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Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 84: Cooper 100
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 283
Falling inward, The Energetic passed Venus’ orbit as Cooper did enough power yields in his head that he found himself doing them in his sleep. Zait had thirty years of experience as an ironman, running the iron fission reactor, on this ship and others. According to him, Angle--who was now gone, and Lunarian, and thus gifted with math--and Cooper were two of the best students he’d ever had. Which meant that Zait felt able to give them the full, complete, and massive benefit of all his experience. For Cooper, what that meant was that each and every day felt like going to a master’s level oral theses demonstration at university, and there was no Angle to share the boon--although Zait did recruit ‘helpers’ to try to distract his student.
It reminded Cooper of training under Red Swashbuckler, except Zait was rarely rude, and never beat him to make a point. He just demanded utter perfection unrelentingly for hour after hour. Despite the stress of it, Cooper found himself enjoying the chance. He had failed to take the opportunity to learn crossbow archery from William Tell, but Red Swashbuckler’s training had already saved his life at least a couple of times against the space pirates. Who knew in what future world Zait’s training might be useful?
Two weeks into the trip they ran into another meteorite trail, and he spent the day with Navigator Ortan as the manling consulted and modified his charts. In the off time, they had talked of Jesus’ life on Earth, and it had been a very refreshing break from Zait’s work. But the next day he was back at it.
Four weeks in, with Zait watching, he had run the reactor room according to the Captain’s orders as The Energetic out maneuvered and out sped a probable pirate attack from a ship that kept trying to close with them. It claimed to be ‘damaged’ and ‘in need of help’ but everyone’s conclusion was that the wild maneuvers it engaged in were not the sort a damaged spaceship would be able to do.
“Most pirates prefer the moons and the Belt, but a few hang out near likely travel passages. It's a high risk, high reward strategy. If they can sneak up on us without being spotted, they can lose little fuel chasing us down and have a lot of time to work us over before another ship comes along. And they don’t have to pay the Pirate Kings a share.”
That led to the question of what kings.
“Ah, some pirates, they build a base for their kind, and have buyers and sellers, but if you operate out of one of these bases they take one third of the loot,” Zait explained before going back to diminishing power curves as one overloaded an engine.
Cooper understood those economics easily enough. Operate without a safety net, and you made more money, but if things went bad, they went really bad. On the other hand, he had gathered that if a pirate king got too big, the nearest planet, or some large freighter company, or a hired patrol of counter pirates would come and burn him out with axe, sword, and explosives. Getting caught in a pirate base when the skies filled with enemy ships was not usually a survivable experience for any pirates. In that case, one would prefer to be way out in the middle of empty interplanetary space by one’s lonesome.
Two days later the ship shuddered, and Cooper heard a screaming noise of inhuman pain from the metal of the ship followed by a screaming whistle. He was in his bed, dreaming of derivatives, and the noise jerked him upright. This sent him spinning around the small cabin, as he had been in one gravity when he went to sleep but now was in zero gravity. Yanking his clothes on, he opened the door and wind gusted past his face. Without thinking he slammed the door, and went to the closet on the back wall. The spacesuit, a dull gray one piece, he skinned on over his sailor suit.
No one else had been sleeping at this time in his room so he had been alone.
The noises had been a clue; the wind gusting out of his room had been confirmation. They had been hulled, and were losing air pressure. Slapping the face mask down, he heard it click, and rotated the airgen backpack, all of two inches thick, and a foot by eight inches which could supply air for him to breathe for ten hours through some technology from the ancient aliens, the People Before, or whoever the locals thought. Cooper thought it was a remnant tech from Shining Light’s people, but while the current masters of the Solar System could make it work, and copy it, none of them understood how it did what it did.
That was neither here nor there. He hung the sword on his belt on the spacesuit, and opened the door to the hallway. Time to find out what was going on, help those he could, and find a superior officer to get orders so he knew what to do as he was still a “move about and assist as needed” sailor instead of having an assigned station. (They did it to give him a wide variety of experiences. Once he got a few more levels in Sailor, they’d give him a fixed station.)
A dazed looking Plutonian, not the first mate Toko, stumbled past him, gasping for breath. Cooper tried to get the brown, bulbous manling to come with him, but the being’s eyes were panicked as he gasped for breath. He was stronger than Cooper, and so, regretfully, Cooper stabbed him with his Sword, praying that the stupor effect would work this time. It did, and the Plutonian sagged without taking physical damage.
Cooper dragged him easily while pushing off from a wall back into his own room. In there he threw a helmet on the crewman and sealed it around the shoulders, then activated the airgen. This would keep the fellow sailor alive unless the temperature got really low.
Cooper put his glass helmet face up against the manling’s, and yelled.
The Plutionian stared up at him.
“You’re injured! Stay here!”
The Plutonian roused himself from the stupor enough to nod, and sheathing the Sword, Cooper went looking for trouble.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
