Battleship Raider Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Do You Want More Quincy & Floyd?

  Also by Paul Tomlinson

  About the Author

  Battleship Raider

  Copyright © 2019 by Paul Tomlinson

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or transmitted, in whole or in part, or used in any manner whatsoever, without the express permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in the context of a book review.

  Battleship Raider is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental.

  First published April 2021

  Publisher: Paul Tomlinson

  www.paultomlinson.org/outlaws

  Cover image and design © 2021 by Paul Tomlinson

  Dedication: This book is dedicated to the original intergalactic thief and conman Slippery Jim diGriz and his creator Harry Harrison

  Prologue

  I was beginning to miss the desert. The jungle was hot and humid and the flying insects were bigger than my head. Much bigger. They buzzed around like a gyrocopter stunt team. And anyone who tells you green is calming never saw a snake with a big flat head the colour of a leaf. The only thing that kept me hacking through the undergrowth was the promise of hidden treasure. That and the fact that I was bursting for a swazz and I was afraid to unzip in case something locked its nasty mandibles on my man-thing.

  Did I mention the humidity? Every part of me was running with sweat and my clothes were soaked through. I was going to end up with all-over diaper rash. I’d always taken feeling dry for granted but now I was thinking of it as one of the must-have features of Paradise.

  I paused to catch my breath and silently curse the old fool that had offered me this crazy ‘opportunity’. And the young fool who accepted it. That would be me, Quincy Randall. Thief, conman and part-time idiot. If I’d known what this expedition would be like, well, I’d probably still have come. I needed the cash. But I’d have brought more changes of underwear.

  I heard something incoming and swung the machete – then watched one of the giant insects spiral down towards the damp black soil. A long pink tongue snatched the wounded flyer out of the air. I couldn’t see the mouth it belonged to, but I could hear the crunching. I shuddered, reminded of the hidden dangers the jungle was home to. Including creatures that were big enough to eat me.

  The umbrella-sized leaves ahead of me stirred as a little yellow frog launched itself into the unknown and beyond them I saw... what? Dappled sunlight on tarnished metal? I hoped that’s what it was. That’s what the old man had promised I would find. I ducked another dive-bombing insect and hacked away at the foliage with renewed vigour, trying to catch another glimpse. If this was the wreck I’d been told about, maybe the treasure was here too.

  Chapter One

  The old man told me his name was Jack Sterling though I suspect that, like me, he’d had a few different names during his time. I met him in the prison in Margotsville, a desert town that lay almost two hundred miles north of the equatorial jungle. Old Jack had been found guilty of killing a man in a bar fight, or so he told me, and seemed content to live out his remaining days within the prison’s walls. I had been arrested as a result of a misunderstanding regarding ownership of a sand yacht that I had won in a card game.

  The old man had been in prison long enough to know how things worked and he somehow managed to get jugs of the local moonshine smuggled into the cell we shared. Dragon’s Tears the locals called it. Dragon swazz more like. Old Jack liked to drink and talk, and I was happy to drink and listen.

  “You stole a sand yacht?” he said, looking at me in a way that said ‘What the heck would you want a sand yacht for?’ Or maybe he was just squinting because he was soused.

  “Technically I only sort of stole it,” I said. “There was a misunderstanding.”

  “You’d better come up with a better story than that when you go up before the judge.”

  “It was a beautiful ship,” I said. “You ever seen paintings of those old paddle steamers? It looked like one of those. Layered like a wedding cake... just floating over the desert like a mirage.”

  “How do you steal something that big?”

  “I didn’t steal it. Not exactly. I won it fair and square. Or so I thought. I had the registration document in my hand.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I was playing poker with this guy. People called him One-Eyed Jack on account of his eyepatch, but his real name was Marmaduke – or was it Maurice? Doesn’t matter. He had a ‘tell’. When he had a good hand he’d touch his eyepatch – as if he wanted to show it to his missing eye.”

  Old Jack smiled. “You cleaned him out! Got everything, including his yacht.”

  I smiled too . Until I remembered what happened next.

  “Turns out it was registered to the guy’s wife. He didn’t have a penny to his name. Gambled it all away.” I don’t usually drink much and this hooch was making my brain feel spongey. “To save himself, Maurice told his wife I’d stolen the papers. I saw his wife and I know why he’d feel the need to do that. I felt sorry for him, so I took the rap.”

  “That story’s so crazy the judge might just believe it,” Old Jack said. He took another long pull from the dirty stone jug.

  “I told my whacky story, now you tell me one,” I said. “You’ve been around – you must have seen some things.”

  Old Jack’s eyes did the squinting thing again and I thought that perhaps he wasn’t as drunk as he was pretending to be. I expected him to tell me about the man he killed, but he had an even better tale than that. Crazier than mine.

  “There’s a lot of men would like to learn what I know,” he said, slurring his words. “There’s a fortune to be had by the man who knows where to look.”

  Tales of hidden treasure were common in the years after the end of the War. Not gold and silver or pilfered works of art but tons and tons of salvage. Military hardware – either floating dead in space or lying on the surface of planets scattered across the warzone. Not the alien stuff, of course, that was mostly biological and decayed quickly. But the human stuff was still out there. Weapons and machinery brought a good price but the greatest prize of all was a ship’s Navigator – the artificial sentience that controlled a battleship’s systems and directed the movement of its fighter craft. A bounty had been offered by the Alliance for the return of a Navigator and even now, almost forty years later, you could collect the prize and never need to work another day in your life.

  “My ship came down and she’s never been found,” Old Jack said, “but I knows where she’s hid.” There was a twinkle in his eye when he said it, but I got the
feeling he was telling the truth. Or believed he was.

  “You were a soldier?” I asked, taking another swig of the harsh liquor.

  Jack Sterling shook his head. “Engineer,” he said. “I used to service the Warbirds, kept ‘em flying.”

  “What ship were you on?”

  “The Celestia,” he said. He noted my lack of recognition and explained. “Dreadnought class. Not the biggest warship we had, but by that stage we were sending everything we had to the frontline. And this is where we came down.”

  It took me a minute to realise what he was saying. I blame the moonshine. “You mean the Celestia came down here?”

  Old Jack nodded.

  “It crashed down on this planet? On Saphira?” I said.

  He nodded again and smiled a crooked smile.

  “And you walked away from the wreckage?”

  “Don’t be a doof, nobody walked away from the wreckage. I got away in a lifeship – came down after her. Our Celestia lies but a stone’s throw from where we are tonight.”

  I made a wet farting noise with my lips and reached for the moonshine. Old Jack didn’t seem offended by my scepticism, he just sat smiling, that twinkle still in his eyes. He passed me the jug and reached inside his stained and tattered shirt, pulling something out. He tossed it to me.

  I caught the cloth-wrapped object and looked down at it. It lay heavy in my palm. I carefully peeled away the bandage-like covering.

  “You know what that is, Quin?” he asked.

  I nodded. The smooth sphere in my hand was part metal and part crystal. “It’s one of the eyes,” I said.

  Old Jack nodded. “One of the tracking eyes from a cannon – a big one.”

  “Dreadnought class,” I muttered.

  “And the rest of the Celestia lies in the jungle a couple of hundred miles south of here, untouched by man since the night she came down.”

  I stared down at the eye. The metal was warm from Jack’s body heat but the crystal was ice-cold under my fingers. “But surely she was salvaged,” I said. “Her position would have been reported.”

  Old Jack shook his head, his eyes still glittering in the gloom. “We never reported it,” he said. “There was maybe two dozen of us survived, coming down in three life ships. After we touched down, we stood in the desert and looked up at the stars, and all of us decided we’d had enough of war. We made a pact that we’d never tell a soul where the ship had come down and we’d live out the rest of our days as civilians. I’m the only one of us left.”

  He watched me, probably trying to see if I believed his story.

  “That was forty years ago,” I said.

  “Give or take,” he said, nodding.

  I wrapped the eye back in the cloth and passed it back to the old man. There was every chance he’d stolen it or won it in a card game. It was an unlikely story. But it might be true. And if the Celestia was lying out there untouched, then there really was a fortune to be had by the man who knew where to look.

  “And in forty years, you’ve never been back to the crash site?” I asked.

  “I never said that, now, did I?” He tucked the eye back into his shirt. “I went there once on my own, just to see her again. And then a few years ago I went with some friends to see what we could get from her. But all we got was trouble. Salvage is a young man’s game, Quin.”

  “And she’s still out there...” I mused.

  “She broke into pieces as she came down and nose-dived into the trees. Wreckage must have stretched in a line for twenty miles or more. Everything was burned when she hit, but the jungle grew back around her and over her and now no one can see she’s there. But her belly’s intact, Quin, waiting for the right man to open her up and relieve her of her riches.”

  It was one of those stories that you want to be true. Everyone loves a story of hidden treasure. But even with the ‘evidence’ Old Jack had shown me, and even in my drink-fuddled state, I knew it was just a story. He had almost certainly never been close to a battleship and that oblong scar on his arm wasn’t a war wound, he’d probably burned himself stealing bread from an oven. That’s what I was thinking as I went to sleep that night in that dusty prison cell. But it wasn’t long until I came to change my mind.

  Chapter Two

  Desert architecture doesn’t vary much from planet to planet. Buildings are low with thick walls made of concrete or mud or whatever. They’re usually painted white to try and reflect the heat away. And roofs are either flat or made of heavy clay tiles. The buildings in Margotsville were all like this, including the prison. It was a squat two-storey structure with a yard at the back and a high wall around it, topped with coils of razor-wire. There were signs hung from the wire that warned of the danger of electrocution. I suspected that the fried rats and pigeons hanging from the wire were placed there to make us believe it was electrified, but that was a theory I wasn’t in a hurry to test.

  A wooden watchtower stood at one corner of the yard, manned at all times by a guard with a rifle. In another corner was a raised platform with a big searchlight on it at, manned only after dark. The prison warden’s office looked out into the yard and there was a small section of the yard under his window marked off with white painted pebbles – a little garden filled with sickly-looking desert plants.

  The yard itself was hard-packed dirt like the town’s roads. You probably couldn’t have dug your way out if you had a pneumatic drill or dynamite. The only way out was up and over the wall. Not that I was thinking of escape. Not at that moment. I wasn’t up to thinking much of anything.

  I’d heard it said that you couldn’t get a hangover from alcohol distilled from fermented cactus. I can tell you now that this is a myth. That morning it felt like someone was driving a big spike into my skull and the sunlight hurt my eyes. Old Jack, sitting next to me, thought this was amusing. He seemed totally unaffected.

  Being outside during the day was preferable to sitting in a cell trying to breathe the dry dead air. And the heat meant no one wanted to move, so we were unlikely to cause any problems for the guards. The assembled prisoners huddled in whatever part of the yard was currently in shadow, moving around during the course of the day as the sun arced through the sky. At midday everyone went inside for a meal and a siesta. There were only about a dozen prisoners in total.

  It was a small prison but Maggotsville itself wasn’t much of a place. Other than Old Jack, my fellow inmates were a handful of locals: a kid on a drunk-driving charge who flew an airbike in through the mayor’s front window and out through the back where there wasn’t a window. A couple of vagrants there for the free food and water. And a man accused of scracking his neighbour’s goat, brought into custody for his own protection. That’s what Old Jack told me, though he may have had the story from an unreliable source. None of these men were real desperadoes. The closest we had to that were a couple of crooks that were straight out of a comic book.

  The little one was Paulie Pickles, which was probably an alias. Or maybe his pappy had been an onion farmer. He looked like he’d spent a lot of time on high-gravity planets. It wasn’t just that he was short and squat, he looked like he’d been squashed. His head was a sideways oval and he had no neck. If his legs had been any shorter he’d have been able to scratch his toes without bending. Dark hair sprouted from every bit of his skin, sticking out like spines on a cactus. He was like a hedgehog that someone had sat on. Prickly described him in other ways too. His brow was set in a permanent scowl and his lips had only one setting – sneer. Paulie’s eyes were permanently shadowed and he always looked like he was up to no good. Maybe no one had told him that it was a bad idea for a crook to look like a crook. Though his career options must have been limited by his appearance. His high school counsellor had probably hinted that ‘children’s entertainer’ wasn’t really an option.

  Paulie’s partner was Augie ‘The Axeman’ Allsop. Again, I’m thinking the name was a bit of a giveaway. Augie was the muscle and he obviously took this role literally. Even
in the blistering heat he was over in a corner loading all the cast-iron weights he could find onto a single bar for lifting. His head was shaved smooth and shiny and he had a thick dark moustache. He pretended not to see me watching him and pulled off his shirt and stood flexing. I like a man who looks like a man, but that bulging muscles thing doesn’t really do it for me. He looked like an orange condom stuffed with walnuts. His tattoos had been done by someone who knew what they were doing – a talented artist or maybe a robot. There was a dragon with its wings spread across his chest – and there was enough space for them to be spread wide.

  Augie was vain and he was watching us to make sure we were looking at him. But Paulie was watching us too and that made me uncomfortable.

  “Something’s going on,” I said. “He’s watching us.”

  “He’s been watching you ever since you got in here,” Jack said, nodding towards Augie and grinning. “I think he likes you.”

  I nodded towards Paulie Pickles. “I don’t reckon much to yours.”

  “I’ve had worse,” Jack said and cackled.

  “Randall!” I looked up as my name was called. Grainger, the head guard, was standing by the little cactus garden, the door open behind him. “Warden wants a word with you.” He tried to make it sound threatening, but even without the hangover I could have cared less. I pulled myself to my feet.

  “Be careful today,” I said to Jack, still uneasy.

  “I always am.”

  Grainger tucked his thumbs in his belt and swaggered across the yard, squinting his eyes at me as we passed each other. I resisted the urge to blow him a kiss. The warden appeared in the doorway of his office as I approached.

  “Macready,” I said.

  He turned and disappeared into his office without acknowledging me. We were supposed to call him Mister Macready as a sign of respect – maybe he noticed my omission. I followed him into the office, not closing the door behind me. I wanted to be able to see what was happening in the yard.