Kestrel Class Read online

  Augustus picked up a rusty looking container from the bench behind where he sat. There was water inside. Ben wasn’t sure how contaminated it was, but it didn’t look clean as the old man poured it into the filter.

  “If this takes more than a minute, it’s worthless,” Augustus said.

  “My gear always works, Augustus. You know that.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” the old merchant said. “I can get a dozen of these at the big market for my coupler.”

  Ben wanted to laugh, but he knew Augustus was prideful. If he insulted the older merchant, it would make reaching a deal more difficult. Augustus was lying, of course, and inflating the value of his merchandise. It was a standard negotiating tactic, but Ben wasn’t about to let him get away with it. The big market was a week’s walk from the Boneyard, near the district headquarters building. August rarely made the trip, preferring to pedal his goods where he had less competition.

  “Don’t be daft,” he said. “I know the value of my gear. And this isn’t the big market. My filter for your coupler is a fair deal.”

  “Hardly,” Augustus said. “Working couplers are rare tech. You won’t find another in the Boneyard.”

  “And you won’t find another buyer here either,” Ben replied. “My guess is you can move the water filter today.”

  “Don’t try to tell me my business, boy.”

  “Fine,” Ben said. “I’ll find another coupler.”

  “Hardly. Victor doesn’t have one. I saw you talking to him. So you know I’m right. These junk dealers wouldn’t know a working coupler from a sanitation converter.”

  “So let’s trade,” Ben urged the merchant.

  “One water filter isn’t enough,” Augustus declared. “Now stop wasting my time.”

  “You’re insane,” Ben said.

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I have the coupler, and if you want it you need more than this.”

  He handed the filter back to Ben, who removed the water reservoir and handed it to Magnum. The big man sniffed the water, took a small sip, then chugged the rest.

  “I told you it works,” Ben said.

  “It isn’t enough,” Augustus insisted.

  “Fine, but you’re putting me in a bad situation here,” Ben said, trying to sound desperate and not just frustrated. “I have another, but it’s my personal filter. I can give you the battery from it. That’s an emergency filter with two batteries for your coupler. Anyone knows that’s more than fair.”

  “Hardly,” sniffed Augustus. “What would I do with a spare battery?”

  “You said earlier that a filter is worthless without one. I’m offering you two.”

  “I want both filters,” the merchant insisted.

  “That’s insane,” Ben said. “Let me see your coupler. I doubt it even works.”

  August reached under the counter, his eyes never leaving Ben’s steady gaze. His hands returned with a simple looking cylinder with electromagnetic coils on either end.

  “May I?” Ben asked, holding out his hand.

  “Let me see the second filter,” Augustus said.

  Ben pulled his last filter from the interior pocket of his coat and set it on the edge of the merchant’s counter. Augustus nodded, and Ben picked up the coupler. It looked to be in good working order, but there was no way to test it. He would have to take it back to the ship, install it in the hydro-generator, and power the system on to see if it could actually combine hydrogen and oxygen into water molecules. He checked the wiring. Each coil was tightly wrapped with hundreds of threads of copper. Nothing looked frayed.

  “Okay, I’ll take it,” Ben said.

  Augustus had already taken the second filter and looked it over. It was in working order, but the reservoir was dented in a few places, and the battery housing was scuffed.

  “This is junk,” the merchant grumbled.

  “It works just fine,” Ben replied.

  “It’s not up to my standards.”

  Ben wanted to laugh. He knew the old merchant didn’t have standards. He would trade away his children if he liked the deal.

  “It’s all I have,” Ben said.

  “Your friend has protein bricks. Give me three of them and you’ve got a deal.”

  Anger boiled up in Ben, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he turned toward Magnum and led the larger man several feet away from the old merchant’s booth. Magnum looked at Ben with uncertainty in his eyes.

  “Look, I know you’re hungry. And I really have no right to ask for those protein bricks, but I need them,” Ben said.

  Magnum held the bars of simple food out to him. There was no hesitation, and Ben could sense the trust the larger man had in him. A trust that was unearned and in many ways unwise. They didn’t really know each other. The only thing Ben had done for Magnum was trade for food so that the bigger man might eat. And that was only after Magnum had saved Ben’s life.

  “I have more protein bricks,” Ben said, taking the three he needed from Magnum. “I’ll repay as soon as we get out of here.”

  “Okay,” Magnum said with a crooked smile.

  “Okay,” Ben replied. “Thanks.”

  He turned back to the booth and set the protein bricks on the counter. “It’s a deal.”

  Chapter 6

  Kim was in the air and nothing else mattered. Not the fact that she didn’t have a permanent home or a future, or even enough credits to keep her fed until her next race. All that mattered was the air currents keeping her aloft and the winding canyon she was racing through.

  Kite racing was difficult and dangerous. The air currents in the slot canyons were strong enough to keep her aloft for miles at a time, but just getting to the finish line before she landed was only half the challenge. Speed was what she needed. Speed meant keeping her kite in the heart of the wind, which often swirled dangerously close to the canyon walls. If she wasn’t careful, the wind that hurled her through the air could slam her into the stone walls of the canyon with bone-shattering force.

  She hung twenty feet below her kite in a simple body harness. Lines from her arms and legs controlled the angle of the kite, which in turn pulled her along and created the perfect amount of drag to keep the kite stable. It was the cheapest way to get into the air. Kites were relatively easy to construct. The silk skins could be recycled, patched, mended, and reused. The aluminum frames were easy enough to fabricate if one was willing to spend a little time in the salvage yards. In Kim’s mind, it was the simplest form of piloting, but it got her into the air, which was all she cared about.

  Kim lived to fly. Every hour not spent in the air was spent daydreaming about flying various types of craft. Some were simple transports, others were elite military ships. She wanted to fly them all. She wanted to rise to the very threshold of atmospheric flight, then break through into outer space. Someday, she promised herself, she would find a way to get off the ground permanently and show the Royal Imperium that they were fools not to take her into their precious fleet.

  Of course, she still dreamed of finding a way to make it into the fleet. If she could get an opportunity to take the entrance exam, she was certain she would be admitted. And once she was in, she would be the best of the best. Nothing would be denied her if only she could find a way in.

  Her kite was caught in a thermal updraft, which shot her upward and sent her body flying past the kite. Below her, two other pilots shot ahead in the race. Frustration colored her vision red, but she knew she couldn’t panic. Nor could she force her kite back into order. She had to let momentum run its course. If she wasn’t careful, the kite would slam into her and she would fall to her death. And if she pushed the kite forward too soon, her lines would go slack as she neared the kite, making it impossible to steer. The resulting jolt when she dropped would send her plummeting and cost her even more time in the race.

  Time was the most important factor in kite racing. She had almost no time to think and even less time for mistakes. Still, she had to wait, had to give
the kite the precious few seconds it needed to right itself before she jumped back into the flow of the race. For a moment, she was weightless as her upward momentum stopped and the kite flipped back in front of her. In that fraction of a second, she could fully imagine herself in an Imperium Fleet fast-attack vessel, drifting through space.

  Just as suddenly as the thermal updraft had flipped her upward, she was caught by a sudden gust of wind that sent her flying forward again. She had to tug hard on her left handline to keep from slamming into the canyon wall, and as she slewed around the bend in the canyon, she caught sight of the two flyers who had shot ahead of her. They were close, and close in kite racing was dangerous.

  If she got too close to another flyer, they could get tangled in one another’s lines. Each kite caught the wind, which propelled it forward, but the wide silk sails created a void directly behind them. If Kim got too close to the other flyers, they would drop toward the ground or suddenly lose speed and cause a collision. Kim had to decide if she would fly higher or lower than a person in front of her. Going around to the side was difficult and dangerous, since the wind was strongest in certain channels and the canyons often narrowed without warning. Two flyers running side by side would almost certainly crash.

  Kim was already higher than the leaders, so she stayed elevated. The winds were strongest near the top of the canyons, but much more dangerous. They could rip a kite to shreds, snap a line, or gust so hard that the kite would spin out of control. The results were the same, a dead pilot. And while her life seemed desperately unfair at times, she didn’t want to die. She wanted to win.

  The wind pushed her forward, running one way, then another, with no way to predict what it might do. Kim’s greatest strength lay in her ability to change with the wind. She let it guide her, and it almost never failed to pay off.

  The second-place pilot was too conservative to hold his position. Kim shot over him easily enough, but the leader was going for broke. As Kim drifted down into the canyon, she was slightly above the leader, but several hundred feet behind him. The race was nearly over. The canyon was opening up. The towering walls grew farther apart and there was a series of flags in the distance marking the finishing line.

  Second place was respectable in a kite race, but it brought no money, no glory, and no satisfaction to Kim. She caught a stronger current and edged closer to the leader, but there wasn’t enough time to overtake him.

  Kim started to curse her bad luck. She had been in the lead the entire race until the updraft caught her off guard. But before she voiced her frustrations, a dangerous crosswind pushed her toward the canyon wall. It took all her strength and coordination to pay off the crosswind from her kite’s sail, adjust her momentum, and stay off the wall. Her body swung toward the rocky cliffside as her kite adjusted to the wind and moved back toward the center of the canyon. She was close enough to see the strata in the rock—hard, unyielding, just waiting to shatter her bones and peel the flesh from her body.

  The leader wasn’t as lucky as Kim. He tried to adjust his kite, but corrected too late. His body was flung into the wall below her. She saw him crash into the rock. It would have been a glancing blow, perhaps nothing more than a bad abrasion, but the pilot’s body spun, tangling his lines and sending his kite plummeting down toward the canyon floor.

  Fortunately, Kim didn’t see the fatal crash. She shot ahead, racing toward the finish line. The third-place flyer was back in second and pushing hard to overtake Kim, but she held onto the lead and won the race. Exhilaration mingled with fear. Kim hated to see a flyer go down, even if it resulted in her winning the race. She felt lucky just to be alive as she glided down. The canyons emptied over a large field that littered with downed ships from the war. It wasn’t as junky as the vast salvage yards where the piles of wreckage were sometimes seventy or eighty feet deep, but it was enough to remind her again that the end for most pilots wasn’t pretty. She circled, descending slowly. There was victory waiting for her on the ground. She would be celebrated by the fortunate gamblers who had bet on her. Free food, drinks, a very narrow cut of the action, but it was nothing compared to the thrill of flying. She tried to let go of the terror of seeing the leader crash, but it lingered, spoiling her victory.

  Death, she knew, was waiting for just one mistake, and sooner or later she was bound to make it. When that day came, she hoped it ended fast.

  Chapter 7

  Ben would have welcomed Magnum back to the Echo even if he didn’t feel obligated to repay him. In the back of his mind, Ben had been thinking that the big man, who obviously had a talent for fighting and was a capable gunsmith, would be an asset to their crew. They still needed a pilot, of course, that was the most pressing need as long as the magnetic coupler he’d traded for actually worked.

  Ben knew that getting off the planet was really just the first step to successfully living a life off the grid the way he desired. Smuggling was a respectable trade, if not exactly legal, but certainly a way to keep flying. The Royal Imperium relied upon smugglers, whether they admitted to it or not. Smugglers did more to keep world populations thriving than anything the Fleet did. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, even if the Imperium officially forbade blockade runners and smuggling of any kind.

  They got back to the old Kestrel class space ship just before dark. Magnum followed Ben without question, like a stray puppy. Oddly enough, while Magnum acted as though Ben was taking care of him, it was the bigger man who had kept Ben from being robbed and probably held captive by the Scalpers. They slipped into the ship and Ben powered up the lantern.

  “Home sweet home,” Ben said to his new friend.

  Magnum looked around the ship in wonder. It wasn’t a new ship. The metal walls were a rusty red that blended into the shadows. Ben led the way forward.

  “This is the cargo bay. And the engineering section is down here. But we’re going upstairs. I’ll introduce you to Nance, then we can cook some dinner. How’s that sound?”

  “Good,” Magnum said. The word came out more like a grunt than true communication.

  Ben climbed the stairs and found Nancy on the bridge, working at her computer station right where he’d left her at dawn.

  “Nancy Josslyn, meet Magnum,” Ben said. “He saved me from some Scalpers at the Boneyard.”

  Nancy looked up at the big man with a mixture of fear and awe. She was small, and Magnum was large. Neither spoke, but both looked at one another and seemed to communicate without a word. After a minute of silence, Ben nodded.

  “Okay, so this is the bridge, obviously,” he said. “The galley is upstairs. Follow me.”

  Magnum followed without a word, and before Ben reached the stairs he heard Nance’s fingers tapping away on the old-fashioned keyboard.

  “Crew lounge is over there,” Ben continued his tour. “Sick bay is on the opposite side. Most of the medical components aren’t functional yet, but that’s a secondary priority at the moment.”

  They made their way to the upper level. Most of the observation windows were covered with junk, but there were a couple of open places. The stars were beginning to shimmer overhead, and Magnum looked up and smiled.

  “Not too bad, huh?” Ben said as he cut open a protein brick. “I’ve got auxiliary power working, so we can test the ship’s systems. The computer is old but functioning, thanks to Nance. You like Chinese, I hope. This isn’t great, but it’s a whole lot better than raw protein.”

  Ben prepared their meal and poured three tall nugs of water. It had been a long time since he’s splurged on wine or even water flavors. There was a single can of soda stowed in the back of the galley storage bin, but he was saving that for their maiden voyage.

  Magnum ate ravenously and drank four mugs of water. Ben was surprised but figured it took more fuel to keep a big man like Magnum at full speed.

  “Look, I know we don’t know each other all that well,” Ben said when Magnum had finished eating. “And you may be looking to move on, but if you aren’t, you
could stay here. We could use someone like you.”

  “Stay here?” Magnum asked.

  “Well, hopefully we’re going to get her flying again soon,” Ben said. “I’ve got an idea for a pilot. All we need is to get some Zexum for the fusion drive and we’re in business. You ever think of getting off Torrent Four?”

  Magnum shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, I do,” Ben said. “This is the Modulus Echo, she’s a Kestrel class transport vessel. There are six guest cabins up here and four crew cabins on the main level. You could be our security officer. What do you say?”

  Magnum looked at Ben for a moment. It was impossible to tell what the big man was thinking, but Ben hoped he was considering the offer. He wasn’t even sure exactly how much Magnum really understood. The big man rarely spoke, but he seemed to understand when Ben told him things.

  “I’ll stay,” Magnum said.

  “Great,” Ben replied happily. “I’ll show you to your quarters.”

  The crew cabins were larger than the guest rooms. Ben had a workbench, a drafting table, and some furniture in his room. Each of the crew had their own tiny bathroom, which utilized recycled water. Ben had been living in his cabin for several years, with Nance right next door in the starboard wing section of the ship’s main level. On the opposite side were two empty rooms, with nothing more than a bed in each. Ben showed Magnum one.

  “This can be your room,” Ben said. “The bed may be a bit small for you, but you can decorate it however you want. I know where we can pick up some furniture too. And I’ve got tools. We can build you a space to work on your weapons if you like.”

  “My space?”

  “That’s right,” Ben said. “We’ll fix it up just the way you want it. The blankets are old, but they’re clean. And you can change the security code if you want.”

  “I’ll stay,” Magnum said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Magnum.”

  Ben felt a sense of affection for the big man. For years he had been alone, and then for a long time, Nance was the only person Ben felt he could trust. He didn’t think of himself as a good judge of character. In most cases he was reserved, perhaps even a little protective around people. But there was something about Magnus that made Ben feel at ease. And there was even a sense of kinship with the big stranger. Perhaps it was because Magnum had saved his life, or maybe it was something more, Ben didn’t know, but he felt relieved that the big man was staying.