Rick Emmerson Space Pirate: Pirates of the Twenty-Wun Stars, #7

By Jerri O'Powell

On the pirate ship The Twenty-Wun Stars the shoulder that is tapped when you are in need is Rick Emmerson. Second only in charm to the captain, Mr. Emmerson is the go to person when you need something beyond your means. Be it a bottle of spiced rum banned on 12 worlds or a new starship power core. He knows where one is he can get you cheap, free or in trade. The deal always seems too good to be true. There is always this random stuff lying about under his keep until it is not, and he may not have a coin in his pocket but he can get you the world. Throughout this series, Mister Emmerson was the deal making, gift giving, angle working, acquisition procuring, money scrounging, "I thought we needed one of these, so I picked one up", guy.

This is his tale. Who is Mister Emmerson? What makes him tick and why would the devil think twice before striking a deal with him. This is the backstory of Rick Emmerson, pirate.

As the deep sea once gave rise to pirates, so also did deep space . The crew of The Twenty-Wun Stars is one such group of opportunistic souls. This exceptional group of serendipitous scoundrels find themselves under the leadership of Captain Jake Wade. The swaggering mojo at which this man moves thru life is literally infectious. The Captain and the crew travel the galaxy, always on the lookout for their next big score to keep the rum taps flowing in the mess hall, with pirate booty for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McMillian
• Release date: Jan 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201485214

Book preview

Rick Emmerson

Space Pirate

His Path To The Crew of the Twenty-Wun Stars

Table Of Contents

Prelude

Civil War on Winston Proper

A Change of Plans for Triple A 19

Dinner in Kae Boston

The Other Side Of the Line

Where Loyalties Lie

Leap of Faith

Turning The Tides

Epilogue

Prelude

What is the definition of Love? I have my own, but it differs from how I think most people think of it. I know you can't buy love, or at least you are not supposed to be able to. I gotta tell you though, I have no idea why those two things are supposed to be  so exclusionary. Money is a tool. It has been my experience that the right craftsman, with the right tools, and a well thought out plan can build almost anything, including love.  As of today I am worth 2.14 billion credits.

I’m gonna buy me some love.  I’m not buying what most people call love. I mean, I know what romantic love is. I have been in love. I have known the love of a woman. I have known the love of blood family. I have known the love of the people I have chosen to have in my life. I have tried to spend my life surrounded by people I love, who love me back. At least I think I loved them back.  It’s kind of weird. I know how to define love to others so I don't sound like some kind of psychopath, but when I’m being honest the way I define love is not like others do.

I think I know what most people call love, but what love is to me, Rick Rynfold Emmerson… well, it’s like a life lubricant. The more of it you have, the smoother your life goes. I think that sounds bad because for most people, love is the say all, end all, but for me it is a commodity to be created, invested and harvested. It has been my experience that the more love flowing thru you, and around you, the more protected you are from the world, which runs on love.  If you don't have enough love in your life the world will eat you up and shit you out.

Maybe you are beginning to get it. I have said the world runs on love and somehow, when I say it, it sounds like a cold calculating enterprise that is the master key to some galactic super villains' plan to take over the universe. When you have enough of the right kind of love around you, it is a beast you ride that devours your enemies and empowers your friends.

He who has the most love wins. Now it’s not just some warm and fuzzy feeling inside. That’s just the glue that holds it together. You can’t build anything of any worth out of just glue. You need to be gluing stuff together if you want to build something. Celebrities have sooooo much ‘warm and fuzzy’, but they waste it. They just glide on it like the lubricant it is till it all dries up, IDIOTS. They don't fully understand the commodity they have. They don't know how to wield the power of love.

I have felt this way about love since I was a child. My parents… my parents understood LOVE. They taught me and gave me my first understanding of love but even that differs from what I call love now. Let me explain.  I remember so much that they taught me. They taught me so many lessons. The thing I remember most about them was their overarching goal. It was for one to out-love the other, show  who loved who more. By the time I was 10 it was a team sport. I had two little brothers. That made it us, against them. The love match was now not only interpersonal, it was inter-team. While our parents were deep in the game of who loved who more, they also had to keep their guard up from our love tactics. When my brother and I were not being awesome to each other, we were dominating school to show them how much we loved them. No one could be left behind. We helped each other because we all had to accel academically. My first brother was not only a great student but he was a star athlete. My youngest brother was a chemical genius, really, EMA ranked level 2 and a gastronomic mastermind. Starting when he was 8 years old we might wake up to a breakfast fit for royalty at his hands. Me, early on, I had a knack for technology and a mind for business. Of course our parents were dominating the household league. We were not rich, but they... had INCOME. This made them better at the game, well better equipped anyway. From time to time however, their love for us  forced them to let us win some rounds… and we loved them for that.

That said, ever so often, they would put the smack down on us and show us who loved who more. They were winning, we were kids after all. When I went off to college they really cracked my love chops. My parents got me a car, and not just any car, but a brand new atomic Dorvick 7, a car that was not going to need fuel for another 7 years. It was nicer than the family car. I cried like a baby that day. My parents really knew how to weaponize love and I learned from the best. They had created an ecosystem where NOT loving someone was the equivalent of an attack.

While most people speak one, maybe two love languages at a 5th or 6th educational level, all six of us knew every love language, speaking and understanding at a PHD level. It wasn’t just implied it was explicitly taught. By the time we were old enough to have the sex talk it was not even awkward it was just, for us, the next thing. For our family the most powerful love language of all was gift giving. We learned to use the gift giving craft with the constructive force of a nuclear biome warhead. You know the things that make uninhabitable worlds livable. We actually had to dial it back outside the family. Subterfuge and anonymous giving was doled out with the stealth of a ninja. My training was complete when I graduated college. As part of my 3 year plan, which involved a bank president, his daughter, a half dozen other people and some well timed financial investments,  it all came together at my graduation party. On that day my parents got the deed to their home,  paid off 7 years early. Who’s the man now? Before you answer that… I made it look like my parents' home was paid off by my two little brothers. They played right along, but they knew it was me. They knew how the game was played. He who dies with the most love wins. If I had died just then I certainly would have won. My life however was just beginning.

Civil War on Winston Proper

The year I graduated college is the year WInston Proper started talking about joining the confederacy. Those were crazy times. I got a job at the number one computer firm on Winston Proper. I worked in a department with defective server returns. I soon found out that a big part of my job was destroying defective returned servers. Long story short, what turned into snagging parts out of units before they were destroyed to sell for extra cash, turned into yanking parts, building complete servers and selling them. My god the rush was awesome. I made so much money. I was selling starship servers for a fraction of the cost and making a fortune.

A couple of years passed before the actual civil war broke out. At first it was good for business, mine and the company I worked for. I had reached the point where I built my own warehouse and had a stockpile of refurbished starship servers. For a while I was selling servers back to my own company who couldn't keep up with demand. After so many years of doing this I actually didn’t realize how deep my network had gotten. I had 20 people working in my warehouse, and a handful making sure the servers were wiped clean and a sales and logistics network that ran deep into the military. It's that very same network that had me receive a message to my phone that told me,

‘Time To Go! War is coming! You have 3 hours!’.

I sent the message to everyone in