"Motifs"
Back into the pit again, across the void I go a-warping. Good ol' space. Bleakest of the bleak. Darkest of the dark. Nothing but deadly cold and radioactivity. Makes you realize why no life besides us and the Bug bothered to evolve sentience and all that.
The fields of stars shine so far away, but when you get close to them they're real bastards, real killers. I can't help but return to this. The ship's all ready and freshened. I'm done with vacation. My revenge against the Neo-Gypsies was chilled and sweet- still need to thank Gray Blade for his assistance. The credit was hard and savory. Then, five days of clubbing and mingling with the tastes of the material flesh on Merchant Freeport, Ishtar, New Vegas, followed by a day of detox and attempted memory retrieval ended by a Sabbath of confession, absolution, donation of percentages to choice charities and the feelings of the spiritual… spirit at St. Mary's on Anselm. Funds almost completely frittered away. That's how it is. Hard to believe I've been in this since PM Fox-Bennett's last term. Need to go home next cycle around.
So now Kierkegaard's Point looms in front of the glassplate. Typical derelict station, obsolete and almost abandoned. Depressing place for the guy to be named after. They've given each major mountain and valley and crater to every small-bit astronomer, physicist, sci-fi writer, composer or character out of Western legend, but philosophers still end up getting screwed. Salieri is a L2 orbital, and Stephenson gets his own Planet on the Outer Rim. Sci-fi writers. Damn them and their schoolboy enthusiasm. Blast them for setting us up for disappointment. Sure hasn't made my career any better.
Old steel, tungsten, and bonafide real glass in this baby. It's ISS-class, full of connecting modules to make it look like a giant Tinkertoy. Huge solar collectors are falling apart with micro-meteorite strikes. Crew left seventy years ago for Terra after the colonization failed. Station forgotten in the mad rush towards other efforts and buried under tons of paperwork.
The surface of Andersen is as desolate as the Moon. EU team left a few landing pods and probes, but there wasn't much to find. No real resources- that's why the TerraComps took out their funding, and the mission failed. Last military inspection was five months ago; nothing suspicious was found, but the dimlights didn't actually bother to board the station.
Five days ago the government-in-exile of the pirate nation Republic of Mordor IV fled to the system. Republics I through III were destroyed in the last couple of years, each based in a system at least ten light-years from the others. It's a universally popular label. The names of the govinex are Abraham and Isaac: father and son. I hate it when the naming is apropos. Pirate-pater Abraham is an unbalanced fellow, but he hasn't sacrificed Pirate Isaac yet- when the time comes, though, he'll follow through with the fear of the absurd.
Whatever.
No shots yet as I leave hyperspace. But they didn't take many with them in the govinex. Besides, it is the nature of the pirate to feint and fake- Decatur the PK, Book II part vii. My superiors want me to capture these brigands alive, though I'd rather just throw a few torpedoes at the central compartments of this giant daisy chain, maybe do some cutting with a laser, and the scurvy dogs will be at Davy. Scanners show that someone is definitely alive in the derelict. No one's groundside, either, and visual probes confirm that. Ground tests show no underground passages. If anyone's shielded down there, the robot probes will get them once they stick out their ugly heads.
My astrosuit is ready. Stupid, standard dark blue of the military and nothing special- I don't do a lot of swimming around, so I haven't bothered to buy my own and accessorize. That's a mainline bounty hunter thing, anyway. PK-ers got no time for the dilly-dallying with cosmetics.
I got the Tas, my .45, and a cheap submachiner I picked up on MF. This thing is as old as Spacerace One, but the bullets will fly smoothly in null-G. I also have a blaster. Hopefully I won't have to use it.
The Shore docks nicely with the docking module. Got to hand it to the Euros- efficiency in uniformity is a good thing. This station may be obsolete, but its standard size means I won't have to cut a big enough doorway into the place.
Kierkegaard's Point is awfully clean. Most of the derelicts around Earth are infested with fungi and funkie nourished by cosmic rays and leftover skin cells. The surprisingly roomy tube is white-sanitized. So I've entered the station without getting shot yet. Good sign.
So I passed through several tubes and modules, finding nothing. The place was cleared out. The Euros were thorough when they left: some rooms had parts in the wall stripped bare. The entire station was a skeleton of everything they couldn't salvage in a hurry, except the recycling life support system the European Space Committee left running just in case some unimaginative, uninformed bureaucrat decided that there was some urgent need to recolonize Andersen a few centuries from now.
I was inspecting an empty cafeteria when the sentry shot me. Fortunately I still had my suit on, because the blaster shot would have burned the skin off my belly if it was covered only by my jacket, along with a few precious organs. I was in a bad spot. The efficiency happy surrender monkeys had already taken out all of their benches and tables, leaving me in a completely exposed area meters around. I immediately jumped and demagnetized my boots, sending me into null-G, shooting up towards the ceiling as I pulled out the submachiner and peppered the ground beneath me with bullets. The pirate machine was a clunky gun mounted on wheels. It could shoot in a 360-degree axis, but the crystalline clear tube was easily blown apart.
And may I add, I cut quite a dashing figure flying against the backdrop of the star-studded space. The window they had there had a nice view to absolutely nothing.
I landed and remagnetized. Stupid scanner can pick up heartbeats, but not motion. My suit was burnt, but whole. I reloaded the gun and entered the kitchen. No one in there. Light was on, though. And there were remnants of food floating in the air: dehydrated pasta strands, freezer burned carrot sticks, large crumbs of spacepie. The waver was warm to the touch, and there was a glass of milk inside. Someone had been in here recently.
The "hall" back to the main passage was through the ceiling. I once again deactivated my shoes and swam up. I've only had basic training for fighting in null-G. So that was a problem when the security turret popped out of the wall and shot the .45 out of my hands as I floated out. I quickly reversed direction and dived back into the kitchen. The turret fired loudly, shots ricocheting off of the hardy tube walls, shattering viewers and screens. It did not come in bursts, but single shots in fast succession, and it did not fire wildly, but at the opening of the port to the hall. The computer had recognized the weapon I had, and had shot it away before I could do anything.
This would have been the perfect opportunity for father and son to attack me while I was pinned down in the kitchen. They didn't. If they really wanted to kill me, they could have had a servicebot manually seal off the module, depressurize it, and wait for me to die of asphyxiation once my air ran out.
The comp was obviously designed to disarm the enemy first, and then disable it. That was nonsensical, considering that if I had just poked my head out of the porthole, the turret would have filtered me out right then and there. Yet the program running the gun was smart enough to shoot my Colt away, first. It probably had a standard list of weapons to choose from.
Edges are a common weapon now that the colonies have a poor class who can't afford blasters. I found a cleaver in a cupboard and tossed it out of the port.
I actually looked into the hall. The knife spun edge over handle several times before a bullet shattered the blade and the pieces were knocked back down into the port. I put my suited arm over my face, shielding me from the shrapnel, and shot the turret with my submachiner. The gun emplacement sputtered, coughed, and sent out smoke before dying. I was pushed back against the wall with Newton's third law, but at least it was done.
Close one. My grandpappy's Colt still floated in midair. It was peppered with holes the wallgun gave it before it focused on cutting off my route to the hall. Rest in peace, grandfather. I know you'll forgive me. I don't know if I will for allowing a three hundred year old priceless museum piece get Swissed by an autoturret.
I checked my sensor. Still nothing. Damned pirates. They're probably masking their lifesigns with armor or jammers. For all I know, they were right behind me with a blaster at my throat. I spun around just in case. Like any vermin or creepy-crawly, their best friend was stealth and chicanery.
That's one of the reasons the field is so small. Oh, any asteroid smasher who can fight can get accepted to a job as raider scourer. A raider would have jumped into the cafeteria, unjammed, back when I was doing an aerial ballet against the sentry, and then proceed to have a million volts pumped into his system. Pirates don't consider this a career; it's life.
And it's my life to end theirs- either their careers or other lives. Grim, but it pays the bills. It's a part of my penance, I suppose. I don't feel bad at Mass for the job when I think about how many grizzled transport captains or sleazy commodity traders I save from certain death. Am I not the knight of infinite resignation? There's the damn symbolism again.
I digress. The next hall was wired with enough explosives to turn the entire station into a giant fireball, slam the smithereens into the surface of the planet, and then carve out a crater large enough to fit an entire Kansan prairie town.
It would have gone off, too, had I not seen my ship parked outside. The tube-module-hall was dimly but nicely lit, was the length of a b-ball court, and connected one wing of the station with another. The walls had long, anti-rocket windows that were pitch-black from the view they provided. I stopped at the entrance to the hall just to see if the Shore was still okay. I had just put on my helmet to zoom in with the visor when I got bombarded by a hundred angry giant exclamation points. The scanner had detected infrared lasers in the room, connected to sensors in the walls, connected to Splamo!. If I hadn't put on the helmet to stargaze, the whole station would have been gone.
Typical military tech- pretty decent equipment, occasionally, hooked up to non-user friendly systems. I hate my bosses.
IR visor revealed that the whole tube was crawling with rays. I almost turned and left the passage, when they all suddenly disappeared. I blinked.
Had a motion sensor found me, decided that I had found the trap, and then created this second one for me? All I had to do was to take a step forward, and then the lights would go back up and Kierkegaard's Point spins out of existence.
I'm no dimlight. I don't take challenges set by pirates. I took a step out of the passage when the PA came to life. "Knight of Fate. This is Johannes de Silencio. I beseech you to work out your salvation. Cross this church farm and come to me," groaned the creaking voice of an oldster.
Typical piratical wantabe nonsense. This station was named aptly. Apparently Pirate Isaac took over the place to live out his philosophically-based dreams or something like that. Or maybe he's just playing with me, feigning insanity by speaking in obvious riddles with obvious references. Got to hate it when a pirate drops an allusion on you. Either way, this fool had been there for quite a while to set up all of the traps. Doubtless the last military patrol was useless. Probably it never even happened. Underlings lie.
Either/Or, eh? The PA message could have been prerecorded. A bad joke that kills someone who's curious enough stumble onto an abandoned pirate nest. On the other hand he might have been across the passage right then, and on the other side of the station was his inner sanctum sanctorum.
Credit is credit. I demagnetized my shoes, climbed up a wall, recoiled my legs, and pushed off, shooting off. I flew across the hall, twisting and turning and dodging the IR beams, the warning beeper in my helmet blaring a constant wave of hysterics.
I didn't land at the other side. I flew past it as the explosives detonated, starting from the end of the hall where I came from. I must have tripped it early on. So much for grace and style and a clean flight. The explosion took me and shot me through another port. My sensors were wrong. There weren't enough explosives to blow up the place. Or maybe it was never supposed to unless someone triggered them by remote- not motion sensing, after all.
Good theory. My flight didn't stop, but I realized that the blasts, which were supposed to blow up the tube passage by each compartment on the wall, stopped before I got to the other side. I looked back, and saw that a safety anti-breach door had closed up at about halfway across the tube. My last thought as I flew out of the tube and into a room was that I was now stranded on this half of the station, which was previously inaccessible due to a lack of docking modules.
Inside the room was Johannes himself, nee Abraham. The pirate was dressed up in shepherd's robes, but looked like a patriarch neither Jewish nor Biblical. Wantabe reenactor. He had a tinge of serial killer: there was a solemn, genuine look of fear and trembling as he clutched the platinum-iridium scalpel over the prone body of his resigned-looking son. Damn it, how I hate it when pirates stage the drama. It was all laid out right in front of me: he was the Old Testament Abe, here to sacrifice his Old Testament son, knowing not why but following his faith in… who, exactly? Me? Does he think that I'm his Maker? Is it because I'm here to kill him? Am I the knight of faith or the knight of infinite resignation? Don't tell me: there's a bomb in his son. A fucking Splamo! implant. Honest Abe stabs Isey, and the whole station goes. That's the reason for all of this. An incredibly elaborate suicide sequence.
I shot him with my Tas. No need to overanalyze things.
The pirate jumped back. His sandals must have had magnetic soles. He didn't double up and start crying, though. He only smiled as Isaac's restraints broke, and the young, strong-looking pirateson jumped from the weird sacrificial altar and into my chest. I got knocked back into the hallway, hard.
Tas didn't work. Isaac swam in and pulled a curved edge- a falchion- out of his white robe and activated its superheated edge. I pulled out my submachiner and shot him a few times in the chest. No die. The blasted robe was anti-projectile armor disguised as a cheap costume. I've got to find where their black market is located. Isaac sliced the sword through my gun, halving it. I threw it at his face. He cut it into fourths.
I shrugged. Such weapons are three a penny on Merchant Freeport.
But there went my non-lethal weapons. My only recourse was the stupidest maneuver I had ever pulled in my life.
All I had left was a blaster with no stun feature hidden inside my astrosuit's sleeve. It was set to Blast, and I reset it to Cut as Isaac gloated with dishonest Abe, who crept in behind, grinning.
It was pure chance that I made the sniper shot. I narrowly missed hitting the pirate-pater's head and giving him a quarter-sized lobotomy. What I did cause was a hole on the wall behind him.
Pandemonium. The station instantly began to depressurize as oxygen ran out. The doors to the room automatically sealed, but not before I blew out the one between the tube passage and the sacrificial chamber. The three of us were trapped in the depressurizing room formed by the passage and the chamber. Father and son brigands were scrambling to get a hold on the sides of the doorway and to prevent getting sucked through the tiny hole to the vacuum.
I held on, grinning stupidly with my helmet on and breathing the sweet, sweet, putrid oxygen tank atmosphere. Looked like Abraham had suddenly lost the connection between finite and infinite. He had no trust in the strength of the absurd. And all that jazz. He had no wish to sacrifice either himself or Isaac for whatever crazy imaginary scheme he had carved out in his head. The wind was surprisingly fierce for such a small leak, and the two had weaker and weaker grasps as their air supply ran out. As I saw the patriarch's fingers slip, I let go of the tube and flew into the chamber, my entire body sucked onto the hole. My astrosuited back plugged the gap. The wind stopped blowing.
The two pirates were floating stilly, paralyzed. The bends will do that to a person.
It took me half an hour to tie up their unconscious bodies. Couldn't take any chances with them. Abraham was immune to the Tas because of his robe, but I wasn't sure. For all I know they were connected to the Neo-Gypsies.
I left Kierkegaard's Point brigands captured, back into the void, without angst.