed down the ladder to the bridge, she said, “How it be lookin’, Schnoz?”

  Schafer noticeably grimaced. Her affectation using the verbal style of a less than educated city girl was only amusing to him when he was plowed. He stood over the shoulder of the helmsman, Chico, who, unlike his name, was anything but a young boy. Handsome, well muscled and swarthy, he very much fit into Jada’s definition of the beddable type.

  Schafer said, “Standard approach, but we’ll have to hover for a bit. Our landing time is tentative. According to Soul Control, a number of vessels are landing on the Patmore platform at roughly the same hour. They have to send over extra ground crew.”

  She nodded, expecting as much.

  As Chico lifted the flight helmet to his head, he paused and scanned its interior. “The foam in this thing is getting hard and thin, Cap. When’re we going to spring for the no-helmet upgrade?”

  Jada glanced at the device. “Do it still work? Is we gonna land safe?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then when it don’t and we won’t.”

  “But it—“

  “Don’t be whinin’, Cheeks. Makes your bo-hunk sound like bo-peep.”

  Chico sneered and roughly pulled on the helmet.

  Jada asked Schafer, “Where Boyce and Jyme be at?”

  “Getting in a workout. Some crap about looking ripped for the show.”

  “Ripped fo the show…pointless. Ripped fo me…like to see.”

  Schafer said, “Really, back to the rhyming thing?”

  “Don’t be jealous you can’t throw down. Gina?”

  “Sleeping. Said, wake her when we land.”

  “That woman’s ass be sleepin’ like a teen.”

  “You’re the one who said, as long as the work gets done, we can do whatever–“

  “I knows what I be sayin'. Just makin the observation is all. Cheeks’s got it? Right, Chico?

  Chico lifted the helmet “You talking to me? Can’t hear you under this. Just got clearance though.“

  “You hear every word I’s sayin'. Now focus them pretty eyes and set us up for a nice landin'.” She noticed a plate with a chunk of something that looked like cheese on it and some crackers. She looked hard at Schafer. “You best not be gettin’ crumbs on my floor.”

  “Our floor. And the vacuum practically spots it before it even hits the floor. Can we put the OCD to bed for the day?”

  Jada made a scowl that was also a smile. “It good?”

  “Which, the crackers or the cheese?”

  “Both.”

  “The printer said the cheese is from an Irish recipe from the late Seventeen-Hundreds. The crackers are… salty.”

  “Yuck. Hate Irish cheese.” She grabbed a cracker and popped it in her mouth, chewing while still talking. “Auction site send anythin’ new?”

  “Nope.”

  Jada paced. “Be nice to know who the other bidders be.”

  Schafer popped the last of the cheese in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Wish I had some white wine. As to the auction, does it matter? Hybrid bidding process and all? How often does the product get to agree to being bought by the highest bidder? Damn strange business.”

  “No doubt.” She stepped over to Chico and massaged his shoulders in what his body language response said was an overly friendly way. “ETA, Cheeks?”

  Chico scrunched his shoulders to shake her hands off. “Flight Control says hour-and-a-half. So figure forty to start our descent.”

  Jada ran her fingers across the base of his neck. “Hmm. Feel like having a go while we be waitin'?”

  Chico’s leaned forward, and the ship dipped as his mind was distracted. “Last go we had left me bruised for a week. Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of the new acquisitions will have similar… requirements.”

  Jada stepped back and made a pouty face. “No sport in dat.”

  SOUL

  CALEB SAT ON something that looked like wood shavings while holding a rabbit gently in his lap. He’d been skeptical that the petting zoo proprietor was being straight with him—the signs claiming live animals—but he could feel the creature’s heart beating against his fingers, and its muscles twitched in such a way that he knew that even the best robotics engineers couldn’t quite achieve. He could sense his own heartbeat slowing to a point which he hadn’t felt since first falling into hypersleep on his original flight out. A small sheep stepped over and nudged him gently in the back, wanting a turn at being stroked. Tickets to sit with the animals were a fortune, yet he was surrounded by children and adults alike. The pen was set in the green space that was Soul’s less than glamorous central park.

  The rabbit’s long ears were folded back along its body and Caleb’s fingers gently felt the hard but pliable cartilage under the downy fur. The cre
ature responded to its ears being stroked with a gentle but firm kick. “OK. Don’t like that? How about this?” He scratched along the right side of the jaw and the animal pushed back against his fingers with pleasure. The petting zoo was plastered with ads for a robotic Ship’s Cat, which claimed to offer the same type of response — happy to have the base of its tail rubbed too.

  Caleb stared at one of the posters. The robot cat’s eyes were larger than reality, displaying a wide-eyed look designed to manipulate the viewer into wanting to pick it up and give it a hug. Suckered in, Caleb thought, maybe a little cat for company. He’d pitch it to the gang.

  Jennifer’s new magnetic boots caught his eye as she approached the pen; faux leather riding boots, with absolutely no practical value in her line of work. Then again, the woman was always concerned with how an outfit looked, even her elastoware. Form fitting was her signature, not that Caleb minded.

  She said, “And how’s my man-child doing?”

  He offered a dreamy smile.