You’re reading Celeste Rising, a SciFi pirate yarn. Find the previous chapter here.

A small torpedo shot out, seemingly from nowhere, flashed across the big screen and ended in an explosion at the side of one of the two smaller enemy ships.

Ayla could hear cursing over the speakers, alarms ringing, someone shouting orders.

“Joy,” Ayla spoke into her comm. “Target the big ship now.”

She turned to the hologram.

“And you, listen. I intentionally had my engineer fire a warning shot only. We do have bigger torpedoes. And right now one is locked on to your ass.”

It was lucky, she thought, that we left Joy on our ship. And that the others hadn’t bothered to scan it too deeply. Joy had been in the engine room, and the radiation shielding must have shadowed her signal.

It took the jackal-head a moment to process what was happening. Take your time, darling, Ayla thought.

“Are you still here?” she said.

“Yes.” The tone of the man was calm. Ayla wondered if this was really a man or a computer voice.

“Fine. Now unlock the doors.”

The bridge door slid open. She looked to Carl. He nodded. All doors had been unlocked.

“Good,” Ayla said. “Don’t touch your remote again, else we’ll blast you into pieces along with it.”

“Don’t get too excited,” the man said. “We have our own weapons locked on to you.”

“That’s life,” Ayla said. They probably weren’t bluffing. If they had prepared this whole ship just to make her crew fall into a trap, then they could also fire a bunch of torpedoes. “So it seems we’re on an equal footing now.”

“If that pleases you,” the man said. He seemed faintly amused.

“It does,” Ayla said. “You had a proposal. I’m listening.”

“A man has something that we want. We need someone to go and get it.”

“Why don’t you go yourself?”

“Let’s say we are not welcome. We’d prefer to stay in the background. We need someone they don’t know. A fresh face.”

Ayla pretended to think about that for a moment. They needed every credit they could get if they wanted to survive the coming week. Fuel, oxygen. The torpedo alone that Joy had fired was a couple of hundred. But she wouldn’t let the jackal know.

“What’s in it for us?” she said, trying to look as disinterested as she could.

“We pay well,” the man said. “Look around you. We own that ship you’re sitting on right now. You can have it. We’ll also give you oxygen, water, consumables for a year. You’ll be covered.”

“Three years.”

“Two. Or we call the Feds.”

Ayla nodded. “I need to know more about the job.”

The jackal-man took a photograph out of his pocket and held it out to her. It was a little Egyptian statue.

“Anubis,” he said. “God of the dead.”

Ayla looked at the statue. “That’s an Egyptian thing. It’s stolen from a museum?”

This doesn’t make sense, she thought. A small thing like that -- a few thousand saturnians, even if it was genuine. That wasn’t a tenth of what a ship like this was worth.

The man spoke again. “Let me repeat: it’s not your business what this is or where it comes from. We want it. That’s all you need to know. You bring it to us, and you’ll get paid.”

Ayla looked over to Carl. He shrugged. Perry was more enthusiastic, nodding. He was always good for an adventure -- the crazier, the better. Lea looked pissed that security had completely slipped out of her hands.

“Where will we find it?”

“Right now, the wrong people have it. A bounty hunter got it from somewhere half a year ago. We’re not sure if he knows its value. But we assume that he’ll want to sell it. There are rich collectors in Luxor Worlds Resort who could afford that thing. You’ll have to follow the bounty hunter and retrieve the artefact before it changes hands.”

“Luxor Worlds?” said Ayla. “I can’t even afford the docking fees there. And it’s invitation-only this time of year.”

The jackal-head smiled.

“We’ll give you an ID. You’ll be able to dock there for free for the duration of your mission.”

So they are government, Ayla thought. “They won’t even let our ship, the Halo, come close,” she said. “Only luxury yachts get through the perimeter.”

“You can take this one. You reckon this will do? Take it now, and if you’re successful, you can keep it.”

Ayla knew they didn’t have a choice. An hour ago they’d almost died when their air had run out. If these people left and took their ship with them... it wouldn’t be long before they ended up in the same spot again. Two years’ supplies was a lottery win. And a new ship. If they sold this one, they’d almost be able to retire.

“We have a deal,” she said. “But you’ll remove these corpses from my carpet. And bring my engineer over here.”

“Disarm your missiles,” the man said.

“Do the same with yours first.”

She looked over to Carl, who’d started a scan of the enemy ship. After a moment, he nodded. They had deactivated their targeting computer.

“Joy,” she said. “Deactivate. And come over here.”

“Aye,” Joy said over the comm.

Ayla turned to the jackal man again.

“How do you know we won’t run away with your statue? If it’s so precious, why would we bring it back to you?”

“You wouldn’t know how to sell it without getting caught. Or killed. Many are after this thing. Governments, criminal organisations. You would end up arrested or dead the moment someone found out that you had it. I’m offering you an easy payment, and you’re out of trouble.”

Now it becomes interesting, thought Ayla. Governments might do crazy things sometimes, but criminals generally knew what they were doing. If they were all after this little statue, there had to be something more to it. But what?

“So, we dock at Luxor Worlds. How do we find that man?”

“What we know of him is in the ship’s computer. It’s not much -- a photo, which is probably fake. We don’t know his name. Might be multiple people sharing one identity. We don’t know when or where they will exchange the statue. You’ll have to find out for yourself.”

“That’s great information,” Ayla said. “We don’t have a name. We have a photo, but it’s fake. Many thanks. How do we follow them if they have a private suite? If they’re rich, they’ll be guarded.”

“Well, you’re a bunch of thieves, aren’t you? Find a way. That’s your problem now. Get me that statue, that’s all. You have three Earth days, seventy-two hours. That’s all. Seventy-two hours from now, I want to see you all here again, in this orbit, around this moon, with the statue in your hands.”

“What makes you so sure that we won’t just fly away from it all in our new ship? This thing alone is worth a fortune.”

“Oh, I haven’t mentioned the nanobots?” the jackal said with a grin. “You’ve been breathing them in since you came on board. We sprayed a few billion into the ship’s air. That nice lilac smell? It was to mask the metallic taste. Some people can smell them. You obviously can’t. Now they’re already propagating in your blood. In a week, they’ll go berserk and begin drilling through your blood vessels from the inside.”

Ayla looked at Lea, who had taken out her comm and was scanning her own arms. After a moment, she nodded. Yes, it’s true.

“And I guess you can deactivate them remotely,” Ayla said. She shivered at the thought of the little critters multiplying inside her. She now understood why the jackal hadn’t been particularly concerned about their missiles. Presumably, he could let them drop dead this very minute with a command from his nanobot remote. Was this what had happened to the three people on the floor? Had they been used for a test of the nanobots’ efficiency?

“Yes,” the jackal said. “If you come here in time and hand us the Anubis, we’ll stop the nanobots. They’ll eventually be washed out of your system over the next few weeks. If you’re not on time...”

He didn’t finish his sentence, but Ayla didn’t need him to. Everybody had seen nanobot killings in the news. It wasn’t pretty.

“That’s convincing enough. We’ll do it. What happens to the Halo while we’re gone?”

“Leave it in orbit. It will be safe here. Park it; get the job done; and come back to claim it. You’ve got seventy-two hours. Be quick.”

Just as he finished speaking the last word, the holograms disappeared from the bridge. They were alone again.

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