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  Mercury Blade

  Valyien, Book 1

  James David Victor

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. It Should Have Been a Water-Tight Plan

  2. Interlude: The Data Smith

  3. Arrival

  4. Tritho

  5. Cassandra Milan

  6. It’s All About Physics

  7. I Brought My Friends

  8. The Merriman

  9. Old Friends, Old Enemies

  10. The Price of Friendship

  11. Birth

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Prologue

  Secrets

  Darkness. The smell of millennia-old dust. Something skittered in the darkness, dislodging some pebble or sand, before the dark becomes quiet once more.

  This place has been quiet for a long time. Whole worlds have been terraformed and occupied since the last time this cavernous void has seen the light. Whole civilizations have risen and fallen since any intelligent being walked here. You might detect some of that timelessness in the slowly sifting airs. Even down here, in the deeps of an alien moon, there are drafts and currents.

  Slowly and hesitantly, the darkness starts to lift as a gentle iridescent green and blue glow kindles. Some strange spore or alga bloom manages to live even down here, feeding on the minute organic particles that still drift through the vaults. If anyone suddenly appeared down here and looked up, they would think they are witnessing a new, alien sky. Perhaps all the old stories are true about the other side of the universe like a horrid, beautiful, terrifying mirror to this side.

  The glow extends in patches and waves as the ethereal single-cell life responds to the bioluminescence of its fellows. Greens descend into mustard yellows, blues become pregnant purples. There are whole fungal wars and conquests going on as we speak, histories that will never be noticed or recorded.

  The light illuminates a vast cavern. Larger than most starships, as large as an entire space station perhaps. The rock and algae walls are fluted and curving, carved by the millenniums of sand and air into fantastic natural shapes.

  But then the glow finds an edge. A flat, straight line. A right angle.

  If anyone was standing here, their eyes would instantly be drawn to this imposition of order in the natural landscape. Never mind the glowing fungus, these corners and shapes are unnatural. They are too big, for one. Massive stone blocks made into steps, some out of sequence and half-tumbled. What is it? What has lain down here in the alien dark for so long, that even time itself has forgotten it?

  The cavern reveals itself not as a cave at all, but the wide lip of a pit. The block-shapes occupy one entire half of the cavern, before descending jaggedly in awkward terraces into darkness. It is hard to tell if this is the work of some god-like imagination, or whether this is a tragedy of a cosmic scale. Did the beings who made this site dig the pit? Surely no mortal hands could accomplish such a task. It would take eons just to move that much dirt!

  Time is relative, however, especially in the furthest reaches of space.

  Or would the imaginary passerby think they are looking at the death of some ancient civilization? A sudden earthquake or volcano ripping through intelligent endeavor?

  The pit is unfathomable. The glow of the walls does not extend to the lip of the circle in the rock. It’s almost as if even the single-celled algal lifeform knew that going down there would be a bad idea.

  Maybe the fungi have more sense than humans.

  The stillness is disturbed by a slight noise—a tremor in the currents of dust that haven’t been disturbed like this since the nearest star was a different color. The bioluminescent fungus reacts to the movement, glaring brighter, flashing iridescent colors as if in warning.

  Thudududuhr… the tremor becomes a muffled noise, and then it becomes a groan. The algal walls spin and wash themselves in reactive pigments.

  Thock! Suddenly, for the first time in a long time, there is a loud crack and a tumble of rocks fall from the roof, vanishing into the darkness of the pit as if swallowed.

  THUDUDUHR! The grinding noise reaches a pitch, and with a human shout, is suddenly shut off. The motor winds down. A haze of light starts to fill the cavern from this tiny imperfection in the ceiling. It is a different sort of light than the alien green and purple one in here. It is a healthier one, of faded grey and white, but for the life of the cavern, it means death. The bioluminescence starts to fade and turn off in great swathes. The algae could never survive with such direct light, and their entire mushroom genealogy is wiped out in a matter of seconds.

  “What the—” a tiny, muffled voice says from the hole. “Get me a light down here, will you? And the ropes! The ropes!”

  The cavern waits patiently. The stone ziggurat waits patiently. The pit waits patiently. There is a scrape, a curse, and descending in slow movements, a star is born into the dark.

  It is a tiny human, descending on strengthened poly-steel ropes, holding powerful caving torches. The light is harsh and bright in this place of secrets, and it reveals the stone ziggurat occupying one half of the cavern and built into the pit besides.

  “Sweet mother of god!”

  1

  It Should Have Been a Water-Tight Plan

  If there is one thing you’re not supposed to do, it’s lie to Trader Hogan, Eliard Martin, Captain of the Mercury Blade thought as he stared into the small, fierce eyes of the man in front of him.

  Trader Hogan was only a small man, barely over five feet, and clad in the goldish-red robes of the Traders’ Belt. He had the sort of head that made the thin and rakish-looking Eliard think of rats—but this would have to have been a bald one, save for the black nodules of implants across the trader’s cranium. Hogan was surrounded by four very large mercenaries, who all dwarfed the captain in his green duster and form-fitting encounter suit. They had the sort of shoulders that could play pro-SpinBall even before the heavy layers of exo-suit armor were added on top. They weren’t carrying guns, but instead, steel grey stunclubs that would certainly put a dent in Eliard’s already terrible day.

  Frack. The captain took a deep breath.

  Eliard—or ‘El’ to those that knew him—knew that he was making a bad choice. But when he thought about his career, the man thought that he had never made anything but bad choices. He pulled his duster coat closer around his shoulders, making sure that at least the gold pips on the high collar were visible.

  “I can’t pay, Hogan. You know my last run was unsuccessful,” Eliard said, managing a tight-lipped smile. Eliard wondered if he could make it back to the door behind him before Hogan’s goons got to him. He wondered if he could make it off the Trader Base of Charylla before Hogan had the ports shut down. Hogan was a big cheese in the Traders’ Belt. A senior member of the council, if only because he had blackmailed, bribed, or threatened every other councilor. The station of Charylla was his.

  The little man did not return the smile. “You want to repeat what you just said to me, El?”

  Double-frack. “Didn’t you hear? There are Armcore customs ships up and down the Delta Sector, I couldn’t get through. No one can.”

  Trader Hogan pursed his lips. A bad sign, Eliard thought. “So, you are telling me that the fearless Captain Eliard, on one of the fastest ships in this sector, couldn’t make it past some lazy Armcore officials, sipping their coffee and eating daze-cakes all shift?”
r />   No, what I am telling you is that I still have your loot stashed in one of my aft lockers, and I’m going to sell it myself! Eliard tried not to betray a flicker of emotion. He was through working all these terrible jobs for Hogan and getting paid next to nothing for it. Not even a cut off the top of the deal—and Hogan always gave him the furthest, most dangerous jobs.

  Maybe because he knows that the Mercury can do it, a sarcastic thought crept into Eliard’s head. Of course the Mercury could do it, just not for creeps like Hogan and his goons anymore.

  It was time that we started making some real money, Eliard had thought. Time that we strike out on our own…

  “Hm.” The little man reached up to very slowly and very carefully scratch at one of the nodes on his head. Rumor has it that he had quantum receivers in there, wired straight to the Coalition data-space, so that Hogan could read, in real-time, just what the galactic stock markets were doing, which was also why he was so fabulously wealthy.

  “Then the next thing that I have to ask is…where is the cargo that I entrusted to you?” Hogan glared at Eliard and there was a shift in the four guards around him, from ‘look threatening’ to ‘let’s paint the walls with this guy’s face.’ Hogan was like that, Eliard knew. He was famed throughout the Traders’ Belt of non-aligned asteroids and habitats for his means of ‘settling up’ with those who lied to, stole from, or cheated him. Usually, that meant a long walk out of a very short airlock—without your suit. Or else it could mean that you and your crew found yourselves in the fertilizer vats and pumped back into the synthetic food or sprayed across terraform projects as a fine particulate mist.

  Eliard felt the heavy iron of the bulkhead lock behind him. He stood in one of the many octagonal corridors that wormed its way through Charylla. On the other side of that bulkhead, it was a short sprint to the Charylla Markets—a chaos of neon and noise. Surely, he could lose them in there, right?

  “If you’re thinking about opening that door, I wouldn’t advise it,” Hogan said in clipped tones, as the nearest of the thugs—surprisingly quickly, Eliard thought—reached forward to prod him, hard, in the shoulder with the stunclub. Luckily it wasn’t turned on, but it still hurt.

  “Get off me!” Eliard batted it away, which only caused the guard to grin even wider, and raise the stunclub as if he were baiting a wild animal.

  “Where is my cargo, Captain?” Hogan repeated.

  “Armcore customs were on to me. I had to jettison it out by the Betel 9 transponder. Heaven knows who’s got it now.” Eliard had had his story ready of course. The Betel 9 transponder was just one of the many routine deep-space signaling devices that ships could use to navigate by, and that meant that a lot of traffic passed by. A bit of space flotsam out there could easily be picked up by a passing vessel or burned up in the passing warp signatures.

  “Had to jettison it,” Hogan repeated in a tone that could slice steel. This time, the other guards rolled their shoulders.

  “Well, normally in this kind of situation, Eliard, I would have you and your crew cleaning my boat without spacesuits, but then I would be down ten thousand credits.”

  That cargo was worth ten thousand? The captain of the Mercury Blade was shocked. It had been a small cargo box. Barely big enough to hold a pair of gloves. Oh, frack.

  “I can make it up next run,” Eliard said through gritted teeth, whilst on the inside, he was berating himself for trying to cheat the most powerful crook in the Belt. What had Hogan put in there, diamonds?

  “If I let you live, you mean,” Hogan said sourly. “I don’t think you could earn that much in a year, Eliard. How much is the Mercury Blade worth again?” Hogan gave him a quizzical look.

  Much more than that! “She’s not a part of this deal,” Eliard said quickly.

  “The deal? Deal?” The trader betrayed a momentary flash of anger. “And who are you to tell me what is and isn’t in the deal? This isn’t even a deal, you dimwit. This is recompense.” The thugs flexed their muscles and took a step forward.

  “Wait.” The trader held up a hand. “I can see the advantage of having you owe me, Captain Eliard. Here, then, is the ‘deal,’ as you so eloquently put it: you get me my ten thousand, or I take your boat.”

  Where am I going to come up with that kind of money? You just want the Mercury as your personal slave-galley. Eliard looked at the guards. Could he take them? He would rather give it a go than have to tell his crew they were going to lose their money and their ship and their home. That was the kind of thing that made a crew very angry indeed, and then made them think about words like ‘mutiny’ and ‘lynching.’

  I am so fracked. “I’ll get you your money, and then we’re clear.”

  “Really?” Hogan said.

  “Really. I promise. Ten thousand credits,” Eliard heard himself say.

  “I changed my mind.” Hogan smiled. “Twenty thousand, due in one Sol week.”

  One week! Eliard could have spat. That was an awful lot of money in a very short time, but he was being allowed to live, and to fly. He wondered if he could convince the rest of the crew to leave near Coalition space and never return to the Traders’ Belt.

  Unlikely.

  “You got a problem with that, El?” Hogan’s eyes were scouring his like a spider, waiting for a fly to land. “Because you know, I can just have my boys push you out of the nearest airlock and take your boat instead, if you’d prefer?”

  “No, a week sounds just about fine, Trader,” Eliard was forced to say.

  Now all I have to do is to find some well-paying work, very fast.

  “You owe how much?” Irie, the Mercury’s mechanic, looked at Eliard from between her long braids of dark hair. They stood at the side of one of Charylla’s many bars, where he had managed to track down the leather-clad engineer as she had been routinely acing everyone at darts.

  Irie Hanson was a marvel of the engineering world, or so Eliard thought, anyway. If only she didn’t know it at the same time, too, he had thought on many occasions. She was a little shorter than he was, with skin like burnt umber and a home-made set of goggles permanently slid halfway up her forehead. From her utility belts she could produce, almost at any given moment, an array of tools and spare parts from spanners to circuit boards. She was the reason that the Mercury was still flying after all of the misuse that Eliard put it through.

  “Twenty thousand credits. For Trader Hogan’s cargo,” Eliard said.

  “Wasn’t that the box that we were supposed to drop off at Kavon 3?” Irie squinted at him over the top of her bright green drink. They had been in space for a long time this run, and even the usually humanity-hating engineer had decided to venture into society for a change of faces.

  “Yeah, uh, about that…” Eliard shrugged, before a nervous grin spread slowly across his features. “It’s still sitting in one of the aft lockers.”

  “What!?” The woman coughed her drink over the bar. “We now owe twenty thousand because you decided to double-cross…” She looked around quickly and turned her angry shout into a fierce hiss. “You decided to double-cross the most feared smuggler on this side of Andromeda!? Eliard! What in the blue were you thinking?”

  “Oh, I don’t know…That we could make some money, maybe?” he said. “Which we can, now. We can sell the cargo ourselves somewhere, make a profit maybe, do a few other little jobs while we’re at it, and return to pay off Hogan…”

  “Why don’t you just give it back?” she hissed at him. “No harm, no foul, right?”

  The captain winced. “I don’t think Hogan sees it quite like that. I told him I jettisoned it past the Betel 9.” The captain licked his lips nervously. “And uh, the original cargo is only worth ten K. Hogan added another ten because he’s a fan of my sparkling personality.”

  “Urgh.” Irie slammed her drink down on the counter and signaled for two more.

  “Thanks, I could do with a stiff drink after today…” Eliard started to say when they arrived.

  “Uh-huh, fly-
boy. They’re not for you.” The woman downed one immediately, then picked up the other to sip more slowly. “I will not be buying you a drink for a looong time, Captain.” She scowled at him. “You know that we can’t sell whatever it is on Charylla, right? Hogan will only find out about it…”

  “We’ll get the money, I promise,” Eliard said, before wondering just how many promises he had made already today. It had been a water-tight plan. It shouldn’t have backfired like this.

  “You’d better get the money, you mean.” Irie finished her drink with another disgruntled shake of her head and reached for her patched leather jacket.

  “Hey. Where are you going?” the captain said. Is she walking out on me? On the Mercury? I need my engineer!

  “I’ve got a guy searching for parts in Level 9,” Irie flung over her shoulder. “I want to get those parts and get them stashed away before you do anything else stupid, and maybe get my home taken away from me!”

  Eliard watched her storm off into the crowd and groaned. Well, at least it hadn’t been our gunner that I ran into first.

  “Do you want to die!?” roared the very large, blue-skinned Duergar, with a broad, wedge-shaped head and tusks emerging from his lower jaw. He was the Mercury Blade’s gunner.

  Val Pathok was large even by Duergar standards. His shoulders were broad and thickly corded with visible muscle—Duergars, thanks to their greater body mass and double-layer of thickened skin, rarely wore much more than part-armor and trousers—and his long arms would reach down almost all the way to his knees, were they not currently grabbing the lapels of Captain Eliard’s green duster and shaking him violently.