Slave World Read Free Page A

Captain; it was the best I could do.”
    “What model is it?”
    “A Pencore 3B.”
    I winced, throwing my head back, closing my eyes. Why me? No wonder he got it so cheap. Pencore had discontinued that model years ago, and for good reason. It had a high-end brain core, more than adequate to handle the ship, but the 3Bs’ had an unexplained propensity to develop quirky, off the wall personalities no matter how many times you wiped their memory, and set their personality blocks to the lowest setting.
    “We don’t ‘ave time to find another one, so we’ll just has to deal with him as best we can.” My life-long nemesis, in the form of a thick, grammar mutilating Southern accent, started to make its reemergence. That always seemed to happen whenever I got overly flustered, or was completely exhausted. I happened to be suffering from both of those conditions at the moment. “Why don’tcha start the pre-launch checks, while I get’s things closed up?”
    “Yes, Captain.”
    I can honestly say that the only good thing to come out of my maintenance layover on Darien IV was that I’d picked up an unexpected contract for the Mandolin Cartel. It was a big money slave and weapons haul this time, unlike the pithily ones I’d managed to scrounge up recently. The drawback was, I had to make the cargo pick up on Orvus Prime first, and I loathed making a pick up on any Federation planet. It was still considered a level-three colony world, but that didn’t mean it was even close to being safe for me. The Star Marshals were always on the prowl in hopes of catching one of the Cartels red-handed for a change, and since I happened to work for them more often than not, that made me a prime target on their hit list. The warrant currently out for my arrest meant a lifelong stay on a penal colony several times over, if not worse, for some of the crap I’ve pulled over the years.
    A ground-based sting operation was only the start of my concerns, because I still had the gauntlet of Federation picket ships that circled Darien like a pack of wolves to consider, first. If that wasn’t bad enough, I was going to have to brave another picket line of satellite surveillance drones before landing on Orvus Prime, and then make it back out again undetected. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a milk run this time? Yeah right, nothing was ever easy for me. I’ve been living by the seat of my pants, hedging on borrowed time for most of my life already, so why should things be different for me now?
    I paused after stowing my scattered array of tools in the recessed compartment beside the maintenance hatch, wiping my grubby hands on the rump of my flight suit, looking out over the massive expanse of my patchwork ship from above. She was a two-hundred-year-old, mostly reliable class-2 light-bulk freighter that was nearing the limit how many band-aids I could slap on, and still keep her going. The ‘Space Tramp’ was on her last leg, but then again, I’ve been saying that from the moment I’d first laid eyes on her. It didn’t matter if she was a piece of junk though, because she was my piece of junk.
    “Just one more haul baby girl, and then maybe I can afford to get’cha ya fixed up the way you deserve,” I sighed lovingly, bending down to pat the scored and pot-marked metal of her hull. Maybe if I’d known this would be the last time I’d see the Tramp like this, I would have come up with something a little more meaningful to say.
     
    ***
     
    The dim glow of Darien IV’s upper stratosphere began to fade from the cockpit view screen, giving way to the inky blackness of space. I felt a bump, almost like a hiccup, pass through the Tramp’s hull, when I transferred from atmospheric to standard star-drive. Damn, I thought I fixed that.
    John, in all his synthetic glory, sat next to me in the cramped two-seater cockpit. His vaguely life-like eyes, which never came into focus, were locked on the sensor display waiting for any sign that our planetary