He met his helmsman, navigator Aleksy Joort, at the landing zone for the port shuttle a day later. A commoner, tall and thin, he possessed the best mathematical mind in the merchant guild, and would have been his executive officer if Altari law permitted it.

“Good day, my Lord,” Joort greeted him.

“Mr. Joort,” Rory said, looking about to spot cameras, the ones he could see were few.

A tall woman with the bearing of a Valkyrie and a sharp chin strode up. She wore a mercantile guild service dress uniform, tan and maroon, with a broken star and comet shoulder flash. "My credentials, Rory ni Coriander." She presented the data pad.

Why not skip the formality of courtesy? He frowned. "Thanks for joining on such short notice, XO.” Rory only trusted Joort as permanent crew, and rotated bridge crews depending on the delicacy, or legality, of the run.

“Delta Zayan, Captain.”

Typical Zayan attitude. “How did you get the guild to break its rules?" he said.

“No breach of custom, sir. Technically, I am Delta Zayan ni Coriander.”

The Altari held to matrilineal succession even if power was shared by each paramani and her war leader. Delta Zayan had not given up her legacy but had married a house Coriander noble. Was it arranged or for love? Who could tell? He was biased against Zayan motives, not without evidence from past run-ins at their custom houses.

“Ah.” He wondered who had married into her line.

Her eyes narrowed.

He felt remorse at his prejudice. Her position wasn’t all that different from his. “Mr. Joort has briefed you, I assume.

She sniffed. “He is a very efficient man.”

“Just another peon, my lady,” Joort said. “Efficiency is my lifeblood.”

Joort deserved better than his status afforded. The Altari government’s near caste system chafed him. The same system that kept Rory from marrying Jade. In a sense, it wouldn’t be legal, and he had never convinced her to go rogue just to be with him. Social norms had shaped both of them, and he dreamed of a world where just being yourself was enough to gain happiness.

“Captain?” Joort’s voice brought him back into the present. Delta’s face was neutral, but her eyes alert, taking the measure of him.

“Fine, we’ve loaded the vaccine. Let's go.”

“Aye, captain,” they answered in unison.

A week into the jump, Rory sat in the captain’s chair of the Cormorant, outward bound for a remote fief with a vital supply of vaccines.

His ship was transiting a wormhole tunnel three bands down in n-dimensional space, or n-space as the shorthand went for the collection of infinite overlapping space-time continuums above and below his own.

The deck plates had worn depressions from decades of boot traffic before he acquired it from a House Rialto broker. He replaced the worst of the plates as safety hazards, and covered the main corridor floors with plastomer grids to save cost.

The bulkheads were bare of elegant plasteel panels to make things look pretty. The Cormorant had the speed of a falcon, if without talons to match. She was a trader, after all.

“My Lord Captain,” Mr. Joort intoned.

He rolled his eyes. “On board, Rory will do, Alex. More efficient.”

“Very well, two syllables it is, My Lord. There is a ripple in the bow gravity wave gradient approaching us.”

He leaned forward. “Another jump lane drift?”

“Possibly. Shall I push off our descent for time to analyze it?”

“And then what? We can’t linger here, and we can’t turn back.”

“In extreme danger we could scram the jump,” Delta said.

Scramming was not the same thing as aborting a jump prior to entering transit. Crashing through the wormhole sidewall into a random point of interstellar space would delay them too long, and damage to the ship and crew from tidal forces was unpredictable. “Right. Right. By the book then. But remember the colony’s need for these vaccines.”

Joort reversed thrusters and the ship’s descent slowed. He threw up a holo display, a virtual map of how each layer of n-space mapped point to point. The sensors could only interrogate so many layers deep into space-time, and only within a certain radius of the ship. His filtrig upgrades lent an advantage. Their enhanced spatial gravilinear plot map let him judge his options better than most sensor packages.

Rory tugged on his vest and chewed his lower lip. “What do you think of it, Mr. Joort?”

“Indeterminate, my lord.”

“XO?”

“I don’t know, captain. Jump lanes have been dicey lately. Scoutfleet has doubled the mapping sorties to keep up with lane drift.”

“Yah, well, they missed this one. I wonder how new it is and what caused it? Resume freefall.”

An hour later, the Cormorant reentered normal space, but there was no colony to be seen.

Nor a local star, just the panoply of stars dusted across deep space.

“Feldspar take me. How long will it take to recalibrate a new jump with the navcom?” Rory said.

“Scanning. Without a local star beacon - ten hours,.”Joort said.

Rory whistled. “No help for it. Make it so.”

Delta chided. “Something is amiss. Best leave the colonists to themselves.”

Joort scowled. “What happened to nobless oblige, and all that rot, hmmm?”

“I’m more willing to give up the bounty then transit unstable n-space. Besides, they did it to themselves.”

In a way the colonists had, violating Commonwealth research protocols about cross species enhancement of function experiments. Rory had paid a substantial sum of gold quants to an orphan drug lab to print up a vaccine against the genomic virus that had driven the cancer rate on the colony up to astronomical proportions. The mutation rate had accelerated, hence the urgency of the mission.

Rory wished there were a circle of hell fit for the arrogant bastards who thought they could play god and get away with it. Ironically, they did. Their leaders had quarantined themselves at the plague outbreak and sent for help. ”It’s not the citizen’s fault their leaders screwed up.” Especially since the citizens didn’t really get much of a say who ruled them. “I’ll buy you a drink when we get home for helping save plague victims.”

“More drinks, I expect, than that,” Joort said drily.

“Once we have a navigation solution, we’ll launch a courier drone to the nearest Scout Depot for relay to a Mirror station. Let the Scouties have more work and know the reason for our delay.”

“Aye, my lord.”

“Captain?” the XO said. “We are being pinged.”

“That’s impossible. Who would be here in the black between?” The control board lit up like a Jubilee fireworks show.

Among humans, the Jubilee is celebrated every seventh year on the capital world, Altarsha. Boons are granted by the paraman as rewards for faithful service. It is attended by dignitaries from all worlds of the Commonwealth. Even the sarpans abate their bloodthirstiness for diplomacy on that day.

“XO, have we got us some pirates?”

Her cheek clenched. “Unless it’s a rogue Battlefleet unit. I count two ships, a 2000 tonner and a 20K, no missile hardpoints, must be the tender. The smaller ship is boosting at attack speed and will close in six minutes. Idiots.”

“Call General Quarters.” Rory ordered.

The klaxon sounded everywhere on the ship, crew, men and women sealed their skinsuits and donned helmets. The security squad broke out the personal weapons allowed to a trader under Commonwealth shipping regulations.

“Hull temperature rising sir.”

“Let’s hope those filtrig engineers gave me my money’s worth. Burn hot, Alex.”

The Cormorant’s oversize maneuver thrusters, Mark five, mod four filtrig enhanced plasma fusion engines, pushed their g’s and the ship corkscrewed in a maneuver beyond the direct line of laser fire.

“Red-line it, Alex. Target a shot on their tender.”***

“We won’t outrun the assault boat.” Joort said.

Rory grimaced. “No, but we can deny them a way home. Who do they think they are, these peasants?”

“What if they take our ship for their next ride?” Zayan said.

“Such an optimist. Burn them.”

Joort tagged the intercom. “All hands, brace for more g’s.”

Joort executed the burn and their counter-fire scored a hit on the tender’s engines.

Cormorant fell back from their vector of attack.

Proximity alarms rang. “Evasive, Alex.”

“As I said.”

The hull shuddered.

“Captain, atmosphere venting on dorsal aft section three.” The XO said. The unmistakable sound of mechanical grapples rung the hull.

The XO threw a ship hologram onto the view screen. A dozen red blips fanned into the breached corridor and broke into two groups.

Rory drew his contraband plasma blaster. “Repel boarders! “Joort you’re with me. XO take the con.”

He charged aft and down on the starboard side, and into the melee between his crew and pirates--not humans, sarpan raptors. His crew had barricaded them into further aft pinned near the entry breach they had grappled with his ship

The saurian aliens wore standard mining gear without markings.

“Mercenaries. This doesn’t parse. Sarpans don’t hire out as mercs,” Joort said, ducking under a fusillade of plasma bolts. Metal vapor stung the air.

“Uncreched renegades do. Where’s their controller?” Rory caught a boarder in mid jump, shot it in the haunch and it fell over snarling, dewclaws on its legs clawing the air, its elongated snout shaking inside its helmet.

They couldn’t just stay pinned until the tender caught up with them and sent more troops.

The bridge signaled him, the XO’s voice strained. She reported a party was beating on the bridge’s hatch from the corridor trying to break in.

“Damn all.” He left Joort with the main party, took two crew with him, and when he got to the bridge saw two sarpans and a human in unmarked space suits. One of the sarpans applied a cutting torch to the hatch, actinic sparks flying.

Rory blasted down the sarpan wielding the cutting torch. The other turned, it’s helmet visor open, and sprang a five-meter distance in one hop, then tore out the throat of one crew member as the remaining crew member wounded it with a glancing shot from a recoilless pistol that jammed. The crewman backed away from the snarling sarpan, breathing hard.

The human pirate drew a hummer, a counterfeit spire dagger without the characteristic white blazing light, the shear field humming on a steel blade that, if not as powerful as an authentic blade, could still cut Rory’s hand off in one swipe.

Rory crescent kicked the knife out of his hand and used a spear hand thrust to his throat leaving him to gag on the deck clutching his throat. Rory ripped off the pirate’s communication device on a pectoral collar affixed to his suit.

A saurian scream reverberated behind him, and he linked the vox box to his suit in time to translate into sarpan on their combat channel. “Avast, you sorry guppies. Stand down for your new master.”

They blinked.

When the sarpan pirates turned, the fight ended. The damaged tender that had brought the boarding party and it’s escort jumped out.

Joort caught up and bound the prisoner, taking him to a stateroom for interrogation.

Rory resisted the impulse to space him and be done with it.

Joort updated him ninety minutes later, while Rory cleaned up after the mayhem, checking the Cormorant for damange. “Captain, our prisoner won’t talk, but you should see something.”

Rory joined Joort. The crewman who had nearly been killed in the boarding action stood watch. “What now?” Rory said.

Joort pointed“The tattoo there, on his left forearm.”

“Former military?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I can barely see it.”

“The dermabrasion to remove it was sloppy. Broken stars and comet. House Guard.”

Rory wondered if his XO had set him up. “Secure him in a locker until we get to port and let’s go have talk with our XO.”

The talk revealed nothing. With the usual Zayanite hauteur, his XO told him it was beneath her dignity to follow the post service life of every commoner veteran, and for Rory to go put his head in a raptor’s mouth if he expected any more information from her.

Rory admired her for not giving away anything, and strictly speaking, not lying either. He confided to Joort out of her earshot. “I doubt the XO would have barricaded herself in the bridge if she were on their side.”

“Never underestimate plots among nobles.”

“Technically, I’m a noble too, Alex.”

“Yes, and you are an admirable example of conniving skill.”

“Well my conniving street sense wonders if we’ve stumbled into a vendetta.”

Joort recalculated their jump vector, and they made the colony just in time to deliver the vaccine to protect the survivors, and hand over the prisoner to authorities. Pity I can’t arrest their president for unsanctioned gene research. Justice would have to wait for the afterlife, if there were such a thing. His mind turned to Jade and how to pierce the labyrinth of social class wound about her so tight it seemed impenetrable.