The Chronicles of Clyde: Unafilliated Read online

  THE CHRONICLES OF CLYDE

  F.E. ARLISS

  Cover Design: Rafael Mattey

  Cover Photo: David McKenzie

  Cover Model: Lisa Graham

  Many thanks to wonderful husband, Andrew Erwin for the many re-reads and edits, and to Lea Ann Walker for her insights.

  Table of Contents

  1Learning Curve

  2Arc Welded

  3Built

  4Arizona Boys

  5Shot From a Cannon

  6Run to Renegar

  7Idolum Introduction

  8Idolum Alliance

  9Feast

  10Two Quirkes in the Clyde

  11Acceptance

  12Renegar Reunion

  13Idolum Empire Explained

  14Warp Waylaid

  15The Game is Afoot

  16Weapons Test

  17Tragedy Tracked

  18Ugliness on Uzi

  19Blood Isn’t Thicker Than Water

  20Idolum Intervention

  21Princess Arc Exousia Quirke

  22One Demanding Customer

  23Angus and Alfie in Action

  Table of Contents (cont’d)

  24Princess Arc Exousia Quirke Brings It

  25Evil Evelsons

  26Quirkes, Quirkes and More Quirkes

  Chapter One

  Learning Curve

  Arc Copperfield finished cleaning the small titanium alloy blade and slipped it into a cleverly concealed pocket inside one of the Tungsten-infused nanotech gauntlets she wore on each wrist. Fully loaded. That always felt better.

  Arc liked to be ready. She liked knowing that if anything threatening came her way, she was going down fighting. Not that Arc liked fighting. She didn’t. It was just a fact of life. Fight or die.

  Arc found that most people were afraid of dying. That made them fearful. Fear made one hesitate, and that got people killed. That was also a fact of life. Fear undid all manner of good intentions. She had learned that young.

  Stooping to tighten the tough synth-leather monk-strap over the instep of her boot, Arc caught a glimpse of herself in the surface of the black chromium-lined locker her gear was stowed in. Long pale-blonde hair, big blue eyes, generous mouth, long straight nose, all topped a muscled, small- breasted, athletic frame.

  Letting herself take a moment to look over her gear in the reflection, Arc was amazed at how she’d changed in the last few years. It was hard work strapping down loads and transferring cargo. She was a toned slab of muscle and sinew due to that exertion.

  They got into some pretty bad situations with pirates and thieves. Learning to fight had lengthened her frame and given her more grace than she’d ever had before. Those ballet lessons her parents had insisted were ‘just the thing’ had been a complete waste of time.

  It took effort to kill pirates, the stupid morons, though some were easier than others. She wore her armored combat gear like it was her own skin. At first it had seemed strange, making her feel a little inhuman. But eventually, the security of the gear and the need for its protection had endeared the black, light as air synth-armor to her. Besides the protection it offered in a fight, armor shielded her from the heavy cargo they moved and kept her safe when she needed to move big loads. It was amazing the number of fingers, toes, legs and forearms that went missing on cargo crews due to shifting of heavy containers.

  Slapping a synth-leather beret on her head, Arc admitted to herself that armor looked kinda cool too. Grinning, Arc headed to the bridge of Clyde, their cargo hauler, to set the coordinates for their next load.

  Dag Doyle was already on the bridge checking the new upgrades they’d just installed with the profit from their last trip, a long haul to a creepy-ass asteroid prison colony run by the Intergalactic Guard. It had just been a food haul, but security had run high as a prisoner-carrier had been hijacked eight years ago and the crew killed by an escaped Idolum warrior and his human accomplice.

  The place was still freaked out over that event, so security was tight on the asteroid. They also paid a premium since it had a bad reputation as a real pain-in-the-ass haul. Arc didn’t mind. It had paid for some really lethal automatic plasma cannons that were now mounted on Clyde’s belly.

  Dag Doyle was part Swedish and part Irish, not that it really mattered anymore. Earth was poisoned and no one survived on the surface. Maybe in bunkers in Idaho, but not on the surface. Too much radiation. Maybe it was like those ancient vids her nanny used to show her when she was a kid…’The Walking Dead’ or some such nonsense.

  When she’d had the chance to jump on this cargo hauler as a deckhand, she’d taken it. Companies were taking on laborers that had no genetic anomalies and an IQ score above 90. That lottery won, she’d simply put down her experience of being raised in farm country, rural Midwest, and she’d made the cut for physical labor.

  She and Dag met on the first day after being hired by a salty old cargo Commander who looked over the available recruits and chose the two of them. He’d taken Dag for his physique and polite manner. He’d taken Arc for the fact that, in his words, she was ‘easy on the eyes’ and smart and sassy.

  He’d called her a lightweight in the lineup and she’d only laughed and returned, “Lightweight maybe. Light in brains and motivation, not so much.” Many of the other applicants had been too cocky, too flirty, or too surly for the old Commander. He’d liked her blend of sass, looks and humor.

  She’d had a shaggy pixie back then, and had been drop-dead gorgeous in her street clothes. Not that she wasn’t still. The hair was longer and though she’d lost all her soft curves, the effect was still stunning, just much, much tougher.

  Arc had been hired for no specific purpose, just as an all-rounder, as they called general labor. She had simply been happy to get a ride off-planet. She’d left everything behind. Even her name wasn’t the one she was born with. She’d made it up at the testing center.

  Dag had been hired as a deckhand and didn’t think for a minute that Arc would be able to keep up with his athleticism. What she’d lacked then in muscle, she made up in hustle. He was slower than she was because of his height and mass. In the first year alone, she’d saved him several times over and christened him ‘Dog’ for his slow reaction times. She’d had to explain the joke to him as Dag and dog all sounded the same with his accent.

  Twice lazy crewmen hadn’t secured loads properly and during jumps they’d come unfastened, sliding helter skelter across the decks towards the crew berths. Pushing Dag’s sleeping form out of the way on the first episode of ‘cargo gone wild’ had secured their friendship. The second episode had killed the other deckhand, Trilby something-or-other. Dead by his own lazy hand.

  Arc had become Second Mate due to that slip up. It turned out that ‘having no genetic anomalies’ didn’t necessarily mean that the person having an IQ over 90 also had common sense.

  She’d gotten a small private, steel-box of a room out of that promotion. It had had two bunks, one bunk folded up above the other. Trilby had never used the upper bunk as anything other than a junk shelf. Arc asked Dag if he wanted it, and they were soon happily ensconced in their first private quarters. Dag’s feet hung off the upper bunk about a foot. He swore he didn’t mind. He slept better with cold feet.

  Most folks thought Dag was her lover, but during the first week working together she’d seen the twinkle in his eyes for an overtly gay bartender on Gateka, the first world they’d stopped at, and knew at once Dag wasn’t the least bit interested in her. Not that she minded. He was a good friend, and she needed that more than she needed the problems a relationship always brought.

  They answered to a salty old Commander by the name of Ewan Quirke. �
�What a perfect name’ was all Dag and Arc could joke about. The grizzled Commander had so many quirks that it was ridiculous to try and keep up with them.

  One of them was crawling under the navigation console on the bridge to catch a nap. It was bizarre and caught quite a number of new crew off-guard. Quirke would wake up when voices came through the hatch and jump up surprising them in mid-sentence.

  Another weird behavior was his propensity for picking dead strips of skin off his knotty, sandpaper-like forearms, and piling it into little mole-hills around the ship where he’d been sitting a few moments before. Ok, so Quirke’s quirks could be disgusting as well as strange.

  Most people these days didn’t even know what a quirk was, so the humor was lost on the rest of the crew when Arc and Dag joked about it. Dag, having had a Swedish boarding school education, spoke better English than Arc.

  In retrospect, Quirke had been a better commander than she’d thought in those early years. At each outpost, Quirke would demand that they ‘take in the local sights’. That could mean anything from cock-fighting to ballet. That first month alone, Arc saw more savage and beautiful things than she’d seen in her entire prior life.

  Commander Quirke also demanded that they learn self-defense. Each station and outpost had its own local sensei or weapons master. At each stop he made them learn at least one move from the local ‘warrior’. Each rotation at six bells, he’d roust them down to the cargo hold and make them practice the moves. The Commander was really good. He was quick, strong, and surprisingly flexible for such an old guy. Arc and Dag took some hard hits that first year as they wised-up and learned to defend themselves.

  By the time the first three months were over, Dag and Arc had mastered at least six life-saving self-defense moves and a couple of completely off-the-wall tactics that would surprise any classically trained martial arts expert.

  Chapter Two

  Arc Welded

  Arc and Dag had been onboard for six months before they learned why the cargo hauler was named Clyde. To Arc, Commander Quirke was old, really old. It was impossible to tell how old because there weren’t any records on him in the system. He was just a string of knotty muscle, wizened skin, hooded blazingly-blue eyes, and long, stringy white hair.

  He wore his hair in a long braid down his back. One night in the mess after a particularly good haul and a better bottle of Zabadian brandy, he showed them an image capture of himself as a young man wearing the same long braid, but topped by a skull helmet and wearing a black leather vest. He’d been what they called a ‘biker’ back in those days and had ridden with a ‘motorcycle gang’ that had a very lucrative business in some sort of import smuggling.

  When he’d been ready to leave Earth behind, he’d joined his father’s crew on Clyde. They’d all just stared at him with their mouths hanging open. When he’d told them that there were four other Clyde’s out in space manned by his brothers, they just continued to gape. A fleet of Quirkes, that would be something to see! All commanding ‘Clydes’. Their Clyde was the root ship, or good ol’ plain Clyde. Clyde.2 through Clyde.4 were the ships piloted by Quirke’s brothers.

  It turned out ‘their’ Clyde was the second generation of Clydes in space, and the first had been named after another ‘Clyde’ before that. That one had been a massive tractor-trailer combo that had hauled freight by road. The Clydes before that had been either hover-wagons, trucks or seafaring ships. Each Clyde was one in a long line of other transports.

  Before the string of Clyde the ships, there had been a wagon pulled by a horse named Clyde. That had been somewhere in Scotland in the late 1700’s. The horse was named Clyde because Quirke’s twenty-times-removed great-grandfather had been too lazy to give him a proper name and had just abbreviated his breed of Clydesdale horse to Clyde.

  Quirke’s family had always been in the cargo trade. Generation after generation found the best way to make money from trade - legal or otherwise - and to capitalize on it. Arc suspected that the Commander was probably the first Quirke in two centuries to be halfway law-abiding. And frankly, she and Dag weren’t sure they didn’t have some sketchy cargo hidden somewhere. Quirke was a clever old guy and cagey as hell.

  Arc and Dag spent several weeks mulling over the implications of hauling illegal cargo. Finally, Arc decided she didn’t care. The Commander had gotten her off Earth and into space. Her loyalties lay with him. Dag agreed. It was a good thing they’d discussed the idea, because it wasn’t long until they had to act on their decision.

  On a long run from Gateka to Zabados 9, the Clyde ran into pirates. Not your normal run-of-the-mill pirates either. Usually they’d just threaten to board and a little bargaining would result in part of the cargo being transferred as a ransom. Commander Quirke would report the cargo stolen to the companies and Interstellar Insurance would pay out a premium. That had happened twice in the past. The Commander had actually known one of the pirate crews, and after chatting for a bit with the Captain, had bargained to retain three-quarters of the cargo. That amiable arrangement had allowed them to break even on the cargo run and avoid another insurance claim.

  The pirates on this run were Dreasing. Arc had only seen Dreasing at a distance as Quirke hated them. They gave any Dreasing a wide berth when they were aboard stations, though most stations didn’t allow them at all.

  She’d only seen them once, at a small outpost near Zabados 9 that dealt in salvaged parts. They’d stopped there only long enough to bargain for a backup generator for the septic system - a part that was hard to find on the fringes of civilization. Quirke didn’t want to EVER have to go without sanitation systems. Arc agreed.

  She and Dag had heard the rumors, too. The Dreasing liked to kill people. They were a scaled, bronze-colored, upright warrior race who liked to fight, kill and maim. They had no ethics and no honor.

  When Dag spotted pirates on the sensors, an enlarged look through the long-range scanners showed the strange, hook-topped ship to be a Dreasing vessel. Quirke ordered them to make a run for the nearest space stockade. They didn’t make it.

  They made a full burn for a little outpost called Jife, which was simply a way-station in the middle of nowhere. It had fuel depots, repair bays, and stores supplies. Most importantly, it had an automated mine field and a large set of laser cannons mounted atop the depot.

  Jife did not allow Idolum - a strange elongated species that fed upon mammalian energy, Dreasing, or Arachnians - a spider-like species that ate human flesh, to use the depot. They’d have gotten a course plot through the minefield if they’d made it close enough to hail the platform.

  Clyde’s burn hadn’t even gotten them within hailing distance when the Dreasing caught up to them. This time Arc could see that Commander Quirke was not going to be doing any bargaining. He’d already channeled all energy to their shields, and his First and Third mates, Tad and Jayla Wyatt, manned the top turret guns.

  Tad and Jayla were cousins and highly competitive. That sort of thing could get old when there’s nothing to do but play cards. Brawls between the two were not uncommon. Though many would think these brawls unfair by looking at the two, they weren’t. Jayla was half the size of her cousin and she could hold her own.

  Jayla fought so dirty that Arc and Dag refused to practice with her except for twice a month, the time required for their bruises to heal between bouts. Quirke wouldn’t let them off completely, saying that dirty fighters had a lot to teach them. Arc noticed he didn’t say that in front of Jayla!

  This time, as they manned the two rotating guns, the cousins were trying to joke, but the Commander’s grim visage had communicated enough tension to the crew that the cousins’ banter was strained.

  Dag had the bridge. Arc, being the best shot of the crew, and Commander Quirke were positioned in the cargo hold. Arc had a sweaty-palmed death-grip on her laser rifle and several back-up laser pistols stuck in the waist of her pants. She hoped she didn’t shoot a butt-cheek off accidentally.

  The grizzled old Commander h
ad positioned her behind a large net-covered stack of metal containers and himself on top of another stack on the opposite side of the airlock.

  “Don’t let them get in, girl!” the Commander barked at her. “If they do, we’re all dead. Do ya’ hear me?” he asked again, looking at her.

  “I hear you, Sir,” Arc said firmly, wiping her trigger finger on the leg of her pants for the umpteenth time.

  “When they hit the lock, you start taking them down. One at a time. That’s all you can do. Don’t waste your shots. There are usually only about eight to ten of them. Just find the first one and fire ‘til he’s down. Then move on. It’s just like stacking freight. First one, then the next. Mow ‘em down. Don’t hesitate. You got that?” he barked at her again.

  “I’ve got it, Commander. I’ve got it,” Arc repeated to herself in a whisper.

  Nodding his head, Quirke grinned at her and said, “Yes, I reckon you do, girl. I reckon you do.” A few seconds passed, then he added, “If I go down, our best cargo is behind the bunk in my cabin. Just unbolt the panel to get it out.”