Into the Black

(Consortium Trading Vessel Bronzeball’s Express, Hindarby System)

Life aboard an independent trading vessel in the Consortium was perfect, as far as Barnuth Bronzeball was concerned.

After all, he didn’t have to deal with Elders who insisted on everything being done according to tradition. Tradition that often included handing over a portion of his profits to the Elders, for a variety of reasons. Tradition that tried to dictate who he could trade with, and what he could trade for. Tradition that would have kept him from being a merchant at all!

How many times had it been drilled into him, as a child, that the Bronzeballs had been smiths and metalworkers since the time of Stonefoot the Great, before the gauz people even left the homeworld? The only other ‘acceptable’ profession for a Bronzeball other than a smith was the military. That was it. You either worked the forge, or you fought.

The blow-up when he told his family that he was going to be a merchant was LEGENDARY. The screaming got so loud that the safety officers were called. According to the friends he still had in his hometown, after they threw him out and disowned him, the family then went and officially struck him from their clan records. As far as the Bronzeballs were concerned, he never existed.

Thankfully, the clan didn’t have the pull with the Consortium to mandate that he change his name. He could no longer claim any association to the clan, but he still had his name. A name that he then put on the side of his ship, in bright gold letters, and proclaimed loudly in his transponder signal.

Was it petty? Of course. Did he care? Hell, no! They had thrown him out of the house for wanting to be something other than what tradition mandated, so why shouldn’t he get some perfectly legal revenge on them?

And that’s how it had gone for years. He’d gotten his revenge on his family by not only getting by without their help, but by actually thriving as a merchant. He’d managed to get his own ship, which then allowed him to make even more money, as he traveled between stars.

See, he didn’t bother with the common trade goods. Those were all high volume, regular consumption items, with relatively low profit margins unless you were dealing with a few specific items that were all fairly locked down by one of the big trading houses. That didn’t stop some fools from trying, of course, but the big houses had ways of ensuring that they learned the error of their ways.

No, he dealt in trinkets and the like. Small things. Consumer goods. His thing was that he’d stock up on common goods, the kind of thing that you’d find on that world for cheap, without them being cheaply made, because everyone had one. He’d then go a couple systems over, where they had some other signature good, sell the current cargo for a 90% markup, and buy new cargo for cheap. Teldanian spices, Gauza street fashion, Fendar instruments… whatever would make a profit at the next port of call.

All of it with the Bronzeball name on his ship.

And then, his family went and got themselves eaten on Coldana, along with everyone else in his hometown. Honestly, he would have given the X’thari a medal for that, if he could. The only people he’d been friends with had moved to one of the cities that had actually survived the X’thari onslaught.

Not that any of that mattered, now. He’d been proven right, and he was still alive, while everyone who turned their backs on him was dead. He’d call that a win, any day.

Now, his main concern was what he could get for his cargo of consumer electronics straight from Shadowgate. Hindarby was on the other side of Consortium space from the formerly blocked off system, but even they had heard about how the entire system had been taken over by chimeras, of all things, who had sealed the system off with some Lost Tech they found. Of course, they went and annoyed the leader of Black Star, if the rumors were true, and he found a way to slip ships in and wreck the place.

That was the story that had passed through Consortium space, and Barnuth had no reason to doubt it. Even better was that it combined both the enigmatic Black Stars and the mysterious chimeras. What that meant for him was that the people in Hindarby would have heard about all the stuff there, and everything in his hold would be considered ‘exotic goods’, which meant a heady markup. Since he’d picked up the entire cargo hold full of goods for the cost of a small used single-person ground transport, which was a fraction of what his cargo to Shadowgate had cost.

His musing was brutally interrupted by alarms going off. Turning to his screens, he silenced the alarms. Huh. Not the proximity warning, and he hadn’t strayed off course. Nothing from engineering, either. But what…

“What in the fuck?”

There was some kind of spatial anomaly over Hindarby III, near the Trade Station. Not an anchor drive. It almost looked like it was the same kind of radiation they detected from Hellspace. But there was nothing like the Coldana Rip here, and the Ihm were far away from Hindarby!

He killed forward thrust. The Express was still four hours out from the Trade Station. Whatever was happening was something he didn’t want to get involved with, not until he found out more about it. As an afterthought, he started diverting power to the anchor drive.

The anchor drive was a bit of an impulse buy. He’d picked one up cheap after Coldana. There were plenty of dead X’thari ships left in the system after the Harvester incident, after all. And since the X’thari had pulled back from Known Space with the death of the Harvester, the risks of having one of the drives was less. More importantly, it gave him a way to get away from situations that might be problematic.

The spatial rift tore itself open, a swirling vortex into what had to be Hellspace. He’d never actually seen it before, of course, but it had to be Hellspace. Nothing else could look like that, or emit a sound like a thousand unheard screams, even across all this distance, and in a ship.

Oh, and something was coming out of the rift. According to the sensors, the object was a perfect regular octahedron, with each of the edges being three kilometers on a side. Something like that was obviously alien. Perfect shapes just didn’t happen in nature, after all, not even in Hellspace.

The object transmitted a signal across all bands, all wavelengths, strong enough to blot out any transmissions. By the abyss, it even interfered with his own scanners! He checked the incoming message log. There was no message, no file. It was an attempt to access any computer systems it could!

Thankfully, advice from a Terran businessman had led to him ‘air-gapping’ the communications from the ship’s computer. Any incoming files would have to be transferred to a solid transfer media, ejected from the comms terminal, and then physically inserted into the computer terminal. It was clunky, but it also meant that the most anyone could do with a hack was to read any mail he had on the terminal. They couldn’t actually hack his ship, and do nasty things like turning off life support, or opening the airlocks to vacuum. Might be paranoid, but it had proven its worth when the Darkarmour pirate clan tried to do just that to him before, and it was proving useful again, as his ship was the only one in the system that wasn’t reading as powering down.

Another transmission, this time just on standard Consortium wavelengths, audio only. “We are the Gorb. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your Culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

(Consortium Navy High Command, Gauza Prime)

Admiral Lorderath Chainheart ground her teeth as she listened to the reports. The officer giving the briefing wasn’t at fault, of course. But that didn’t make the news they were delivering any easier.

“And that is the last transmission we received from Hindarby Trade Station. There was a Hellspace rift opening, and then, nothing.”

“Was it the Ihm?”

“Unknown at this time, Admiral. All attempts to contact the system have been fruitless. It is like the entire system went dark.”

An alarm went off. “Report!”

“Admiral, that is the Anchor Drive warning alarm. Incoming anchor drive ship. Location… the outer edge of the system. Well away from anyone or anything important. Ten minutes until it phases in.”

“The timing can’t be coincidental. Scramble some interceptors to identify the ship when it comes through. Prosecute with prejudice if it is X’thari. Anyone else, fire only if they take hostile action. And get me a list of ships that were in Hindarby! Did any of them have anchor drives?”

The officer handed over a tablet. “I already prepared a list of the ships in system before communications were lost. All of them civilian freighters. Most with the recognized trading houses, but there are a few independents in the mix, as well.”

“The trading houses wouldn’t bother with the expense of an Anchor drive, not when other systems were more cost effective, and didn’t have the risk of drawing in the X’thari. Discount those. What about these independents?”

“Five of them, Sir. The Brass Tacks, Too Sober for this Shit, She Said She Was Single, Bronzeball’s Express, and Fortune’s Friend. None of them are registered as having an Anchor Drive, but they are all independents. They wouldn’t need to register changes to their ship unless they were getting the ship insured, or they were trying to sell. And most independents figure that they’ll be dead in any situation that causes the ship to be lost.”

“Bronzeball? Any connection to the maker house?”

“Unconfirmed, sir. Probably a bastard or disavowed son. The Trade Board heard a case involving the owner from the Bronzeballs, but he was allowed to keep the name.”

Chainheart shook his head. Some of the old houses could be very stuck in their ways. He had no problem believing that the famous metalworkers and smiths would disown a family member that wanted to be an independent merchant, rather than a maker or a soldier.

“Fine. Let me know when we have news.”

(Later)

“Captain Bronzeball?”

The figure on the screen nodded. “Aye, Admiral. Captain Barnuth Bronzeball, at your service. I take it you want to know why I took my Anchor Drive in so close to the system?”

Admiral Chainheart nodded. “Our records have you being at Hindarby. The system is now completely dark. We were hoping that you would have some kind of insight into what happened, especially since you decided to do such a reckless way to come to the system.”

Captain Bronzeball grunted. “That I do. Something came out of Hellspace, right by the Trade Station. Don’t know what it was. Never seen anything like it. But it was definitely not natural.”

“Can you transmit your sensor records?”

“Sure, just give me a bit. I have my comms separated from the ship’s computer, so I need to physically transfer between the two systems. That’s probably why I’m still alive, by the way. Those Gorb weren’t playing around.”

“Gorb?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s what they called themselves. Big, eight-sided ship flew out of a Hellspace rift. Overloaded frequencies up and down the spectrum with what looks like some kind of hacking program. Station and all the other ships in system went and shut down immediately after, but the Express wasn’t affected.”

“So, these Gorb unleashed a massive hacking attack against the entire system?”

“Yeah. Then they went and transmitted a message in Consortium Standard to everyone in system. Hold on, I’ll play it for you.” The captain reached forward and hit a button on his controls.

“We are the Gorb. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your Culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

That was chilling. “And what happened after that?”

The captain shuddered. “The Gorb started taking the station and ships apart. Using tractors to hold them in place while cutting beams sawed them up like a scrapper. Don’t know what happened to the people. I think they didn’t recognize the Anchor Drive charging, or didn’t see it as a threat, which is why they didn’t bother me until it was too late for them to stop me. That, and there were better targets than my baby closer at hand.”

“Very well. I’m invoking Article 183b of the Consortium Naval Code. The interceptors currently on station will escort you to Silverhammer Base, where technicians will go over your sensors and communications systems, to get the raw data. You will, of course, be compensated for the delay, as per Article 183c.”

Captain Bronzeball sighed, “Yeah, I figured that was coming.”