In Pursuit of Bark's Finest

By Luke Mills

On the frontiers of transhumanity’s expansion into the galaxy thousands of light years from the light of Sol, things can get rather chaotic. There are countless millions of nascent interstellar nations securing their interests, pirate ships prospering off plunder and deniable mercenary work, dissidents setting up their own civilizations, and other groups all trying to push an agenda. When these groups crash into each other, the results can become extremely messy and convoluted.

Recently, a frontier nation calling itself the Red Star Union has found itself at the focal point of one such complication. A freighter under their protection has been sabotaged, hijacked in interstellar space, and robbed of its cargo. This would be bad enough even if all it were carrying was luxury goods, but the freighter Nebula Plow was carrying more than just normal trade goods. Indeed, her cargo of Non-Orientable Wormholes for use in starship power plants was both very expensive and very, very dangerous.

Now the Red Star Union has to worry about a pirate crew running around with several extra devices capable of converting matter into antimatter with negligible energy cost. With those, the pirates could be capable of inflicting untold damage if allowed to leverage their ill-gotten gains into a stronger position, a possibility the Union finds completely intolerable. Unfortunately, all that the Red Star Union has to go on for evidence is two names; that of the captain, and that of the ship. The Captain is going by the possible pseudonym of Fuller, while the ship is named Bark’s Finest.

And thus the orders came down to the Union’s Bureau of Starforce Intelligence: find more information on these pirates, conclusively identify them, and figure out where exactly they’ve gone to ground so that the fleet can crush them before they get established. Of the many agents that the bureau assigned to this mission, one would happen to play an important role: Field Agent Madeline Zargosty.

This is her story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luke Mills
• Release date: Jan 8, 2021

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Luke Mills ©2021

All Rights Reserved

Table of Contents

In Pursuit of Bark’s Finest

Prolog: Avast Ye Gravlubbers!

1: Visiting the Church

2: An Audience with Scensia

3: Pirate Port

4: Rough Town, Rough Crowd

5: Hark, an Informant!

6: Welcome to Blackwood

7: Mad Science Safari

8: Consulting an Archive

9: Abandoned Base

10: A Change of Perspective

11: Target Locked

12: Captain Fuller’s Gambit

13: Cleanup Crew

14: Shore Leave

Bonus Content

Short 1: An Obtuse Romance

Short 2: Concerned Friends

Voidskipper Verse Explorer Guide

Avast ye Gravlubbers!

At the Red Star Union’s premier Non-Orientable Wormhole factory in the Stonebeach system a shipment was being prepared for export. The Conjoined Church of Scensia (Transcendence branch) had decided that they would be making a new group of missionary Voidskippers, and since their closest Monastery System still hadn’t developed a domestic wormhole industry, they had placed an order to the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative for eight of the crucial power plant components.

As for making those Non-Orientable Wormholes in the first place, that was a difficult and time consuming job. There were two ways to make a Non-Orientable Wormhole, both of them not exactly straightforward. The first option was to run apocalyptically energetic particle colliders in hopes of randomly deforming spacetime in the correct way, using a wormhole pair to attain effectively infinite length for acceleration. This was not preferred due to large amounts of waste products and energy expenditure for each Non-Orientable Wormhole produced, and was therefore seldom used outside attempts to bootstrap a wormhole industry from nothing.

Vastly more common was to make a communications wormhole and ship one end through an already existing Non-Orientable Wormhole, which was vastly more reliable and predictable, though still expensive. After all, even a communications wormhole required creating a pair of artificial black holes, each one made by crushing fifty four million metric tons of mass into a singularity using a modified warp drive. These proton-sized black holes were then brought as close as possible without allowing them to merge and quantum entangled, with the distance at this step determining the length of the wormhole throat. Then the entangled black holes received an injection of exotic matter, converting them into microscopic traversable wormholes suitable for transferring vast amounts of data between their ends.

Even once either of these methods produced a Non-Orientable Wormhole pair, the process of making a useful product from them was just beginning. Such Non-Orientable Wormholes started out outright sub-microscopic, and since the entire reason Non-Orientable Wormholes were useful was their property of converting matter that went in one end to antimatter at the other, that meant they needed to be inflated to macroscopic sizes at immense expense in terms of energy.

Ironically one of the best ways to get that amount of energy was by using a Non-Orientable Wormhole pair to run a set of massive antimatter reactors of the same sort as Voidskippers used, with the only semi-practical alternative being solar energy collection on a scale you didn’t often see outside Megasystems. Even then, inflating wormholes was still expensive and slow; the total amounts of exotic matter and mass energy that went into any given Non-Orientable Wormhole pair were generally comparable to a decently sizable asteroid when everything was totaled up.

Still, it was for exactly this reason that the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative kept a significant number of completed Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs in inventory; customers usually preferred their wormholes to be delivered promptly, rather than waiting months for them to go from particle collision to finished product.

As such, when the order from the Church came in, the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative simply selected suitable NOW pairs from their inventory, and scheduled a pair of ships to carry them. The separate ends for each Non-Orientable Wormhole pair were always shipped one at a time, so that if one end got stolen, the authorized holder of the other end could simply aim a high-pressure hose through their end and blast the unfortunate thief with literal tons of antimatter. This is where the pirates’ inside men made their first move.

Unbeknownst to the workers of the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative, their proprietary custom security brainware had a very obscure exploit that would permit unauthorized insertion of a pared down mindcast into their cortices. One of the hacker teams in the pirates’ crew had discovered it, and they’d been wondering how to go about using or selling it for a while now. Eventually, they had decided to steal a few Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs, and had set about covertly subverting a few workers in relevant positions.

As such, once the final wormhole connectivity checks were done, the tracking chips on the Non-Orientable Wormhole pairs due for the Church were tampered with, and the shipping manifests surreptitiously edited. As a result, instead of eight halves of a Non-Orientable Wormhole pair being loaded onto the first ship, four complete pairs were loaded aboard. That task done, the delta forks manipulating the workers acting as their hosts deleted themselves to avoid capture.

The only other part of their task that the pirates needed to complete their setup was sabotaging the freighter. After all, if the freighter arrived at its planned mid-skip fully functional then her captain might choose to fight, risking the precious cargo of Non-Orientable Wormholes, not to mention that it would make the freighter escaping all too plausible an outcome. In addition, any and all comms holes aboard the freighter would need to be sabotaged, to prevent her from calling for help and getting immediate support from the Red Star Union’s military.

So the pirates also planted or turned a few conspirators in the dockyards. No fancy mind control gambit this time; instead they simply forged their backgrounds, used some memory suppression brainware whenever they were under scrutiny, found employment, and waited for their opportunity. When that opportunity arrived, the moles in the dockyards grabbed their bags of shaped charges and edited the documentation to say that the freighter Nebula Plow (Registry Code #6cef-1370-3234-32e8-7579-29ca-70a6-580f) was due for an inspection, which the moles of course agreed to perform.

This level of deception was necessary in order to successfully infiltrate a Voidskipper. Such vessels were kept under constant, comprehensive surveillance run by a specially designed mind. If they had been aboard without authorization, the saboteurs would have been detected almost immediately, and the entire plan would have been sunk. Still, the saboteurs did have authorization, and conveniently it was authorization that provided a valid reason for them to access critical components for the ship’s safe function.

There were five major power conduits aboard the Nebula Plow that needed to be disabled in order to render the ship properly stricken. Three of these power conduits were used to supply the warp drive with energy, and the other two each supplied power to one of the communications lasers attached to the comm holes that would have allowed those aboard to call for help with precise co-ordinates when their warp drive was disabled. If all five of these were rendered inoperable, then the Nebula Plow would be helpless until these components were repaired.

The falsified inspection went like clockwork, with all ten charges being successfully planted. Within 1.5 kiloseconds the saboteurs were all back at the dockyards and beginning their exit strategy. Then, and only then did the Nebula Plow depart from her berth.

At this point in time, Captain Jurgen was still completely unaware that his ship had been tampered with. He was still rather annoyed at the surprise inspection causing a holdup, but he was willing to tolerate it. He passed the time in the Nebula Plow’s command lounge, idly stirring a cup of hot Geffanzh with his lower limbs, even as he used his upper pair to do some recreational circuit board soldering.

Still, after a few kiloseconds of waiting, Stonebeach Orbital Control sent a transmission saying Nebula Plow, your inspection is complete, and you are now free to depart to Palemission.

Captain Jurgen acknowledged this and sent back via his morph’s integrated interface Affirmative. We are now vectoring towards Palemission. Is the timewall clear for egress?

The Nebula Plow’s nose slowly aligned towards the white dwarf known as Palemission, even as Orbital Control replied We are opening a port in the timewall for your use. Co-ordinates have been sent to your astrogation systems.

Jurgen felt the hum of the ship as her warp drive engaged at sub light power, Skimming through spacetime towards her designated egress port. A few kiloseconds later, the Nebula Plow had passed the tightly spaced swarm of time-dilated comm hole buoys used to defend Stonebeach from unauthorized FTL entry. While the freighter in question wasn’t moving FTL during egress, her comm holes could have been broken if she passed through without waiting. They’d still be there of course, but they would have wound up connecting to branch timelines if a closed timelike curve had been produced, and that would have been much less useful.

Either way, the Nebula Plow made it through the timewall without incident. Stonebeach Orbital Control transmitted Nebula Plow, you are clear for FTL. I repeat, Nebula Plow, you are clear for FTL.

Jurgen smiled as he felt the Nebula Plow start pushing her power plant to Skip Power, the previous low-level hum rising to a low roar as her power plant reached 150 Exawatts of output, storing the immense amounts of energy needed to exceed the speed of light in spacetime itself as the warp drive entered charging mode. From the outside, the massive freighter’s radiator fins increased in luminosity to a white hot intensity from their previous dull red glow. To dump even more heat from the 150 Exawatt power plant, massive plumes of waste plasma from the reaction were vented directly into space, shedding light comparable to the heart of a continuous nuclear fireball. A few moments later, just before the skip happened, the captain transmitted back Affirmative. See you again soon, Stonebeach.

Then the warp drive fired, wrapping Nebula Plow in a field of distorted spacetime that catapulted it forwards through the interstellar medium. In a mere fraction of a microsecond, the Voidskipper moved a light year and a half, massive amounts of interstellar gas accumulating in the Event Horizon formed by her warp bubble. Then that Event Horizon disappeared as the warp drive was briefly fired in reverse to prevent the formation of a black hole, and all that mass was re-emitted as Hawking Radiation in a single instant, a diffuse pulse of energy equivalent to billions of tons of TNT washing off the Nebula Plow’s armored hull.

Then the charges went off. Instantly alarms both audible and digital started blaring in Nebula Plow’s command lounge, Captain Jurgen spilling his drink everywhere as he jumped out of his seat and called out What happened!?. Immediately the chief engineer replied over the ship’s intranet Looks like sabotage, captain! The instant our warp field collapsed the power conduits for our warp drive and comm holes all got blasted simultaneously; it looks to have been RDX-based shaped charges with a thermite follow-up. The power conduits have been completely severed and the ends coated in heat-forming material; it’ll take at least ten kiloseconds to cut out the wrecked sections and manufacture replacement superconducting cable.

Jurgen barely had time to growl in frustration before a notification of an incoming call appeared on the ship’s systems, along with an alert that another Voidskipper had just appeared out of a skip ten thousand kilometers away with both her panel and hull-flush radiators glowing brightly and her weapon turrets extending from below her armor layers. When he accepted the call, Jurgen’s suspicions and fears were nigh-instantly proven right.

The video component of the call was showing a figure that could only be a pirate. A tall, imposing robot, with thick, overbuilt limbs and a copious amount of weaponry was standing in what was obviously a combat information center. The robot grinned menacingly using the video screen making up the bottom half of their face, before declaring "Hello. I am Captain Fuller of the… shall we say... free trader Bark’s Finest. You have certain high-value items in your cargo hold that we want. Your options are as follows. You can either let us transfer those goods to our own vessel without resistance, or we’ll slag your warp drive and power plant before boarding and taking them anyway. You have thirty seconds to decide."

Jurgen waited all of ten seconds before he made his reply, angrily tugging on his long, floppy ears as he replied Fine. You can have our cargo, you infuriatingly smug pirate. Any chance of some assistance getting back underway in exchange?

Captain Fuller laughed, before replying Of course not! We do need to make good on our escape afterwards after all, and every second you lot are busy fixing your ship is another second we can use to put distance between us and you. Now open up that cargo bay door nice and wide. We’ll have Skimmers ready to blow your ship if you try anything while we’re aboard.

Putting action to those words, kilometer-long doors on the Bark’s Finest opened and five smaller ships were released into the vacuum of space, each about a kilometer in length. The Skimmers quickly took up positions around the Nebula Plow, even as Bark’s Finest opened her cargo bay and pulled up alongside. Cables quickly secured the cargo bays to each other, and the pirates began to come aboard.

From the command lounge, Jurgen watched powerlessly through the surveillance system as the pirates EVA’d aboard the Nebula Plow. Then he spotted the special, extremely heavy-duty load moving equipment used to shift wormholes, and he blanched. Still, he didn’t dare do anything while the pirates were aboard.

All in all, it took the pirates half a kilosecond to get the hole-movers into position. With an immense whine of linear motors running at maximum power, the incredibly massive Non-Orientable Wormholes began moving towards the pirate ship’s cargo hold, the specially-built handling pods containing each one not even buckling as well over a billion metric tons of mass were transferred with each end.

Two kiloseconds later the pirates had stolen every single Non-Orientable Wormhole aboard the Nebula Plow, even as the vast majority of her other cargo was also transferred to Bark’s Finest. Not everything admittedly; Bark’s Finest had a smaller cargo capacity, but the pirates certainly absconded with most of the high-value cargo.

True to their word, as soon as the pirates got what they came for, Bark’s Finest disengaged from Nebula Plow, and her Skimmers returned to their hangars. As the pirate ship cleared some distance between her and the hapless freighter and started vectoring to FTL, Captain Fuller took the opportunity to remark Pleasure doing business with you! We make a point of maintaining good customer satisfaction here on Bark’s Finest. On a scale of zero to seven, how would you rate your experience?

Captain Jurgen’s face contorted into a rictus of fury, but he barely had time to send Cork your antimatter injectors you-! before Bark’s Finest vanished into the distorted spacetime of a superluminal skip.

The instant that the pirates left, Captain Jurgen used the intranet to call engineering and digitally shout I don’t care what you have to do, get one of our comm holes able to send again ASAP!

The engineering crews worked diligently in the bowels of the Nebula Plow, directing the swarms of maintenance drones to repair the damaged section of power conduit. To their credit, with all efforts focused on repairing only a single area, they managed to reduce the time required to only three kiloseconds. The communications laser went through its boot sequence smoothly and rapidly, and then signaled the Command Lounge that it could now contact the receiver on the other side of the spacetime discontinuity it was attached to.

Immediately, Captain Jurgen sent a distress message to the freighter’s home port in the Whirlpool system, not only including Nebula Plow’s precise galactic co-ordinates, but also the exact nature of the sabotage she had suffered and the cargo that had been stolen. This message was immediately received in the capitol system of the Red Star Union, prompting several actions.

First and foremost, the message was immediately relayed through the Red Star Union’s extremely comprehensive comm hole network between the eight dwarf stars under their jurisdiction to the Stonebeach system. There, under the glare of a red dwarf sun the message was passed on again, both to the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative, the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence, and to the RSU Starforce fleet base in-system.

At the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative, there were three maximum-priority actions that they needed to take. First and foremost, they needed to notify the customer that the delivery had been hijacked by pirates, and the order would therefore be delayed. This was readily achieved using a standardized form transmitted via comm hole link to Palemission.

A few seconds later, the Conjoined Church of Scensia sent a reply, reading:

"Dear Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative,

We appreciate your honesty in regards to the delays in our ordered Non-Orientable Wormholes. We understand that there are at times factors beyond your control, and wish you well. Please ensure that you investigate the cause of this disruption very thoroughly to make sure that it does not happen again. Our order for the wormhole pairs still stands, and we are willing to wait for them to arrive on their delayed schedule.

Sincerely, Scensia."

It was formal and old-fashioned, as communications went. Still, it served its purpose well enough.

The second maximum-priority task for the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative was activating the anti-theft features on the wormhole pairs they had shipped, so as to kill off the pirates before they could get much further. The wormhole ends in need of a good hosing down were quickly identified. They were then isolated from the rest of the storage facility using the heavy-duty inductive motor trams used for moving such things until they were half a Megameter clear at the Emergency Demolition Facility. Only once the wormhole ends and their containment units were there, their fuel input ports were hooked up to the high-pressure hoses used for anti-theft wormhole pumping, using remote controlled drones.

The pumps activated, and well over a cubic meter per second of water was sent blasting through each wormhole end. The hoses and pumps were well engineered for this rate of flow, taking the water directly to where it was supposed to go. Due to some interesting quirks of distorted spacetime, the streams of water missed each other as they flowed through the throat of the wormhole. Then they exited, now having been inverted to antimatter by their passage through the Non-Orientable Wormholes.

The Emergency Demolition Facility, in short, exploded. Fortunately for the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative it had been designed with this sort of event in mind, and the damage was sufficiently directed and distant that no personnel or actually important infrastructure were harmed. Only now did they realize that the third maximum-priority action was needed: identifying the security holes that had allowed this to happen and closing them to prevent a repeat occurrence.

It took them five kiloseconds of ripping through every single infosystem they had to identify that there was a security exploit in their defensive brainware, then another twenty kiloseconds to find and patch it. During this time frame they also uncovered the tampering with the shipping manifests, as well as every other act of sabotage that the pirates had performed. By the end of thirty kiloseconds from the start of their security review, that particular exploit would never work again.

Happening in parallel with this, the fleet was mobilizing. While the pirates had almost certainly made their escape by now, chasing them down wasn’t their only goal; there was a stricken Voidskipper out there, and Nebula Plow would need protecting until she could repair the sabotage that had been done to her. To ensure this came to pass, two Cruisers and an Escort Carrier were deployed to the co-ordinates where Nebula Plow had been waylaid, taking up a defensive formation around the freighter.

As for the rest of the fleet? Of the almost two million military Voidskippers stationed in the vicinity of Stonebeach, around twelve thousand of them were deployed to scour the space within two light years of the system for any trace of the pirates. As expected they didn’t find anything, but at the very least they could truthfully claim an attempt was made, and that all the nearby rogue planets not already claimed by the Red Star Union had been checked for signs of pirate bases.

Twenty kiloseconds later, Nebula Plow had traveled to the Whirlpool system for an actual inspection, as the entire ship was now considered to be unsafe until it had been gone over very thoroughly for any further sabotage. On his part, Captain Jurgen was greatly relieved by this state of affairs, as it meant there hopefully wouldn’t be any further nasty surprises for him when he came back off leave.

Even aside from the events at the Stonebeach Wormhole Cooperative and the movements of the Red Star Union’s space fleet, the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence had its own high-priority tasks to undertake. First on the agenda was figuring out exactly how the Nebula Plow had been sabotaged in the first place, and capturing the perpetrators for interrogation afterwards.

The first part was incredibly easy to spot in retrospect; the doctored documentation that the saboteurs had used to board the freighter carrying the now-missing wormhole pairs stuck out like a sore thumb once actual serious scrutiny was applied to it. It admittedly was much harder to figure out who’d been eating the chemical precursors for the bombs they used, but investigating the finances of the restaurant scene in the habitats attached to the dockyards provided the answer after some careful analysis.

After all, while practically everyone ate the relevant elements in sufficient quantities, eating enough to make a stockpile of explosives was still a notable irregularity. After all, the biologically integrated 3D printers that everyone had couldn’t violate conservation of mass, meaning all that feedstock matter had to come from somewhere. Spotting who had been eating extra meals and in a position to assist in performing the sabotage narrowed down the leads considerably, and refining the criteria brought the matter down to a handful of absolutely guilty suspects.

Now the investigators knew exactly who was to blame for sabotaging the Nebula Plow, and it was only a matter of chasing them down to capture for interrogation before they could escape. Unfortunately, the saboteurs had already used the period of time between disembarking the Nebula Plow and her report of getting waylaid by pirates to escape. To be more specific, they had visited the premises of Far Star Ventures, a struggling Mindcasting travel agency of mixed repute. Indeed, their mixed repute was the exact reason they were struggling.

Once there, they had requested that their mindstates be transferred to a very specific address, and that their sending selves be permanently deleted. To ensure immediate service, they paid far more than the asking rate for Mindcast travel, and given Far Star Ventures’ tight financial state they had accepted without a second thought. By the time the investigation team served their search warrant for the premises, the saboteurs had already been safely shuffled through the comms hole network to who knew where for well over two kiloseconds. Far Star Ventures was subsequently placed under far tighter regulation than previous given their unwitting role in the plot, but the damage was already done.

The other major project of the Bureau of Starforce Intelligence was to identify the pirate crew now running around with several additional Non-Orientable Wormholes, collect information on their modus operandi and general disposition, and ultimately track them down. These pirates had already proven themselves a disturbingly cunning and competent threat to pull this sort of heist off in the first place, and now