Jupiter's Glory Book 3: The Obsidian Slavers Page 2

  “Your main problem,” he said while he finished the final checks, “is you need to keep these engines overhauled. When was the last time you got the Obsidian a proper servicing?”

  “You mean in a proper workshop where we leave the ship in capable hands for a few days?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Never, as far as I’m aware. Captain Gardener surrounds himself with people who do their best work on the wing, as it were. That includes our engineers.”

  “Well your engineers forgot about the water coolant.”

  “Our engineers all came down with the flu.”

  “What, all of them?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing sinister. We’re not carrying a sixth-generation strain of bubonic plague or anything. It’s just on a ship like this, where all the air’s recycled, when one person comes down with an illness, all their co-workers tend to get it as well. It can put entire sections out: well, did put an entire section out.”

  “Wraith’s a doctor. He could take a look at them for you.”

  “You mean Garfield?”

  Hawthorn silently cursed himself for slipping up like that. He had become so enthralled by his work that he had clean forgotten that telling people their real names could get them all killed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rayne said, “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Appreciated,” Hawthorn said, getting back to his feet. His clothes were already grimy – it was amazing how even a small amount of mechanical work tended to get him dirty. That too came from concentrating too much on the work and not paying any attention to anything going on around him.

  He offered her a small smile, but the truth was he was too annoyed to actually mean it. “There’s a flu outbreak,” he told Wraith. “Why don’t you see what you can do to help while I fix the last two engines?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “A doctor afraid of a little infection?”

  “I’m sure they have their own doctors here. I’d prefer to stay with you.”

  Hawthorn did not argue. Whatever Wraith’s problem was, perhaps he would share it with him once they got back home.

  He checked the other two engines, each located in a separate room, and found the problem was the same in both of them. He was working on the final one when the captain returned with Wraith’s drink.

  “I don’t suppose you need a job,” the captain asked.

  Hawthorn laughed. “You don’t know how tempting that is: to go back to doing this sort of thing on a big ship every day. But I can’t right now. I have some stuff to sort out.”

  “Well, if you ever change your mind, look us up.”

  “Sure, I’ll do that.” Hawthorn surprised himself by actually meaning it.

  Captain Gardener and Rayne took them back to the hangar, chatting all the way about the various checks they should have been doing. Hawthorn did not mind at all, for it was rare that he managed to talk about his greatest passion in life and the information was gratefully accepted.

  “Here we are, then,” Rayne said, surprising Hawthorn since he had not realised they had already walked all the way back to their shuttle. “Thanks for all your help, sir.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Hawthorn said.

  “We really should pay you, at least,” Captain Gardener said. “I mean, this is your trade, yes? You should be compensated.”

  Hawthorn had not been paid for anything in quite some time and the prospect of having some disposable cash sounded good to him.

  “We’re fine, thanks,” Wraith said. “My friend here loves doing these odd jobs out of the goodness of his heart. It’s all I can do sometimes to stop him taking apart our shuttle and putting it back together again while we’re in it.”

  “Then you have my eternal gratitude,” Gardener said, extending his hand. Hawthorn shook it but noted Wraith was already heading back into the shuttle by this point. “Is your friend all right?” the captain asked.

  “Maybe it was the mention of flu. I may be an engineer who loves engines, but I guess doctors just don’t like illnesses.”

  Hawthorn said his goodbyes and climbed back into his shuttle. Wraith was already strapped in and looking anxious to leave. Standing on the hangar deck, Gardener gave them both a tip of an invisible hat, while Rayne waved gleefully. Hawthorn found himself waving right back before taking their shuttle backwards and once more into the blackness of space. He watched as the Obsidian returned to blocking out the starlight. Then, abruptly, fire flared in several areas of the massive craft as each engine came on and slowly the vessel turned and departed.

  “All right,” Hawthorn said, “we’re alone. What is your problem? You wouldn’t let me take their money, you wouldn’t shake their hands, you wouldn’t tend to their sick. You don’t think they had sick?”

  “I think they had sick.”

  “Then what?”

  “I didn’t mention it before because I knew you’d have done something stupid. Then they would have blasted us out of the sky, working engines or no working engines.”

  “You’re saying I shouldn’t have helped repair their ship? They were dead in the water.”

  “Maybe they deserve to be.”

  “Because they miss their checks due to the deadlines they have to meet?”

  “Because if you knew who they were, you’d consider them horrific people, Gordon.”

  Hawthorn thought back to the friendly and grateful Captain Gardener and the eager and excitable Carla Rayne. He could not reconcile his observations with Wraith’s accusation. “What are you talking about, Wraith?”

  “You never asked what their cargo was, for which I’m entirely grateful.”

  “Their cargo? Who cares what their cargo was?”

  “The cargo cares.”

  Hawthorn felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Wraith? What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Their cargo was people, Gordon; and from the size of the Obsidian’s transport section I’d say it was a whole lot of them.”

  “People?”

  “The Obsidian is a slaver vessel. Your good friends Steve and Carla are slavers.”

  Hawthorn looked back out the window to where the Obsidian could still be seen moving away, its engines burning brightly in the distance. His fantastic mood had vanished in a single instant as he realised at last the terrible thing he had done.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “The shuttle runs like a dream,” Hawthorn said as he stepped back onto the command deck of Jupiter’s Glory. He and Wraith had left the shuttle in the Glory’s hangar and from there had gone straight to the command deck so they could tell Arowana all about their trip. He had spent the entire return journey trying to work out how he could appear comfortable and calm enough to fool Arowana, but as he spoke those words he could see he wasn’t fooling her for a moment.

  Iris Arowana was never a woman to lie to. Aged in her late twenties, Arowana was a former security guard and still always dressed in a black uniform as though she had never given up her job to go on the run with Hawthorn. Her most annoying trait was not that she could always tell when Hawthorn was lying but that she was always right. Hawthorn did not like women at the best of times, but one who was right all the time should have been someone he hated. On some level he supposed he did hate her; but he was also in love with her, which told him if they ever did something stupid like get married it would not be long before divorce number two loomed on the horizon for him.

  Presently Arowana was staring at him, perhaps giving him an opportunity to come clean. When Hawthorn responded with nothing more than a charming smile, she gave up and turned back to her instruments.

  Exchanging a look with Wraith, Hawthorn continued farther onto the command deck. Jupiter’s Glory was a large vessel, although far from the size of the Obsidian. The command deck was formed of a spacious area filled with far too many consoles and seats at which no one ever sat. Slightly raised from the circular consoles sitting before the main windows, Arowana sat at an are
a which pretty much replicated the format of the consoles below, but with fewer chairs. Ideally they would have more crewmembers, but it was entirely possible to pilot the Glory from that single area. Of course, if they ever went into battle, they wouldn’t last long at all because they simply did not have enough bums for the seats.

  Hawthorn stopped beside Arowana’s console and took a deep breath as he stared out into space. “Nice night.”

  “It’s space: it’s always night.”

  “Anyone need me for anything?” Wraith asked. “Only, I’d like to get out of here before the shouting starts.”

  “There’s not going to be any shouting,” Hawthorn said defensively.

  “What have you done?” Arowana asked with a sigh.

  “Nothing. See what you’ve done, Wraith?”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything.”

  “Gordon,” Arowana said in that annoying tone one might use on a five-year-old, “what have you done?”

  “Nothing. Just stopped to help some people, that’s all.”

  “Help them how?”

  “They had engine problems. I’m a mechanic, I fixed them. Here, smell me if you don’t believe me.”

  “I’m not going to smell you.”

  “No, seriously, I have engine oil all over my clothes. Smell me.”

  “Get your grubby shirt away from me.”

  Hawthorn backed off, satisfied that he had won the argument, all without either of them shouting. He cast a triumphant glare at Wraith, which unfortunately Arowana caught.

  She adopted a sweet smile, which to Hawthorn’s experience always meant trouble. “What was the name of the vessel you stopped to help, Gordon?”

  She had him and he knew it. If he lied, she would know it. If he told the truth, she would do that thing she did and know everything in an instant. His only chance was in hoping there were two vessels called Obsidian in the Jupiter system. Then another idea struck him. “I didn’t ask,” he said.

  “What type of engines were they?”

  Damn, he thought, she’d outmanoeuvred him again. Being a mechanic, he would be able to figure out the type of vessel from the specifications of the engines. “Iris, much as I love that you’re taking an interest in my life at last, we should talk about the shuttle. Beth’s done a fantastic job. I should go congratulate her.”

  “It’s called the Bunnyhop Express,” Wraith supplied.

  “It’s not called the Bunnyhop Express.”

  “Too late,” Wraith said. “We told the Obsidian it was.”

  Hawthorn half expected he had done that on purpose.

  With a satisfied smirk, Arowana sat back in her chair and her eyes hazed over while she concentrated. Hawthorn looked away. He hated seeing her do this, and could not believe she even did it at all considering she herself hated it so much. It was why they were on the run, why they had ended up taking Jupiter’s Glory and pretending they were dead. Both Arowana and Hawthorn had until recently worked for a security firm named Securitarn. The firm had conducted illegal experiments on Arowana and others, implanting huge databases into their brains. Arowana was the only one to have survived and now Securitarn wanted their property back. They had to keep moving, keep using aliases, and all the while Arowana had the most annoying thing any woman could ever possess – complete knowledge of pretty much everything.

  It did not help their relationship at all whenever she accessed that database.

  Her face fell as she came across the Obsidian in her brain.

  “It’s from Io. Gordon, it’s a pirate vessel.”

  Hawthorn rubbed the back of his head. “A pirate vessel? Really?”

  Her face hardened. “What. Have. You. Done?”

  “I didn’t know, all right? They were in trouble and I helped them out. It was only afterwards that beardy over here told me they were slavers. They seemed like such pleasant people.” If he was going to get blamed for this, he was at least going to take Wraith down with him.

  Wraith shrugged overdramatically. “We may not agree with it, but it’s not as though it’s illegal or anything. Just get over it and move on. We have our own problems to be worrying about.”

  “What do you mean it’s not illegal?” Hawthorn demanded. “It’s slavery, of course it’s illegal.”

  “Actually,” Arowana said icily, “it’s not.”

  “It’s not? Since when?”

  “Since about a hundred years ago.”

  Hawthorn was thoroughly confused but felt whatever Arowana knew about this, it wasn’t coming from her augmented brain. “Talk to me, Iris.”

  “There have always been arguments,” she said, “about drugs and prostitution. They’re going to happen anyway, so why not legalise them? Getting prostitutes off the streets and into brothels makes the workers safer; getting drugs from reputable sources decreases the amount of rat poison in them. Also, the government can take a cut in taxes, which is a huge cut considering how much money prostitution and the drugs trade bring in.”

  “We’re not talking about that, though,” Hawthorn said, annoyed that her superior knowledge often made her go off on tangents. “Slavery was abolished back on Earth, back before our ancestors left to colonise the solar system, back before there even was a Jupiter system.”

  “True. But Io’s always had a slavery problem. The Jupiter system is, of course, formed of more worlds than any other, because Jupiter has more natural moons. Most of those moons are small, with manageable populations and easily enforceable laws. But Jupiter itself, being a gas giant, is uninhabitable, so the greatest hubs of our system’s population are spread over its four largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The Galilean moons. With four different moons each claiming to be the most prominent body in the Jupiter system and with each of those four moons split into several countries … well, it means there are a lot of borders being crossed, and a lot of different societal ideas.”

  “Slavery?” Hawthorn reminded her.

  “Have you ever been to Io, Gordon?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ever been to Malkavia?”

  Hawthorn thought a moment. “The name’s vaguely familiar.”

  “It’s a country on southern Io. It’s not a massive country, but it has a lot of impact on the rest of the world. Kind of like the UK back on Earth. Basically, there was so much slavery in Malkavia that eventually the government passed a decree that it would be legalised. It hit the local news, caused something of a scandal. All the governments of Io got together to discuss it, but outside of Io I don’t suppose it impacted much. The result was that no one could tell Malkavia how to run itself but a lot of countries refused to do business with it any more. Within a decade they’d all backed down, because Malkavia is Io’s biggest domestic exporter of sugar and wheat.”

  “That’s what they need the slaves for, I take it,” Hawthorn said.

  “That’s how it began, yes. A slave work force doesn’t need paying as much and they have no rights, no holidays or anything like that. Nor does the government pay them for retirement. It means the prices of sugar and wheat could stay low when exported.”

  “Which is why the rest of Io ended up being fine with it.”

  “Precisely. Now, since slavery’s legal in Malkavia, slaves are kept both for the fields and the home. It’s second nature to them now, so much so that we can’t really consider the average Malkavian a bad person purely for owning one. Unless you’re going to condemn every ancient Roman while you’re at it.”

  “And the slave ship?” Hawthorn asked.

  “Malkavia isn’t allowed to export slaves, nor is it allowed to import them by force. But they developed ways of circumventing that law. If someone offers themselves up as a slave, Malkavians are allowed to fetch them, harvest them if you will.”

  “Why would anyone want to be a slave?”

  “Some people have no other choice. Maybe their lives have been destroyed by war, maybe there were too many people in their families. Maybe parents are so poor they’re se
lling their children to the slavers. I guess some people volunteer just to get away. Slaves have no rights, but they’re not badly treated. They’re given a roof over their heads, enough food and water to be happy and some freedom of movement at least. I don’t suppose it’s such a bad life.”

  Hawthorn could tell she was reading some article or other from her database, because he knew she did not believe what she was herself saying.

  “If I knew they were slavers,” he said, “I wouldn’t have helped them.”

  “Then they would have died,” Wraith said. “By the time they got help, a lot of those slaves would have died of starvation. You did a good thing by saving their lives.”

  “Now we have to grant them their freedom,” Arowana said.

  “Whoa, no,” Wraith said. “No, no, no. You said yourself, they’re not doing anything illegal. Besides, if we freed all those slaves, what would we do with them?”

  “Crew our ship? There are six of us, Wraith. Six of us to man this entire ship.”

  “Talk with her,” Wraith said to Hawthorn. “Say something, man.”

  “I don’t like slavers,” Hawthorn said. “I don’t even like the idea of slavers, but Wraith may be right. What would we do with them even if we freed them?”

  “I don’t have all the answers,” Arowana said through gritted teeth, clearly wishing she did. “But I know what’s right and I know what’s wrong. And we have this Carpoan sword-ship, the most fearsome form of battleship ever created, so we might as well do something with it.”

  “And if we do,” Hawthorn said, “if we start doing too much with it, we’ll attract Securitarn’s attention and they’ll come for you.”

  “Securitarn don’t even know we have a sword-ship. No one does.”

  “And we need to keep it that way.”

  Arowana seethed and Hawthorn felt bad already. “You never agree with me,” she said. “You never stand by me when I believe in something.”

  “I believe in it too, Iris. But by rescuing those slaves – most of whom don’t even want to be rescued – I could be surrendering you to the enemy. And I won’t do that. If that’s not standing by you, then fine. But I won’t trade you for even a million slaves.”