Free KRAKEN by Vivian Vixen Page B

trips.  You’re only going to be able to keep the line open for a few minutes, tops.”
    Erthur shook his head. “Right.  Best shot.” He smiled at Aydra. “Cheers.”
    This was the bread and butter of pirates everywhere.  It was hard to pull a decent profit from a true raid, ship to ship.  It took months of planning to find a government craft’s plot and to intercept it at the right spot where reinforcements couldn’t get to it in time.  You lost a lot of men on raids like that, lost some good artillery.  And that’s only if you didn’t mistake a fake convoy for a real one.  It was only if you won.  You only made money if the guy you kidnapped was worth enough.  Or if the technology you captured was advanced enough to sell well on the black market.  There’s always someone willing to buy—the question was for how much.
    But Aydra didn’t have to worry about that.  She was just a mechanic, even if she did know how to work the computers.
    All she cared about was what to be prepared for, where she was heading next.  She picked up bits and pieces listening to the whispers over the broken intercom.  They were on their way back to the main system, Sol, and lucky too.  They’d land just as soon as her contract was up.
    Thing was, with contracts like her, and pirates like them, they kept their word.  If you were mid-flight, between systems and your contract ended, you’d either sign on for another tour, on their terms, or get ejected naked into the vacuum of space.  If you were resting and refueling at an outpost planet you might spend the rest of your days there.  But, if you were lucky enough, you might end up somewhere populated, a good spaceport where you could work your wares and move on to the next job.
    She heard that they were going to dock around the Plutonian moon Charon.  It was as close to Earth as a craft with notoriety as theirs could get without being noticed.
    Charon was an unofficial waystation, the last populated stop before venturing through interstellar space.  Anyone with money or sensibility stopped at Oberon, around Uranus, before going on.  For the rest—the desperate and needy, the hopeless and hopeful—Charon was their last chance.
    It was Aydra’s best chance.
    Many were born there, a few went by choice, and some were marooned—but anyone who managed to get out never went back unless they had no choice.  It didn’t matter what part of the galaxy you had been raised in, from Mars to the wispy edges of the Centaurus Arm—where even Earth was forgotten—everyone had heard stories about Charon.
    The city there had been born in the early twenty-third century to much fanfare.  It was an autonomous civilization, handed over to the men and women who built it.  It was to be home to the very first launchport into interstellar space.  From the Charonian orbit, ships would set out for Alpha Centauri, then Sirius, Arcturus, Pollux, Castor, and onwards to the unnamed worlds scattered in the emptiness of space.
    The city on Charon rose from the planet like a pyramid, the central structures rising proud and tall, over six kilometers into the airless sky.  Then, as supplies and funds had dwindled, or as workers had been killed, injured, or drawn into other pursuits, the buildings became gradually smaller, less grandiose, until, at the base of the pyramidal city, the smallest and most pathetic structures rose from the dust, or were dug into the ground.  It became clear in short order that one could do anything on Charon.
    Markets for drugs or weapons or the bits of classified data that could lead to influence back on the home worlds sprang up and anyone who could afford the lengthy and expensive trip to Charon would have access to the best and worst that had been, or would ever be, offered.  In the deepest recesses of the city, over the endless stretching centuries, strange cults, fueled by wicked drugs, became the powerful lords of the whole Charonian metropolis. 
    Stumbling