Page 61 of The Captain's Bounty
“Four pallets of Vodka?” Vullum offered.
“Minus two bottles,” Demin inserted.
“And you really should check the galley lockers. There might be spices. Something in there sure stinks.”
Aldar growled into the comm, then sighed. “There’s a fortune mixed in with the junk down in Maintenance, but we might actually need that stuff to get this rusty scow back in order. And come on! A quantum shift scrubber? You really want to sell that, even for its actual value, which you know a scrapper will never give you, or keep it to scrub out the engines they don’t, you know, burn out so fucking fast and leave us without a jump coil again at a crucial moment?!”
“We have six jump coils,” Kelys reminded them. “We can sell the two I don’t recognize and still be set for at least forty jumps.”
“Four hundred jumps!” Aldar countered. “If we don’t sell the quantum shift scrubber!”
“We could always sell one of us,” Demin added, saying pretty much exactly what Bruwes was thinking. “The only question is, who do we give up and are we going to try to get them back again after collecting the bounty? I don’t know about you, but I think the Corporate bounty might be the easiest to collect on, but we won’t have a prayer of raiding them to get her back again.”
No, they wouldn’t. Corporate was too big, too powerful. Too many ships and endless men to throw into hunting them down again. And that was only if they managed to survive and escape after launching a raid against them in the first place. Not very likely.
On the other hand, the risks weren’t much better turning one or more of them over to Me’Kava.
They didn’t have ships, or men to spare. They were far, far weaker than Corporate, but that was home. The Me’Kavian people were not their government, they were friends and families. They might be outcasts and criminals, but there were still loyalties and tender feelings when he thought of home, bruised though those feelings might be.
And yet, those sentiments were not returned, obviously since Me’Kava had taken out bounties against them. That his own father was certainly at least one driving force behind that didn’t even sting anymore. It just pissed him off.
“I disagree,” Vullum said slowly.
Bruwes braced himself, stomach sinking. He already knew what the other was going to say. He knew it, because he was thinking the same damn thing, but it was the captain’s job to say it, so he did. “Me’Kava doesn’t have a defensive fleet. We’ll be met by what? One ship, at most, wherever we do the exchange, and they’re far more likely to want to meet planet-side.”
“Where they expect to ground and overtake us,” Aldar agreed. “After all, most bounty hunters have a bounty on their own heads, so why settle for just one when they can take us all?”
“No,” Bruwes agreed, rubbing his forehead once before searching the console for a long, frustrating moment before he figured out how to pull up the ship’s transmissions. He found the dossier that had brought the scavs to their ship in the first place. They didn’t even have Lissa’s file, but they did have The Raider and its crew.
“They’ve got our contact,” he mused, “but they haven’t pre-charted a route back to Me’Kava. Who were they planning to sell us to?”
“Bold of you to assume they had a plan,” Cory remarked, her voice crackling in time with some banging in the background. The comm-lines needed to be recalibrated. “You’re thinking like a bounty hunter, Captain. Think like a scav. This might have only been the first time they ever tried to take a prisoner. They weren’t very good at it.”
True. Taking prisoners might have even been a last-second decision, with the acquisition of food, water and recyclers being their primary target. So… think like a scav. You have prisoners you weren’t prepared for but were lucky enough to stumble on, and six bounties to collect. But how to go about it?
“Send word back to whoever put the bounty out,” Bruwes announced. “Literally just ride the signal back to source and say we’ve got their cargo and we want money.”
Cory let out a startled laugh. “Are you serious? We’ll have to send word that we have something they want before we know where we’re supposed to meet.”
“They’ll send a collector,” Demin said, just as grimly. “Who are we going to have talking to them? Cory? Lissa? They have bounties too. This is a terrible plan. We should salvage what we can of what debris we can find?—”
“And become scrappers?” Aldar’s voice interrupted over the top of his. “You think we’re broke now, just wait until you see how little space debris goes for.”
“We’ll be dealing with men like Olex,” Bruwes added. “He’d turn his own mother over to the authorities if she had a bounty on her, never mind us.”
“We need money, or we’re not running very far at all. We’ll be out of food in three days and we’re already out of water,” Vullum said bluntly. “How far away is the nearest relatively uninhabited planet with water?”
“That we can access without having to identify ourselves?” Bruwes pulled up the star chart. “A jump and ten days out. And we’d need filters. Do we know if those are working?”
“I think you guys are missing the obvious. This could be a pretty sweet pirate ship,” Cory suggested. “I mean, it’s not ideal?—”
“Ideal?” her mate shot back. “Putting good guns on a rust scow does not make a pirating vessel. It makes exactly what we’re in—a rust scow with a lot of guns that is one peppershot away from implosion. And why is more pirating always the solution with you? That will add to our reputations, not end them. You have a bounty on your head now too. I am not risking you!”
“Oh, but it’s okay for me to risk you?”
The channel fell into static as everyone began to talk at once, and Bruwes dropped his head back on the seat rest, casting his frown to the ceiling.
“We’ve already exceeded the average life expectancy of a pirate. How much longer do you really think we can keep doing this?”
