The Colchis Job (Four Horsemen Tales Book 3) Read online

  The Colchis Job

  Book Three of the Four Horsemen Tales

  By

  Kal Spriggs

  PUBLISHED BY: Seventh Seal Press

  Copyright © 2018 Kal Spriggs

  All Rights Reserved

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  Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”

  and discover other Four Horsemen titles at:

  http://chriskennedypublishing.com/

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  Cover by Brenda Mihalko

  Original Art by Ricky Ryan

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  To the men and women in uniform I have had the pleasure of serving with, at home and abroad, with special mention to the 90% who are amazing, hardworking people. That other 10%...well, they’re 90% of the problems the rest of us deal with and that’s where the best stories come from, right?

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  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  About Kal Spriggs

  Connect with Kal Spriggs Online

  Connect with Seventh Seal Press

  Excerpt from “A Fiery Sunset:”

  Excerpt from “The Mutineer’s Daughter:”

  Excerpt from “Minds of Men:”

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  Chapter I

  The Anauros System

  High velocity MAC rounds screamed down the corridor of the Argos. I went flat against the bulkhead. “Dammit, Professor, this is all your fault!”

  “Sorry, Staff Sergeant, they said they were customs inspectors!” Grimes shouted from where he clung to a stanchion behind a metal frame. He wasn’t really a professor; he just seemed to know a little bit about everything. I was rethinking everyone’s nickname for him as well as wondering why the hell I’d put him in charge of the ship while I wasn’t on the bridge.

  I leaned around the corner and cut loose with my MAC in turn. Two of the dimly-seen figures flew back, their bodies tumbling in zero-g. One’s wavering scream echoed down the passageway. I pulled myself back while return fire scythed down the corridor in response. Gunfights in zero gravity sucked.

  “Reedie,” I called over my radio, “where the hell are my reinforcements?”

  Reedie’s voice puffed through the radio, “Sorry, Staff Sergeant, uh, I mean Colonel. We ran into a few of them, and we’re having difficulties making it to the armory.”

  I’d wanted them to get into their Mark 6 CASPers, which should have turned the fight in our favor, but of course it hadn’t gone that way.

  Reedie mumbled something unintelligible through the comm before it went silent. At this point, I’d gone through my extensive vocabulary of swear words and started inventing new ones. This was supposed to be a quick and easy voyage back to Karma. We had a ship; we had a cargo of battle-earned loot. We could have jumped straight there...but no, I’d detoured to the Anauros system for a “quick” stop.

  And now we were being boarded by pirates.

  “Grimes,” I snapped, “cover fire.”

  “Yes, sir!” He put his MAC around the frame and fired blindly down the corridor. His chances of hitting any of our attackers were slim to none. There was a better chance of one of his rounds punching through the hull or damaging some important equipment, but at this point, none of us really cared about that.

  As the pirates dropped behind cover, I lunged past Grimes and flew along the corridor until I slammed into the bulkhead on the shipboard side of the airlock. My arm clamped on the bar next to the airlock to keep myself from bouncing off the bulkhead and ricocheting down the corridor.

  The “customs” cutter had docked, and pirates had swarmed out. We’d driven them back into the inner airlock, but there seemed to be no end to the bastards. I doubted they’d expected to find armed mercenaries on the ship they’d boarded, but it wasn’t like there were a lot of us left, after all. We’d left Bedarine Seven with only twenty out of the whole company. The Argos was a Styx-class patrol ship, which were rare enough they may not even have realized we were armed, much less guessed we had mercenaries aboard. At this point, though, they had to know that if they didn’t kill us, we’d turn the Argos’ weapons on them.

  I reached up with one hand and found the emergency access panel on the side of the airlock. I ripped it open, and my hand gripped the red pull-bar inside. For just a moment I considered offering the pirates a chance to surrender. Gunfire tore past my ear, close enough that I felt the passage of rounds. To hell with them. I pulled the bar down with a grim smile.

  The airlock slammed closed, cutting one of the pirates in half and spraying a wide fan of blood. I heard a loud rumble on the other side as the explosive bolts detonated. That was followed by a rushing roar and then total silence. Sound didn’t propagate through the vacuum, after all.

  In case of emergencies, most ships mounted emergency detachment systems on their airlocks. If a ship or station caught fire, it was easier to blow the airlocks loose than to go through a full undocking procedure. Since the pirate cutter had clamped onto our airlock, we couldn’t have detached them, short of what I’d just done.

  Grimes pulled himself up to where I clung, his eyes wide, “Sir, did you just...”

  “Blowing the airlock can only be done from a manual station, to verify that the airlock is clear of personnel,” I grinned. The pirate’s blood had splattered in a wide fan, much of it still hanging in the air, and I figured would probably require a good bit of cleanup. I pulled up my radio, asking, “Bridge, status?”

  “Uh...” the tech on the bridge clearly wasn’t proficient with the sensors and systems. Not yet, and probably not ever, if she, like most of the Argonauts, decided to leave the company on our return to Karma. Since we’d taken the ship from some Cartar mercenaries back on Bedarine Seven, none of my people were what I’d call “proficient” with the ship’s operations. “The pirate cutter is spinning out of control. I think it’s venting, too.” I heard someone in the background start to gag. “Oh, God, and...” there was an audible wet cough, before she continued, “people and pieces of people. One of them just hit the bridge viewport and bounced off.”

  “Perfect,” I said, feeling a bit more cheerful. Hopefully we’d captured a recording of that; it would make great promotional material of us fighting pirates to give to potential clients. “Reedie, how’s it coming with the pirates near the armory?” I glanced at the watch on my wrist as I said that, not really sure why. It wasn’t like the battered thing had shown the right time in the twenty-seven years I’d worn it.

  It was Staff Sergeant Ruel who answered, which made me frown. I’d asked Reedie. Reedie had been in my squad; I knew where I stood with him. Ruel was an unknown factor. He’d been a squad leader in Third Platoon, and I had a low enough opinion of the Argonaut’s former and now-deceased previous commander that I didn’t trust anyone he’d put in positions of authority. I mean, after all, he trusted me, and I basically killed him and took over as soon as things got desperate. “Whatever you did, they started throwing down their weapons. I have secured the survivors.”

  “Good, search them all, then lock them up in the aft cargo bay, and we’ll deal with them later,” I said. I didn’t know he had my squad frequency, which I’d been using to manage Reedie and Grimes to run the ship and move people around without the other surviving Argonauts interfering. While no one had resisted my taking charge in the immediate aftermath of the Cartar attack back on Bedarine Seven, there’d been mutters and grumbles from some of the other surviving NCOs.

  I turned a baleful gaze on Grimes. “Next time, Professor, when someone wants to board us, you wake me up first, understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” Grimes swallowed nervously, his gaze going to the floating droplets of blood and crushed remains of the pirate in the airlock door. He turned a little green, and I sighed.

  I slung my MAC and pulled myself past him, rubbing the watch on my left wrist. Things hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped since leaving Bedarine Seven. They hadn’t gone bad, exactly, but they hadn’t gone well, either. If I’d known how much of a headache taking over the Argonauts would be, I might have taken the Lotar’s pay and blown it on booze and women instead of claiming the Cartar’s ship and command over the remnants of the nearly-destroyed Argonauts. “Get some people down here to clean up the bodies and loot what they can. Also, have Reedie see wh
at kind of damage we did to the ship in this little firefight and prioritize repairs.”

  I sniffed the air and a funky, rotting fish smell hit me once again. That same smell had haunted us since we left Bedarine Seven. The Argos had been owned by the Cartar, an octopi-like species of ocean-dwellers. At this point we’d done everything, including putting the whole ship into vacuum, and we still hadn’t gotten rid of their damned smell.

  I sighed, “Oh, and have them clean the corridor again while they’re at it. It stinks like a damned fish market in here.”

  * * *

  “Good morning, sir,” Ruel met me on the bridge only a few minutes later. I squinted at him suspiciously. Ruel seemed far too chipper, and he wasn’t normally a morning person.

  “What’s so good about it?” I asked. I clutched at the back of the command chair in the microgravity, and I noticed the former squad leader from Third Platoon handled the lack of gravity remarkably well.

  “I got to kill people,” he said with a grin. “Plus, a couple of those pirates had some nice equipment.” He lifted his uniform blouse over his potbelly and patted a silver inlaid pistol he had tucked in his belt.

  I started to say that was a good way to make sure he never had kids, but I thought better of it. For one thing, he’d probably unloaded it already, and he’d be insulted if I suggested otherwise. For another, the idea of slimy Sam Ruel having kids sort of gave me nightmares.

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “Take it out of your paycheck. What happened with Reedie at the armory?”

  “Your boy is fine, I just took his radio since he was getting a little excitable.” Ruel rolled his eyes. “What about that,” he asked, waving his hand at the tumbling pirate cutter.

  “What about it?” I asked. I was more concerned with ensuring the pirates didn’t have any friends and that no one was coming to investigate. Anauros wasn’t a beacon of law and civility, but they still might have questions about what happened.

  “Well, it might be valuable. We could probably jury-rig something and get her flying again.” His beady little eyes gleamed with greed. I couldn’t help but think he looked rather porcine. “They might have something worth salvaging, and, if nothing else, it probably doesn’t stink like rotting fish over there...”

  “There might be survivors, sir,” the female technician interrupted. “Also, it’s a navigational hazard.”

  “The navigational hazard part is accurate, anyway,” I nodded. I squinted at the readouts and displays, understanding most of what I saw, but I still wasn’t familiar with the way the starship’s displays prioritized and sorted information. “They’ve lost power and atmo?” I asked, thinking that was what the sensors all seemed to show.

  “Yes, sir,” the tech said. Heather, I reminded myself, Heather Valsaint. I’d had time to get to know all the surviving personnel from the company and should at least remember their names. Besides, that was what commanders did, right?

  “Right.” I looked over at Ruel. He’d been a squad leader in Third Platoon. A smiling, greasy man, I felt he’d have been just as happy being a pirate as he was a mercenary. I trusted him about as far as I could throw him and, given his girth, that wouldn’t be very far. Still, he knew how to get things done, and he was good in a fight. But as soon as we got back to Karma, I planned to pay him off and get rid of him.

  I watched Ruel’s face as I gave the order, “Miss Valsaint, open fire with our main weapons and destroy the wreck.”

  “What?!” Ruel demanded. His jaw dropped, and he stared at me. His piggy little nose wrinkled up, and, for a second, I thought he might even go for his pistol.

  “You want to hang out here and be a sitting target while we do zero-g salvage operations?” I gazed at him, challenging him to disobey me. “Maybe we should see if these pirates have any friends, maybe a mothership with comparable weapons to the Argos?” The Styx-class patrol ship had once been a Peacemaker ship, but those days were in the past. The Cartar had dismounted most of its weapons. Besides that, the ship had a dozen or more maintenance issues, ranging from the sewage venting system being clogged to the constant reek of rotting fish from the environmental system. Without a full work down of the ship’s systems by real engineers, we didn’t know how bad things might be. The damned sewage thing is a real nuisance. What the hell am I going to do with two metric tons of solid shit?

  Ruel scowled. Odds were that these pirates had been a local operation. Most pirates operated on the fringes, with whatever cobbled equipment they could manage. There weren’t really that many powerful pirate fleets...but we’d barely survived the encounter as it was.

  “Fine,” he scowled.

  “I wasn’t asking your permission, I already gave the order,” I snapped. He glared, but gave a small nod. He understands. I’m the one in charge. I looked back at the tech, and I didn’t bother hiding my smirk. “Miss Valsaint.”

  “Yes, sir,” She straightened in her seat and brought up the Argos’ weapons.

  She only had to fire once. The small cutter vanished in a visible flash of light. It hadn’t been a vast explosion, so there’d be debris, but hopefully none of it big enough to be a navigational hazard. “Plot the bigger chunks,” I noted, “and smash them up. Good weapons training for you. Be sure you get recordings on all of it so we can pass it along to the Peacemakers once we hit Anauros. Maybe we’ll get lucky and there’s a bounty on these guys.”

  “It’ll teach no one to fuck with us, either way,” Ruel chuckled. Now that I’d established I was in charge, he didn’t seem to have a problem with my decision.

  True. Maybe Ruel would be worth keeping around...if I could trust him.

  * * *

  “Sir,” Grimes called as I came down the corridor, heading to my quarters. I’d just confirmed with Reedie that Ruel had taken his radio away when he’d been trying to report during the gunfight with the pirates near the armory. I wasn’t too happy about that, but I hoped that I’d settled things with the display on the bridge. “Private Mulcahy wanted a word with you.” The tall, brown haired young man had an earnest expression on his face. Then again, Grimes always looked earnest. I almost wished I had a face like that, people would have believed any lie I told them.

  I looked at the private behind him. Mulcahy was one of the surviving CASPer pilots, if I remembered right, and shown some good promise. I planned to keep him on. He was a tall, lanky redhead, who normally kept his mouth shut and did as he was told. Even better, he’d fought like a demon back on Bedarine Seven. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Could we talk, uh, privately?” He looked around nervously. He was from Third Platoon, which meant he worked under Ruel.

  I shot Grimes a glance. He’d just let pirates aboard the ship. I wasn’t sure if he’d even contemplate that someone in the company might try to off me to take over. If Ruel sent Mulcahy…

  “What is this about?” I demanded and my hand fell to my slung MAC.

  Mulcahy gulped, and he reached out an arm to a stanchion, like he was going to pull himself away in the micro-gravity. He seemed to realize he couldn’t get away, and he brought his hands up. “Christ!” He swallowed, “Sir, I just, look...” He took a deep breath, “I saw Sergeant Ruel gack a couple of the pirates after they laid down their weapons.”

  “Oh.” My hand flexed against my weapon. “Is that all?” I asked, not particularly concerned. They’d been caught in the act of piracy. Most mercenaries wouldn’t even give them a trial, they’d be vented out an airlock before lunchtime to not ruin the rest of the day. Some mercs I’d dealt with would have sold them into indentured work on one of the frontier mining worlds.

  A Peacemaker might care, but only if Ruel had gotten creative in his killing of them. Pirates were scum, worse than scum, for they clogged up the traffic between star systems, the very lifeblood of the Galactic Union.