Keelic and the Space Pirates

Keelic and the Space Pirates

by

ALEXANDER EDLUND

The Keelic Travers Chronicles

Book 1

Keelic and the Space Pirates

Copyright © 2016 by Alexander Edlund

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express permission of the publisher. Thank you for respecting the rights of this author.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locales, and incidents are products of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual people, places or events is coincidental or fictionalized.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 — Who are you with, little boy?

Chapter 2 — When I think you are fit, we will go for a hike

Chapter 3 — Yes, we just did something wrong

Chapter 4 — What do you say, little Dreep?

Chapter 5 — Warm orange

Chapter 6 — The Gleaming Door

Chapter 7 — Is your dad Crew?

Chapter 8 — Want to take an orbit?

Chapter 9 — Thotti

Chapter 10 — The Death Cloud

Chapter 11 — Translight!

Chapter 12 — I am in command

About the Author

Chapter 1

Who are you with, little boy?

Floating weightless, Keelic looked out the porthole at the utter black beyond. The translight barrier blocked his view of the stars, his view of home and friends, now thousands of light-years away.

A siren cut through the room. Keelic twisted to look back at the console by his bed. The sound was piercing, louder than the last emergency drill. He touched the wall to turn around.

All passengers, ordered the Ship-Announcer, are to enter their bed, or the nearest safety pod. Immediately. Do not attempt to return to your quarters. Follow local guide lights and enter the indicated pod. All passengers—

The console lit with the image of his mother. Keelic, go to your bed.

Why?

So it can pod.

Another drill?

Mother went stern. Keelic.

He knew that tone, and pushed off from the wall. The bed’s force web caught him, then pushed him into the bedding. Was this a drill or something real? Were they being attacked? Had the translight engine malfunctioned? He opened his mouth to ask, but a new siren layered over the other, a twined harmony that demanded attention. This was no drill.

Commencing emergency deceleration, announced the Ship-Ann.

Keelic was thrust against the bed’s field as stars appeared in the porthole. He grinned. Deceleration from translight speed to standard flight in seconds! He didn’t know a transport could even do that. Only military vessels had engines for such maneuvers, or so he’d thought. Something seriously cold was happening.

The wall lights dimmed and the nominal-space engines engaged with a hum that roared. Keelic raised his head, listening. Not once in the twelve planetfalls since leaving home had the engines sounded like that. Stars streaked in the porthole. He felt the ship turn, and grabbed for the edges of the bed. He couldn’t believe it. You never felt inertia in normal space flight. The ship had to be maneuvering at near light speed if the stabilization field wasn’t able to compensate. Space outside the window burned white, and he shoved a hand up through the bed’s field to block the light. He glanced at the console to see his parents’ reaction.

Everything’s going to be all right, said his mother. She forced a smile and looked to the side.

Keelic’s father leaned into the image and said, It’s just the shield going up.

The shield! Keelic lowered his hand to squint into the light.

His mother said, We should pod the beds.

Turning to object, he found the image frozen. Crimson lettering blazed over his parents’ faces:

ALL NONESSENTIAL COMMUNICATIONS

AND POWER CONSUMPTION

TERMINATED

The image of his parents faded slowly.

Father?

Keelic reached for the console, but the panels were dark. A touch of fear fluttered through his excitement, and he settled back into the bed.

The white light of the shield streamed in through the porthole too bright to look at, casting harsh shadows. The hum of the engines thrummed in his chest. With a moment to think, understanding came fast—shield on, power conservation, and radical course changes could mean only one thing.

Battle.

Bearneb rebels? No, the Bear Nebula was now a long, long ways away.

The sirens cut out as the hum of the engines died. With a metallic ping, his bed began to recede into the wall. He touched off the tensile-web and shoved free. Momentum took him to the far wall, where he waited for the Ship-Ann to tell him to return. The bed rose back into place as light from the window faded.

Violent shudders rippled through the vessel as the nominal engines stuttered back online. Shield light returned from the window, though less bright. Keelic pushed back to the bedside console and tried to bring up a view screen, then an infobase, but its panels didn’t even beep in response. Giving up, he drifted in an agony of fear-laced curiosity.

What if this was a pirate attack? The life of a pirate was what he wanted. Freedom, your own ship, you could go anywhere you please, and have everything you want. He devoured every story he could find about Jaw Taka-ta-Kua, captain of the stolen warship Death Cloud, the last surviving Terra Corps super-dreadnought from the Galactic War. Jaw’s fleet raided whole star systems.

Keelic touched the magnetic-guide on his belt, and drifted over to the cabin door. It didn’t respond to his proximity. Locked? He touched its pad, and the door opened with a sigh. He put his head out and looked both ways down the dim corridor. All clear.

He grabbed an aftbound pull-me, but it didn’t move. He checked around once more, eyes lingering on the door to his parents’ quarters. With a heave, he went sailing toward the aft lounge, reveling in the forbidden free flight.

His trajectory was sending him at an angle into the wall. He tapped his mag-guide to correct, then assumed the aspect of a slant-winged proto-fighter, and started shooting each door as it passed by.

The lounge doors at the end of the corridor slid apart in time for him to flash past. As he sailed across the room, he looked ahead, saw where he was heading and how fast. Too late, he slapped Stop on his mag-guide. Gyring his arms, trying to rotate so he could land with his feet, only made him turn sideways and roll. With a small cry of despair, he slammed into the lounge’s main viewing screen.

Holding an aching shoulder, he looked around. Most of the safety pods in the room were closed, their oval doors gleaming in the pale light of the walls. He knew from safety drills that you couldn’t hear or see anything from inside a pod. The gaming tables were silent. Drink receptacles, game pieces, and other stuff floated idly with the air currents. No maintbots were active, though, to clean it up.

He mag’d over to the console set back from the immense screen where a comfortable chair was nestled into an arc of control panels. The chair gave the best view of the screen and was the perfect place to imagine you were captain of the ship, but he knew from experience that sitting in it prompted the Ship-Ann to ask what you wanted. Why hadn’t she told him to get into a pod? Ever since the bridge tour incident, and the time he’d found the maintenance access to the engine room, he could feel her sensors tracking his every move.

He quit wondering about the Ann, and maneuvered until he was horizontal above the console. What he really wanted was real-time exterior views. An ensign had shown him how to get ship stats, game screens, and display the scanner visuals when the transport slowed to sightsee, but the entire layout had changed. There were all kinds of ops and ship-tech, but no sensor views. Then he found something very important-looking.

This was too easy. Where was the Ship-Ann? It didn’t matter; he would never have another chance. He noticed he was drifting, and gripped the console against the pull as the ship changed course. He touched a pad labeled Bridge Emulation. It menu’d out, and after a quick review, he selected Tactical Overview. The console reorganized, and the lounge screen structured out in full-dimensional glory.

Two brightly shielded vessels were closing on Keelic’s passenger transport and her military escort, a large cruiser named the ADL Darklight.

The attacking ships opened fire with needles of energy that gouged arcs of gray across its shield. The Darklight returned fire with a staccato burst of coruscating lances.

Another ship, small and unshielded, leapt into the image and spat a streak of red at Keelic’s transport. A boom rocked the ship, and the console lunged, hammering him. He flew back, cartwheeling all the way to the ceiling, hitting it hard. As he rebounded, he managed to clutch a holdfast. Tears of pain flooded his eyes, and his head reeled with dizziness. He wished he had webbed himself into the console chair.

Onscreen, the shielded attackers were flanking the cruiser. The Darklight concentrated fire on one attacker then the other, forcing them back as she whirled end over end to bring fresh weapons to bear. The pirates’ maneuvers were boring in comparison, and their shields were taking a beating, but there were two of them.

The enhanced image flickered from view to view as different sets of sensors scanned the battle. Images split and merged as the battling ships maneuvered. Ruler-straight lines of energy connected the ships, flashing, shifting colors, and cycling on and off. Beams bleeding rainbows of light struck into empty space, and images onscreen vanished as observation probes died. Views color-shifted and warped, went to static, and then cleared. Scanner jamming and countermeasures! This was just like in the vids.

Full-spectrum scans revealed moon-sized engine signatures, and twisting wave patterns that linked and interfered with the engine waveforms. Keelic had never seen such images before, but he knew what they meant: warfare at the substratum level. The fight was moving fast, and his transport ship struggled to keep pace. Around him, the vessel groaned and creaked under the strain.

He was on that transport. All of this was happening out there. All around him. His sense of the battle expanded in three dimensions. A flurry of color brought his gaze back to the screen. Both attackers were closing on the Darklight, firing close-range particle cannons that flashed blue where they struck, leaving broad swaths of blackened shield. On both pirates, shield ports opened and streams of brilliant sparks poured out. The Darklight vectored to evade the storm of kinetic weapons, but there were too many, and black pocks spread across her flanks.

The third vessel, shieldless, flashed into view and fired on Keelic’s transport ship. The lights dimmed as enemy weapon fire cut streaks of black across the transport’s shield. High-band lasers, Keelic knew, invisible until they struck.

Cold, he said.

He’d seen that maneuver on vids. The ship was making strafing runs by dropping out of translight, firing, then accelerating away. It was hyper-dangerous, but the only way for old, shieldless vessels to fight with shielded ships.

The cruiser’s forward shield irised open and eight green streaks flashed out.

Torpedoes! screamed Keelic.

Each took a different vector, flowing outward in a cone, then streaking inward at the nearest enemy ship. Light burst from the pirate as its point defenses fired, and space around the ship flashed into expanding bubbles of white violence as torpedoes detonated. The vessel vanished among the expanding energy spheres, and its engine signature collapsed. The ship emerged intact from the maelstrom, shield so blackened that it was visible only where it occulted the stars beyond. A last torpedo, having taken a longer route, struck amidships, and the entire vessel vanished in a blinding burst.

The shieldless pirate flew into view and fired another red torpedo at Keelic’s transport. The ship groaned as she maneuvered under full power. Feeling himself falling from the ceiling, he hooked his feet under holdfasts. It felt like he weighed a ton, and something across the room failed with a crack. Grimacing in pain, he glanced at the screen and saw a red ball of plasma streaking toward his ship from six different angles.

In a desperate bid to dodge the torpedo, the transport’s engines roared deceleration, and Keelic was pressed hard against the wall. The maneuver failed. All light died, and Keelic was slammed free of the wall, reeling through darkness. This time he had the presence to touch on his mag-guide and curl into a ball. He struck something hard and caromed off in another direction.

The screen expanded back to life, the only light in the room. Rebounding from another wall, Keelic missed grabbing a handhold and coasted across the room, turning gracefully, twisting his head each rotation to look at the screen, getting dizzy until his mag-guide stopped his motion.

The cruiser was pursuing the last pirate. Both vessels spun to spread the effect over shields gone gray with ugly black wounds that didn’t fade. As the cruiser whirled, she released two green torpedoes from openings in her shield on the opposite side. The torpedoes arced in both directions around the cruiser. The enemy tried to go translight, but the cruiser’s engine signature was twined with the attacker’s, holding it in place. The torpedoes struck the pirate, and its shield buckled.

Beams from the cruiser scythed through the pirate’s exposed hull, carving rents with bright edges, from which flickering explosions spewed glowing material into space. The cruiser rounded on the burning carcass, slicing it into smaller and smaller pieces.

A space battle. He had been in a real space battle! It made the whole trip worthwhile. Tamarin would explode with envy. At the thought of his friend, homesickness carved a hollow darkness in Keelic’s middle. He didn’t simply miss home; he had lost it. His parents said they would never return to Pesfor.

They had suddenly said one day, We are moving! They were so happy to get off Pesfor 3. So happy to get away from everything he knew. Ermol is a beautiful planet, his father said. Unspoiled, if a little backward by Galactic standards. Whatever that meant. They said Keelic would see many new wonderful things. He would make new friends. But didn’t they know that he didn’t want new friends? He wanted the old ones. A tear floated from his eyelashes when he blinked, and he batted it angrily.

The captain of the escort cruiser was on the screen now, talking as sweat rolled down his face.

Turning his back on the screen, Keelic mag’d for the lounge door. When he was halfway there, the nominal engines surged for acceleration, then cut out, leaving a low harmonic. A rapid transition to translight. Were they being chased? Keelic found that he didn’t care anymore, and drifted back to his quarters.

As he reached his room, the all-safe sounded. Touching open the door, he dove for the bed, slipping into the tensile-web. His father appeared on the console.

You are all right? asked his father.

Yes I’m right...I’m fine.

Your mother wants you to come over.

Keelic touched off the bed, and pushed for the door. It opened and he sailed across the hall to his parents’ cabin. His mother, crying, hugged him tight, and filled the air with little droplets of tears, saying how happy she was that they were all alive, and what a good idea it had been to get a transport with cruiser escort, and how much she loved him and Father.

Keelic dutifully hugged her back, and took more comfort in her presence than he was willing to admit. His father patted him on the back.

A man’s voice announced, There will be a general address by the captain at thirteen hundred hours. All interested passengers are invited to attend in the fore and aft lounges. The Ship-Ann is temporarily out of service. If you have any immediate needs, please address them to your section’s steward. Thank you.

Keelic nodded to himself. So that was why the Ship-Ann hadn’t done anything to him.

His father was talking. Out of service? What does that mean? You can’t take an Ann out of service. Announcer matrices do not go offline.

Keelic didn’t want him to pursue this. It would be just like Father to help them fix the Announcer and find out about his excursion during the battle.

It’s okay, she’s not as nice as Anny, said Keelic.

That’s true, replied Mother. Anny is special. I know she really misses you.

At least they hadn’t left Anny behind.

Can I talk to her?

No, dear, Anny needs a house matrix. She’ll be waiting for us when we get there.

Can’t we load part of her? Just the—

No, said Father. Announcers don’t work like that. They need a whole matrix. The house is the body, and there is no sentience without a body. You should know this by now.

He did, but he also knew that there was sometimes a difference between what his parents said and what could really be done.

Can I go to the freefall?

His mother looked at Father. Her expression said, I really wish he wouldn’t.

He’s eleven, Father said. He needs to work out the excitement. Keelic, be back here at twelve thirty hours, exactly. Then we’ll all go listen to what the captain says.

After the real battle, then bounce-soaring around the empty freefall-gym trying to simulate it, Keelic found the captain’s speech an agony of boredom, full of long-winded reassurances meant to calm people who weren’t smart enough to know what a great thing they had experienced.

When the captain showed sequences of the battle, explaining in a limited way the tactics, and why the pirates failed, Keelic’s interest returned. The captain also mentioned that the Ship-Ann was being reinitialized because of battle damage, but refused to say more. A passenger asked why the transport hadn’t left the area. The captain explained that the way the attacking ships had forced them out of translight was a sure sign that the attackers had intended to board the transport. The only way to avoid being taken was to stay near their escort. As well, by remaining in the area, the transport aided the defense effort by coordinating sensor data, effectively doubling the escort cruiser’s sensor coverage.

Keelic felt good. He’d already figured that out.

After the captain’s talk, Keelic got some of the other children to join him in the freefall-gym to play Cruiser. They never seemed to get into it like he did, and soon tired of losing repeatedly to his tactics, so they switched to Free-Tag and Spin-the-Dunce until his parents called him to dinner.

*****

The next morning his father called him to the gyro-gym. Building strength for Ermol’s strong gravitation was Keelic’s least favorite activity onboard. He drifted into an acceleration room, pulled himself down in a huff, and buckled in. As the room matched speed with the spinning gym, he was pushed into the seat until he was sitting firmly in it. The door opened onto the clank of metal weights and the soft whir of gyrocycles.

Something caught his eye, and he looked up part way around the wheel-shaped room to see blonde hair, and lots of it. The young owner was on a treadmill, laughing with two other girls. They were all in 3-Dyed exercise outfits. Two had scenes of some vid playing over them, but the third’s was black until something moved across it. A ship? Yes, and the shape was unmistakable. It was the far-space probe Galahad.

A girl who knew about Galahad? Keelic knew more about the probe ships of the Pathfinders than anyone he knew. He stared at her, wondering what to do. In three months of exploring the ship, he was sure he’d never seen her. His mother called to him from the other direction. He cringed. One of the girls looked at his parents, then at him, and then ignored him, laughing at something another girl said.

His parents began him on the first machine.

I know how to do it, he snapped.

His mother scolded, Do not speak to me in that tone.

He mumbled an apology, glanced at the girls to see if they had heard, and did his sets in record time. He jumped to the next machine and started in, watching the trio as they finished warming up on the treadmills and began working out along the curved wall. He spent extra time at the bench press so he could watch them.

He ended his workout as they did, and entered a deceleration chamber with them. The one with blonde hair looked directly at him, and he suffered under her frank gaze until she looked away.