Holterman system Merchant Ship Constancy, outbound from Korovin system
“Cargo’s stowed, Captain. Just doing my final walk around now.”
The flat, uninterested voice of the Constancy’s first officer dragged Captain Curtis Karangi away from a review of the options he’d have if the Feds discovered the containers the Constancy had just loaded. Karangi was not a happy man; it had been a depressing exercise. The plain fact was that if the Feds did intercept his ship, being neurowiped was probably the best offer he was going to get.
Karangi picked up the old-fashioned hand mike. “Captain, roger. We’ll get under way shortly.”
“Righto,” the first officer replied dismissively.
“Righto! Righto! I’ll give you righto, you disrespectful son of a bitch,” Karangi muttered as he smashed the mike back into its cradle.
Karangi sighed despairingly as he patted the stun pistol that never, ever left his hip. If the damn Feds didn’t get him, his crew probably would, every last one of them an insubordinate, money-grubbing ratbag. And if his crew didn’t get him, Constancy would. The bloody ship was clapped out, a death trap, her every transit through pinchspace a roll of life’s dice. But he was trapped. He owed money-mountains of money-to a Hammer-backed finance company, and until it was paid off, he would do exactly what they wanted him to do.
Goddamn the Hammers. A more evil bunch of people he hoped never to meet. If it were up to him, he’d have nuked them all to hell years earlier. After all the grief the Hammers had dished out over the years, why the Feds hadn’t done just that he would never understand. Anyway, it mattered not-they had him by the balls, so if they wanted him to captain a blockade runner, that was exactly what he was going to do. Besides, they might be complete assholes, but they paid their blockade runners handsomely. He would keep slipping contraband past the Feds and into Hammer space-something he fancied he was very good at-until he had repaid every cent he owed.
Well, Karangi consoled himself. Look on the bright side. Two more runs would see his debt paid off in full, with interest. Then, finally, he would be off the hook, and the Hammers could go screw themselves.
Five decks below the bridge, Constancy’s first officer gave the brilliantly lit cargo bay a last look-see. Satisfied that all was as it should be, he slipped behind a wall of contraband containers. Safely out of sight of the ship’s surveillance holocams, he concentrated on the task at hand. He would not get another chance; if he wasn’t on the bridge for Constancy’s departure out of the Korovin system, Captain Karangi would want to know where he had been and what he had been up to.
It was the work of moments to connect a thin cable into the ship’s emergency data network. Impatiently, the first officer waited as the covert access routines loaded into his neuronics burrowed their way through the layers of security that protected Constancy’s master AI. Finally, he was in. Disguised as a diagnostic logging subroutine, he downloaded the ship’s navigation plan buried in a mass of other ship data. Moments after that, the entire plan-now an anonymous collection of heavily encrypted data packets-was on its way via the ship’s communications hub down to Korovin’s planetary net.
Where the data packets had gone, the first officer did not know, nor did he much care. He would be well paid for what amounted to less than a couple of minutes’ work, and that was all he cared about.
With a final check to make sure nobody else was around, he was on his way up to the bridge.
At 17:23 Universal Time, the massive bulk of Constancy began to accelerate slowly away from Korovin planet. According to the flight plan lodged with Korovin nearspace control, its destination was the obscure planet of al-Harrani, 425 light-years distant.