Battleship Raider by Paul Tomlinson (book recommendations website .txt) 📗

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