In A Starship's Wake

Chapter 30: Grateful Assembly

Tyrone was groggy all through dinner aboard White Onyx Devastator. Luckily nobody really noticed, because everyone there was too preoccupied with eating. The fact that any or all of them might not have been here to eat this meal still weighed heavily on everyone. Even for the crew of the warship, death had been a strong possibility.

Lucid though had mostly returned by the time the crews started talking, and there was plenty to discuss. Not one of the three groups really had the complete story, and all were eager to hear what had happened aboard the other ships.

Half the crew of Bolinscar Red Comet were in the mess hall, including Captain Freidrich. The rest were in the warship's infirmary, waiting for the border guard prison transport to arrive. It would ferry them to better medical facilities on its way to deliver the pirates.

The captain told the story of being forced out of Faster Than Light travel. At first they thought it was some kind of malfunction, and by the time they recognized they were under attack the long range communication system had been destroyed. Learning the details of their short battle with the corvette was disquieting. Tyrone knew that under similar conditions Garden Variety Animal would fare no better.

Taking it in turns, Joseph and Tyrone related their parts of the story. Fragments of the Comet's short-range distress signal somehow reached their ship and triggered a split-second alarm. They stopped to investigate more carefully, which led them into the Kupier belt of the deserted system and the discovery of the stricken freighter. How close a thing it had been that they picked up the signal at all was lost on nobody.

"Thank God you stopped and came back to listen harder," Captain Freidrich said. Her crew murmured agreement.

"And that we weren't already too late," Tyrone added. "When we first arrived we thought we were. None of what we did would have changed the outcome if the Devastator hadn't been so close by either."

Captain Fredrich grimaced. "Well they were, so let's not dwell on that too long. I've spent enough time thinking about it today to last the rest of my life."

The Devastator's radio officer, whose name they now knew was Anna, told them what happened aboard the warship while it was in transit. She didn't go that deeply into most of what they did, dismissing it as "details critical in preparation, but very boring after the fact." Still, she had plenty of interesting things to tell them about.

"We did get a report back about other encounters they had with ships in the Teton Sector. They've carried out twenty-four known attacks, ten of those successful."

"Wow." Joseph's dismayed shock was echoed on every face. "That's a lot of attacks."

"A high success rate too," Captain Freidrich added. "Twenty-four attacks...over how long?"

"The first was more than a year ago," Anna answered.

"That's a long time. Why hasn't anyone managed to catch them before now?" Freidrich asked. "We were able to hear their conversations with Garden Variety Animal. I know pirates with some skill and good understanding of the territory they fly in can evade capture for decades, but it didn't seem like their leader understood the Teton Sector well enough to be one of them."

"He made up for it elswhere," Anna said. "Most of it involved fairly careful planning."

"Deserted systems and a sophisticated way to get targets out of FTL?" Tyrone guessed. "The fake transponder trick isn't difficult to figure out, but it's expensive. Putting up the money for that and using remote systems like this one might be enough."

Anna nodded confirmation as she took a drink. "Those were both factors. He also was more careful about the targets he picked. It's fairly common for pirates to target a freighter larger than the ships they're using because there's a reasonable expectation they can still overpower it."