The Smuggler's Tale

by Mark E. Cotterill

Introduction.

A long while ago I had the idea of turning the old classic computer game "Elite" into a board game. The idea seemed quite simple; a board laid out with planets, players with ships loading them up with cargo, fighting pirates, police and each other to deliver the cargo to whichever planet they thought they could make the most money at and generally doing whatever they wanted until they earned enough "Right On Commander!" tokens to get to Elite status.

One of the main problems (and there were many) was that in play testing games would routinely last several days, much longer than even Twilight Imperium players were willing to play for. It seemed that I had modelled the original game far too closely (Elite status could take hundreds of hours to achieve) and needed a way to reduce things down to their basic element. I tried a lot of different ways to make the game quicker, snappier and generally more interesting and after playing the new improved updated version of Talisman I had the idea of making 'Characters Classes' for the players to use. Each class could have its own mission, objectives, traits, ship, etc.

So I set about creating 12 different 'spacers' which represented the different types of career you could pursue in the original game; traders, miners, bounty-hunters and so on. Before long this list grew into a project all of its own, with character backgrounds, objectives and missions all carefully mapped out and written into a large notebook, until finally I realised I had the makings of 12 separate short stories, maybe even a book! A sort of Canterbury Tales for the Elite universe. It has been fun exploring that universe, inspired by the original game. Whenever I played Elite I always wanted to step out of the ship and see what was on the stations, go down to the planets, meet the aliens, find out what it's like to live on an Anarchy world, now I can!

Here is the first of those stories, The Smuggler's Tale which first appeared in the recent Issue 1 of the hardcopy version of The Avatar. I am currently working on Story II The Merchant's Tale which is a sequel to The Dark Wheel by Robert Holdstock, a free novella given away with the original game.

Look out for The Assassin's Tale, The Slaver's Tale, The Bounty-Hunter's Tale and many more, coming soon(ish) to this fanzine!

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My father always warned me to stay away from planets. I never really understood what he meant until I became a smuggler. Planets were dangerous places. So was space of course, but you could at least see the danger; The pirate bearing down on your ship with missiles locked, the meteorite that flashes up on your astrogation console, even the microscopic fissure in the lining of your hull through which your precious air supply slowly leaks out. It was all there to see if you just looked hard enough, but on planets things were more complicated. Laws, governments, pandemics, revolutions, the unpredictable actions of others.

So I followed my Father’s advice and got a ship. I named it Prometheus. That was the name of the first ship I ever travelled on, the cruiser which rescued me any my family from Zaonce when I was nine years old. My Prometheus was a Cobra Mark III, a combat/trader, small and fast, but not cheap. I had to take out some seriously heavy finance to get her, which kept me working every waking hour, but that was the price of freedom. I could do what I wanted, go where I wanted and trade what I wanted.

I started out simple around the safe-worlds, pulling food off Lave and taking it to industrial planets. That was fine for a while, but all it took was one bad day and I’d be back into the red. Like the time I was forced to drop my cargo by some pirates out near Vega. They had me outnumbered and knew I wasn’t stupid enough to fight them. They told me to dump all my containers and then they let me go.

That was when it all began I guess. I already knew about the various shortcuts to getting rich, but had no real contacts to get into anything serious. Furs into Lave wasn’t too much of a risk though, they were legal almost everywhere else and it was such a busy station they rarely scanned incoming ships. I had no trouble shifting my small consignment of Leestian tree frog pelts and one ton of furs was worth about the same as a hold-full of computers. My buyer told me what time to make the drop and which docking bay and he’d make sure the scanners were pointed in the other direction.

Eventuallyb I could afford to fit the Prometheus out with extra energy units, military lasers and an ECM and before long I was running around in a fortress; I would have loved to have met those pirates again! Once I had a tough ship I started getting more adventurous, taking firearms into Confederacy systems and even a few Anarchy worlds. Once I’d cracked open the Zaonce route I began running narcotics.

* * *

Reorte was my big pay-day twice a month. I’d pick up the white-stuff at Zaonce, jump straight into Reorte system space and dock. My buyer was a man named Pitz Zebur, though whether that was his real name I somehow doubt. We did all the unloading by hand using old fashioned hook lifters and a couple of grav-sleds in a part of the Station nobody used much any more.

The first sign of any trouble was when we saw the giant insectoid security team swarming into the loading bay like some kid had kicked open a termite hill. They were each twice the size of us and there were maybe a hundred or more of them. Zebur never stood a chance. He got spiked through the chest by some giant bug while I was pinned against the side of my ship. The bug that had me fired something like glue onto my body and I was stuck fast. At first I was afraid it might be acid, but all it did was keep me from moving. I could hear Zebur screaming as they chewed him up, but it was quick. I knew I would be next.

The one in charge wore a different design on its shell, I wasn’t sure if it was painted on or part of its natural colouring. I could hear the same clicking and scraping sounds that had been the last thing Zebur had heard but this time my translator picked it up and tried to make sense of it. There was also a smell associated with the sound, and I remembered something in a ‘spacer’s survival guide’ I had once listened to about covering up your body odour when dealing with insectoids. A broken series of words drifted into my ear.

“WRONG, BRING, HEPAR.” I knew two of the words, not bad for an eleven-credit talk-o-matic, but whatever the bug was saying to me was hardly important. I already knew what my fate would be, I’d been busted, I was either going to die a slow and painful death or there would be a trial, and then I was going to die a slow and painful death.

After a few minutes one of them splashed some liquid onto the substance which was holding me onto the hull and I came unstuck. It pushed me towards the already open side door which led to the cockpit. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I dare not believe I was being set free, maybe with a fine or something. Were they just tormenting me? I got in and shut the door, then sat at the ManOp console and realised I was shaking so hard I wouldn’t be able to operate the controls anyway. The image of Zebur being chewed up kept running through my head. Even as I’d been glued down, they’d been emptying the remaining containers from my cargo bay, but the fact that I’d lost a huge fortune in narcs didn’t even begin to cross my mind.

The docking clamps were still on and I couldn’t pull away until they were released. Everything on the astrogation console was blank, as was every other system on the ship. The power and comms feed had been locked out and an  override had shut everything down. After a while I saw another massive creature entering the docking bay. It was a flattened, squat beetle shape with a greyish white body. It moved slowly towards the ship, feeling its way with its long spindly antenna. When it found the edge of the hull it climbed up onto the top section. I could hear its feet tapping on the outside as it crawled all over my ship. From my limited vantage point I couldn’t see exactly what it was doing but as it worked its way around it passed by the front cockpit window. I could see it was laying down this oily, silky substance. It walked in precise lines, following the contours of the hull and wrapping the whole ship in this sheet of material.

The stuff was all over, even laid on top of the front viewport. It was perfectly transparent and seemed to be hardening into some sort of clear shell. Once it was finished the creature went away and was replaced by four others. These were smaller and looked more like humanoid ants. They went round cutting the material, which I could see was now as hard and stiff as the alloy used to make the ship itself. They made incisions around all the small openings like the vents, ports and other necessary parts of the ship, but not the door to the cockpit. They cleared the cargo bay doors, but since there was no connection between the bridge and the cargo area, which didn’t have life support anyway, I knew I couldn’t get out that way. Finally, there was a loud bang as a small tube was fired into the cockpit, shooting splinters of poly-alloy around the cabin. There was a hiss of pressurisation as some tiny mechanism in the tube cycled on and off then several small objects fell out the end of it. Packets of food, very basic space-rations, about a month’s worth. A quick look at the water tank showed that this too had been topped up, just as it would have been if I’d been on a normal stopover.

The console lit up. The engines showed ready. The fuel tanks were full, communications were back and a single line of text appeared on the message screen. It was a figure, an amount of money; five thousand credits. All I had to do to was hit the launch button and I would be away from this place. I switched over to my accounts screen and saw the same five thousand credit figure, owed to the Reorte Corporation. It was a fine, an amount I had to pay off, but with no date attached to it. Pay the fine and then what? They’d let me go, they’d kill me? Repeated attempts to contact somebody on the Station were met with a dead channel. My interpersonal comms had been disabled so I couldn’t place an external call to anywhere. It was all very weird, but, I wasn’t dead. I hit ‘Launch’.

* * *

I suppose if I really wanted to analyse it by looking at my logs and comms records I’d see that I probably spent more than ninety-nine percent of my time in the cockpit of my ship anyway. The other one percent would be the few hours I spent each week trudging about stations, handling contracts, maybe a few hours in some station bar listening to other spacers stories, or telling them mine, but that one percent must have been the bit which kept me sane. Even thinking about not being able to leave this tiny space behind the astrogation console made me realise how much of a prison sentence this was. There was nothing I couldn’t do from in here; it was possible to live through to old age and die behind the controls, and a few had. I worked out that to pay the fine off completely would take over a year, then accounting for expenses during that time, fuel, food, docking levies and all that other extra stuff, I was looking at over two years work to break myself free. 

There was another way, the way that had got me into this mess in the first place; smuggling. Just because I was a one man prison ship shouldn’t alter the way my old contacts dealt with me should it? I’d already noticed that a few of the regular, above board sellers had black-listed me on the station manifests once they’d noticed my criminal status had changed, but what difference did it make from one fugitive to another?

I kept working straight but made a plan for myself to get few extra credits out of a simple computer run off Diso. Usually there was a heavy tax on tech exports out of the Station, but I knew how to get around that. Everything went smooth and the whole exercise even cheered me up a bit too. Planning the thing, thinking up back stories for if I got caught, it was like I was back out there doing it all again, on top, winning. For a moment I almost forgot I was a prisoner. I did the run a couple more times and then noticed that my food supply was staring to hit the really nasty and unpalatable stuff that even I wouldn’t eat, so I loaded up with something for the run back to Reorte.

Somebody must’ve talked. When I arrived I found a message waiting for me. There were three amendments to the original fine which all tallied with my runs out of Diso. The total increase was another nine-hundred credits, three-hundred for each indiscretion. I got so mad I wanted to hit someone, but the only person around was me, so I slammed my fist into the bulkhead instead. I sat back in my pilot chair and let it pump me with calming drugs before lulling me into a micro-sleep cycle of six minutes. When I woke up the food had been fired through the tube, the water was back up to max and the fuel was being topped. I tried to contact someone in the Reortian Judicial System, but I soon discovered that the Reortians didn’t have a Judicial System. 

My next plan was much more discreet. I figured out a way to make a run that only myself and one other person would know about, and they knew that if they talked I’d be onto them. This time it was slaves. I hated myself for doing it, but the money was too good. Every smuggler hated slave-trading, apart from a few particularly nasty ones who seemed to positively enjoy it. The destination was an asteroid outpost way out on the edges of the Onisou system. The whole thing was over in less than a day and I got paid directly on delivery. I didn’t even need to dock, I simply dumped the containers out. Each one was a self-supporting life-pod with three to four humanoids or felines locked in cyro-storage. The payment was in the form of a small package of high value gems which the fuel-scoop picked up and locked in the ship’s security box ready for re-sale at my next stop. I thought that surely the Reortians wouldn’t have any informants out here. I was wrong. I decided it was time to get out.

Dahon Ginson had been a buddy of mine back when I worked on freighters. He was a gifted engineer and once I had my own ship I tracked him down to a place he ran out on the fringe. Tchunla Station was an old refinery and had become something of a haven for the local pirates, but not the kind who’d slit your throat to steal your sunglasses, these were pirates from a bygone era. The old Knights of Space who still lived to their own codes and who remembered a time before the Galactic Co-Operative of Worlds.

I made sure I approached the station from the proper direction since I knew Dahon would be nervous when I didn’t respond to his communications. I’d set my running lights to indicate a comms problem and as I got in close the docking bay doors opened. I set the ship down right in the middle of the huge hanger. One of the mechanics trotted over to see who I was but all I could do was wave at him out of the cockpit window. Then Dahon himself came over, looking confused. He waved some instructions at the other mechanic who went away then came back with a computer handset attached to a long coil of cable. They both disappeared beneath the ship and then there was a crackle on the intercom.

“Hey there Jax! Can you read me?”

“Dahon! Yeah I hear you!” I called.

“What the hell have you gotten yourself into now Garrison? What’s with all the wrapping paper? It’s says your a prison ship, property of the Reorte Corporation.” I explained everything to him. “I never seen anything like this before,” I could hear the faint sounds through the mike of him tapping on the hull with his wrench, moving along the underside and up to the cargo doors. “They’ve left gaps for the cargo door to open, but not much else, a few vents, connection points. What is this stuff?”

“I got no idea,” I said, “some kind of organic chemical, the bugs laid it on there.” I watched as they wheeled in gantries and work platforms around the ship. 

“It says some stuff on here about penalties for interfering with or damaging Reortian property,” said Dahon.

“You worried?” I asked.

“Nah! There’s worse people out to get me than them. I got a cutter that should be able to slice through this stuff no problem. How long you been in there?” I told him about the last three months.

For the next hour or so there was the sound of cutting and drilling and swearing and of drill bits snapping and motors burning out. Finally Dahon came back on the intercom,

“I’ll have to try the plasma-torch, but it’s probably gonna melt the hull plating.”

“We can replace that once I’m out,” I said.

“Yeah. Get yourself suited up, the welder only works in a vacuum.” I did as he said. I knew I’d come to the right man, Dahon would never give up on something and he’d keep working until he got me out, even if it meant spending all night and pushing his crew to exhaustion.

The plasma welder didn’t work and nor did the zero-point plate cutter. Nothing did. 

“There’s always the obvious,” he said, with resignation in his voice.

“Cut through from the cargo bay?” I knew we were both thinking the same thing. It meant destroying most of the life-support system, power units and major bulkheads, effectively gutting the ship to get me out.

“Yeah, I hate to kill a ship, but unless you want to stay in there…”

“I don’t, I have to get out Dahon, more than anything, doesn’t matter what it costs.” He said nothing more. I heard him open up the doors to the main cargo bay.

Suddenly there was a lot of noise. People were running and shouting. They dragged a body across the deck towards the first-aid station; it was my friend. There was a long break in communication. I was desperate to find out what had happened, but everyone was too busy to speak to me.

Twenty lonely minutes passed and then the gantries were moved away and the comm line was unplugged. Everyone disappeared down into the habitation modules underneath the bay. I sat there for a long time until one of the mechanics showed up, obviously drunk, with a laser pistol in his hand. His aim was way off and he had no hope of causing any damage to the ship with something so small, but I could tell who he was trying to hit. I put the Prometheus in the air and manoeuvred her out through the hanger doors.

It felt like no matter what I did, wherever I went the Reortians had it covered. It was as if they’d been running some experiment; locking up people in their ships and then watching what they did. Each time someone had escaped they’d changed things or added a new device which would prevent the same thing happening again, but if that was true, then what chance of did I have of ever escaping?

* * *

My answer came about five months later. He was leaving the Station at Lave as I was going in, another ship exactly like mine. I was already on my approach so couldn’t divert, but I managed to get his number. After docking I ran a few searches and discovered he’d bought textiles. I knew he’d be heading for Sirus so I launched without loading anything and hoped I’d get there before he left. My hunch proved to be right and sure enough I saw the same ship on the Station roster. I waited for him to launch and followed him out. He got the message and signalled me to follow.

He took a convoluted route out of SysCon to a small moon. It was low gravity enough that we could land on it. His ship settled down into the soft regolith of a crater and I flew around to land facing him. As the dust settled I could see him through the front screen. He waved at me a couple of times, smiling. I waved back. He picked something up and pointed it out through the screen. A short burst of green laser flashed out, onto the back wall of my cabin. Instinctively I ducked. It began to flicker and after a few seconds I realised it was just a communications laser. I rooted around in the locker underneath the pilot’s chair and dug out a similar device. They were used for emergency long-range communications in the old days, but now every smuggler had one stashed away somewhere to bypass communications when there was a risk of eavesdropping.

I set up the receiver dish behind the viewport where the beam was and tuned it in to the green band. A line of text came up on the small display.

‘Hey! You been busted by the Reetans too?’ I tapped in 

‘yes’ and he came back with

‘how long?’

‘7 months,’ I told him. He told me he’d been like this for six years. I said that I couldn’t imagine being able to last that long, that I’d probably end up flying my ship into the sun to get it over with.

‘Yeah tried that once,’ he replied, ‘but they cut my engines, turned me around and sent a ship to tow me back.’

‘Shame, they say it’s a quick way to go, you take the shields down, you explode!’ There was no reply so I sent another message. ‘How much you in for?’

‘Stopped counting when I got to ten-thousand,’ he messaged back. 

‘What did you do?’

‘Smuggling.’

‘Yeah, me to.’

He told me that he’d started out with a fine like me and they’d kept adding to it. Every time he payed some of it off, they’d add some more and there was absolutely nothing he could do.

‘We are good source of income for them’ he typed, ‘Corporation remember. You really think they ever let us go?’

‘Can’t escape!’ I replied.

‘I have plan,’ he said. 

‘How?’ I said. Through the viewport I could see him tapping away at his keyboard.

‘Have teleporter, need GH.’ A ‘Galactic Hyperdrive’, an expensive piece of equipment capable of flipping a ship through witch-space into a completely new galaxy, one without Reortians in it. From what I could work out his plan involved wiring up my ship with his in some mad scheme to bypass the teleport inhibitor and TransMat us both out of our ships at the same time.

He told me he already had the teleporter installed and if I decided I wanted ‘in’ I should buy a Galactic Hyperdrive, but not have it fitted, and meet him here in exactly one month. He would wait for two hours and if I didn’t show up he’d know I wasn’t interested. He took down the receiver and gunned his engines back to life. In a cloud of dust and debris he lifted off and flew back out the way he’d come in. 

I took off as well and headed back to the Station, all the while thinking about the plan. All night I thought of it and all the next day. I also thought about this lunatic and what he was proposing. I was terrified by the thought of those six years trapped in a ship and what they had done to this man’s mind. Even more terrifying though was the plan itself; the product of this mind. A plan so unbelievable and insane that the Reortians could not possibly have foreseen it, and for that reason I knew, most terrifyingly of all, it must work.

Back at Reorte I found myself smuggling something totally new; my own money. With some creative accounting and by adjusting the buy/sell rates of a few items I secured the necessary funds to buy the Galactic Hyperdrive unit. The familiar screen showed up with the fine repayments in one column and the usual penalty charges in the other. Since I was now being careful and playing by the rules these amounted to little more than ‘flight violations’, ‘regional restriction contraventions’ and ‘inaccurate log keeping infringements’. I pleaded poverty with the faceless automated system and opted not to pay them.

Four days later I was at the meeting point. Right on schedule the other ship flew down and turned sharply into the pit of the crater. I still had some questions to ask about how this was going to work, but my new friend was a little too impatient to answer them all. He told me that we’d jump out to deep space, well away from any possible rescue or interference. I’d launch the uninstalled Galactic Hyperdrive, he would then set the teleport to a wide scan and we’d dock our two ships together using umbilical supply lines. We’d guide our ships within range of the drive and set up a field using the shields that hopefully would cover us both at the same time. Then I’d activate the Galactic Hyperdrive remotely and with a lot of luck, once we were clear of this Galaxy the teleport inhibitors should cut out and beam us to a nearby planet or station.

I knew that in all probability flipping two ships like that would rip both of them apart before we dropped out of witch space, but by then we’d either be off on our way along the teleport beam or completely dead. Either way was fine with me.

* * *

The smart ones among you will have noticed that, since I’m telling you all this, I can’t possibly be dead. That’s a fairly safe assumption, but there are some things worse than death.

Before that day I’d never been in a teleporter so I wasn't sure if I felt so damn awful because of being bounced through the witch space between two galaxies or because I'd been cooped up for so long, but when I looked across to the other side of the room I was in I realised I had no right to complain. My 'partner' had fared less well, at least I assumed it was him. It was very hard to tell what it was.

I tried to stand, but discovered that my legs didn't work too well. I thought about the Prometheus and realised she was gone. I had felt her breaking apart as I was beamed out, torn to pieces by the huge forces of the Drive. That realisation alone hurt me more than any physical injury could. I couldn’t understand how I had let myself do what I’d just done. I knew I really must have been out of my mind.

I looked around at glassy walls, smooth like they had been heat-blasted. There was a slight condensation on them and they felt cold and clammy to the touch. I could hear a distant clicking and clattering that sounded familiar. I crawled out into a long straight corridor. There was nobody else around but I suddenly felt a desperate urge to get out of there. I tried to stand again, using the frame of the doorway for support, but the walls of the corridor were too smooth and rounded and I slipped back into the dirt and dust on the floor.

If I couldn’t walk, maybe I could hide until I got my strength back. I kept moving, desperately clawing at the rough ground, knowing that I might be discovered at any minute. After expending all the energy I thought I had left in me I looked back and could still see the same doorway I’d just left. I was completely exhausted but still determined to push myself on, wherever I was going. I must have passed out, but when I woke up I was still lying in the mud. I pulled myself up again to rest against the wall. I was moving a bit quicker now and staggered to the end of the corridor where the sounds seemed to be more intense, though I wasn’t sure which direction any of it was coming from. 

Right at that moment I would have given my life for a few seconds of Zaonce sun and fresh air, to be back on my home world again. I swore that if I ever did get out of here I'd give up all the travelling, the smuggling, figure out exactly what the hell it was I was trying to run away from and settle down.

The passageways led past gardens of finely cultivated moulds and fungal growth, past rooms of electronic equipment and all the latest tech from the many product lines of the Reorte Corporation and then they led me into a huge chamber. It was full of Reortians, this time the leader species. Tall, ant-like insectoids, each one lying on a pallet rolling around wildly with their antennae waving in the air. I realised they hadn’t even noticed me, they couldn’t ‘see’ me because my scent was covered by some other all pervading smell. Scattered around the room were some cargo cases that I recognised. Narcotics! The good stuff, the same kind that I used to smuggle here. Several of the cases were open and packets of white powder had been thrown around the room in a frenzy. Most of it was in heaps near to the aliens themselves and that's when I saw what they'd been doing.

One packet of Hepar was split open across the thorax of each Reortian. Their fore-legs and feelers were still sticky with the stuff and the smell of it, mixed with their own natural pheromones I suppose, was very strong. One of them, at the back of the chamber, rolled over onto its legs and shakily got up. It began moving towards me, its large feelers noticing me with some difficulty. It motioned with its head but without my translator I had no way of decoding its body movements and scent messages.

It pressed a few buttons on a machine set into a low table, which blinked in response. I thought about running, but knew there was no way I could. A huge swarm of guards, like the ones I'd seen on the Station, surrounded me. Their clacking and snapping noises rose to an unbearable level as they took hold and bound me up in more of the same strong silky stuff that my ship had been sealed in.

They dragged me down through the corridors to a place that seemed all together more human. White walls and human-sized doors. I could make out medical gear and beds. The bugs handed me over to a group humans, dressed in smart white Corporation medical uniforms.

That’s where I am now, hooked up to this machine, which is keeping me alive. I don’t very often speak to the medics, but when I do they laugh and jeer at me for my ignorance, because I never bothered to find out what hepar actually was; the liver of mammals, dried and powdered. The very finest is of course found in humans. The final punishment, for destroying my ship, which they insist belonged to them, and refusing to make any more money for them, was an idea they say they got from me, or rather the name of my ship;

Prometheus: Titan, demigod, stole fire from Zeus and returned it to Earth. As punishment he was chained to a rock where each day an Eagle fed upon his liver, which grew again each night.

THE END