by Kal Spriggs
Brian looked up from where he and Johnny Woodard had been cleaning weapons, “Swaim has a mom? Bring up her picture!”
“No!” Swaim blurted, but it was already too late.
The woman who appeared on the holographic display was quite simply breathtaking, and even Mel could appreciate that. She had curves in the right spots, long flowing platinum blonde hair, and stunning blue eyes. It only took Mel a few seconds to recognize her, “Isn't that Samantha Yewell?” Mel asked.
Samantha Yewell was an actress and a media personality. She'd made millions in acting, but she also chaired some kind of charities and she produced her own news and media interviews, distributed throughout planetary networks on dozens of worlds. Mel seemed to remember something about her volunteering work on a few disaster relief missions, but she couldn't remember the details.
“Indeed,” Fenris growled. “I gather she's something of a celebrity...”
“You weren't supposed to tell anyone!” Swaim protested.
“Unless it fell under circumstances in which your identity presented a risk to us,” Fenris replied. “And this is a risk, because she's been approved to run an interview with our prisoner... which means she'll be coming aboard the ship.”
“She's coming aboard this ship?” Brian asked with a smirk. “Swaim, buddy, you've got to introduce me...”
“I will fucking kill you,” Swaim snapped.
Brian's eyes went wide. Thus far, Swaim had been like a kid brother, mostly goofy and friendly. Occasionally intimidated by a member of the crew, but by and large, the last thing any of them would have expected was for him to threaten anyone... especially not a bioengineered super soldier.
“If you touch her, if you look at her funny, I will kill you,” Swaim snarled.
Brian's eyes narrowed, “Listen, you little punk--”
“Okay,” Mel interrupted, “I think that's enough, both of you.”
Brian and Swaim both looked over at her. For a moment, the anger on their faces was enough for Mel to hesitate, but she went on, “This is a potential threat to not just us, but her, as well,” Mel said. “If she recognizes you, Swaim, then that's going to put her in danger. Brian, Swaim wants to protect his family and you're endangering not just his family, you're endangering us.”
Brian scowled at her, but after a moment he gave a single nod. He understood. Thank God, Mel thought. The last thing she wanted was for their relatively clueless would-be hacker to try to go toe-to-toe with a genetically engineered super-soldier. It wouldn't work out well for Swaim.
“Now,” Mel said, “I'll handle the meet and greet and coordination. Swaim, just hang out in your personal quarters the whole time she's aboard... and Brian, you stay in your quarters when you aren't on prisoner detail.”
Brian rolled his eyes. “Sure. Though we might need to rotate people through on that detail. He's commented a couple of times how it's curious the same couple of us are his guards.”
Mel frowned as she considered that. She'd put Johnny Woodard and Brian on the guard detail, mostly because she felt that she could trust both of them to do the job and not get caught up in ulterior motives. Her other options were Bob Walker or Marcus. Bob still hadn't revealed what agency he worked for or what his ultimate goals were with their group, so she didn't want to give him full access to their prisoner. Marcus, on the other hand, was... unpredictable.
Their resident engineer and mad scientist, Aldera Kynes, wasn't a good option, either. Mel didn't know that she trusted the woman at all for all that she liked her and besides that, she didn't really have much in the way of weapons training. Plus it looks like she and Bob are a 'thing' now...
“Tell him we're only putting our two most trusted and capable people on him,” Mel responded.
“Great,” Brian rolled his eyes again, “Look, not that I really get all that tired, but standing outside his door for twelve hours at a time is, well, boring. I thought there would be a lot more killing people and breaking stuff in this whole mercenary gig.”
“Given the choice between getting paid without having people try to kill you and not, you're saying you'd rather have people try to kill you?” Mel asked
“...yeah, why?” Brian looked confused by the question.
“Nevermind,” Mel growled. These people are crazy...
“Fenris, coordinate for her to come aboard and have her interview,” Mel said. “Preferably a short window so we can get rid of her quickly.”
“Indeed,” Fenris growled. “I'll take care of it.”
“In the future,” Mel said, “let's try to avoid any such surprises, alright?” She glared at Swaim, who just shrugged. No wonder he's so clueless, he comes from ridiculous wealth. Hopefully their guest would do his interview and they could get rid of the woman quickly.
What else can go wrong? Mel thought to herself. A moment later, Mel actually felt the ship roll as Fenris fired his maneuver thrusters.
“We have an inbound kinetic object, I am attempting to evade,” Fenris growled. “I do not have time to bring our warp drive fully operational...”
***
Fenris could see and react faster than any human. His central computing core was a quantum processor, an optical crystaline matrix that could examine, consider, and make decisions at light-speed.
His sensors identified the large kinetic projectile on a collision course with only three seconds until impact. The projectile, traveling at over three hundred kilometers per second, weighing at over four thousand kilograms, would have hit with the energy potential of fifty four kilotons of TNT. An impact like that, without an active warp-drive, could have crippled the ship despite his heavy armor.
A human simply could not have reacted in time to prevent the impact. Even fully alert, a human would need a second or so to identify a threat, and another second to select a course of action and initiate it. Fenris's warp drive would take thirty seconds to come fully online from standby. All weapons were at standby, which would take between three and five minutes to bring operational. The reaction thrusters, which Fenris brought online almost instantly, needed two and a half seconds of thrust to generate a miss.
Fenris's warning to the crew was an afterthought. By the time he finished speaking, he had shifted the ship's position by just over two hundred meters laterally with maneuvering thrusters, throwing most of the crew around as his maneuvering thrusters roared at their maximum capacity.
The tungsten-steel projectile round sped past them, there and gone faster than a human eye could have registered the motion. Even as it passed, Fenris tracked it's orbit outwards and he identified the origin within milliseconds.
Civilian vessel, Bannock-class, armed merchant ship, transponder identifies as the Rugged Venture out of Triad... Armed freighters often carried projectile rounds as deterrents against pirate boarding, but this round was heavier than any normal merchant ship would carry. A kinetic strike from a round like that was sufficient to destabilize a civilian warp drive or even light military-grade warp fields. That was the type of armament that a pirate or privateer would carry. Three hundred millimeter, Fenris estimated, gravity-based linear accelerator... probably of Drakkus production. Drakkus exported weapons to many systems, but Triad had a ban on all Drakkus weapons imports after the annexation of Oberon. While a merchant ship might ignore the ban, they'd be risking their charter if they did. The ship was too well-armed to be a proper merchant, it mounted a weapon system it shouldn't, and it had fired on them without warning. Fenris had finished his analysis long before his warp-drive came online.
“Mel, I have identified the shooter, it is an armed merchant ship, possibly with a false identification transponder, and armed like a pirate. Do I have permission to engage?”
***
Mel was still registering that they were under attack when Fenris requested permission to engage. She didn't fight the spike of rage that boiled up from inside her at his words, instead, she welcomed it. “Engage the target, I want them alive... if possible.”
&
nbsp; She moved to her command chair even as she saw Swaim and Brian move to their stations. As Fenris's drive came fully online, she punched out a message to Commodore Creed. Fenris had already attached a set of his sensor data on the projectile and the correlating data on their attacker. She forwarded that with a simple message, “Our vessel is under attack, we are neutralizing the attacker.”
She didn't expect to receive any sort of immediate response.
“Where is the round heading?” Mel asked
“It's on a high-speed orbit,” Fenris reported. “I estimate it will miss any vulnerable ships and stations before exiting the system, but I've tagged it for later destruction.”
Projectile weapons always created hazards to navigation. Mel made a personal note to be certain they destroyed it. Every year there were dozens of ships damaged or even destroyed from legacy munitions used in battles against the Culmor and the Erandi.
Their drive came online and Fenris leapt into motion. With their tactical warp drive they could move at near-lightspeed towards their attacker. The enemy ship, seeming to realize they'd been discovered, had also begun to bring up their drives, but Fenris reacted faster.
The Rugged Venture had been stationary, positioned in a wide orbit of Harmony. It must have possessed some kind of energy masking system to fire the projectile without a visual, electromagnetic, or thermal indication. Something to ask them about when we capture them, Mel thought to herself.
Fenris closed the distance between the two ships in only seconds.
She brought up the communications system, “Attention Rugged Venture,” Mel spoke in a harsh, clipped voice, “power down your vessel and prepare to be boarded.”
“Sorry, there must be some kind of misunderstanding, what's going on?” A woman spoke from the other ship. Whoever she was, she didn't bring up any kind of visual projection. In and of itself, that wasn't suspicious, but since they'd just been ordered to power down, Mel found it odd. Normally you want to see and be seen by the people you're talking with.
“Power down your drive or you will be fired upon,” Mel snapped.
“What's this about? We're just a civilian freighter out of Triad...”
“Their drive is spiking,” Fenris snapped. That was normally a sign that someone was trying to move before their drive was fully operational. It was a bad move in general because energy fields needed time to fully manifest and a cold start like that could result in catastrophic failure. But if they were trying to escape at the risk of capture, then it was the only move they had left.
“Take them down,” Mel snapped.
“Engaging,” Fenris growled.
The bridge thrummed a bit as Fenris opened fire with his primary battery. His shots were almost perfect, the heavy disruptor cannons penetrating and destabilizing the forming bubble of the ship's warp drive rather than vaporizing the ship entirely.
Fenris hit the unprotected ship with all of his active sensors, close enough and with high enough power that he probably burned whatever sensors the ship had left after the their fire. “I'm detecting loss of main power to their vessel. Their weapon systems are offline and their drive will require a minimum of thirty minutes to bring back online. Shall I prepare a shuttle for boarding?”
Only a year ago, Fenris would not have understood the feeling of pleasure, much less expected to feel it. Yet as Mel spoke, he felt pleasure at her words. “Good job, Fenris. Have Bob, Brian, Marcus and Tank suit up, let's find out who took a shot at us.”
***
“What a bunch of...” Brian Liu shook his head as he stared at the handful of crew, arms raised, faces pale. “Really? I mean, you take a shot at us, sure... part of the game. But then you don't even put up a fight?!”
“They're cooperating, that's good, right?” Johnny Woodard asked. Woodard, or Tank as most people called him, was happy enough not to have to fight his way aboard the ship. In fact, they'd been greeted by the ship's Captain at the airlock, who'd been pathetically cooperative. All the ship's crew were gathered in the mess hall.
“Yeah! They are...” Brian stalked up to one of the crew, a big man with a lurid scar across his face. “None of them will even look at me funny! What's wrong with you?! Bunch of pansies... I wanted a fight! I got geared up and everything!”
Woodard shook his head. While he liked a fight as much as anyone, he wasn't going to regret not having to fight to take over the ship. He activated his suit radio, “Nigel, you found anything?” They were all careful to use their cover names, even on their secure comms.
“Yeah, these idiots are all too eager to tell me everything I want to know,” Marcus's voice sounded resigned. “I didn't even get to the part where I had to threaten any of them. Their Executive Officer just unlocked their ship's computer for me when I showed up.”
“Why did they shoot at us?” Mel's voice came over the net.
“The Captain received a message on their way into the system, from one of the rogue Harmony Protectorate ships, a bounty offer if they killed Admiral Rao, with a note that he was aboard our ship,” Marcus sighed. “Looks like these guys did a bit of freelance privateering for the old regime, so they thought they could score a lucky hit with a long-range shot and then pretend they had no idea what had happened when we blew up.”
Johnny Woodard didn't really know enough about space combat to know if that was feasible. For that matter, he didn't know if the round the ship had fired would have even hurt Fenris if it had hit. It seemed a little far-fetched that an armed merchant ship could manage anything against a battlecruiser, but that was for other people to worry about. “What do we do with them?”
“I guess Commodore Creed has a prize party headed over. Taking a shot at a Guild ship while it's on a Guard tasking is an act of piracy, or terrorism if you prefer,” Mel answered. “So the ship is forfeit and the crew will be sent to the planet to face charges.”
“Forfeit?” Woodard asked.
“Yeah, congrats, we got a prize capture bonus in our contract, so we get a flat bonus for the value of this ship.” Mel chuckled.
“Booooriiiing,” Brian complained. “I didn't get to kill anyone.”
***
“That was interesting,” Mel said as they resumed their position over the planet. She'd given Fenris orders to keep their drive at full standby from this point forward. As long as they had Admiral Rao aboard, they'd be a target. It would be a massive drain on their power plant and it would require a whole lot of additional maintenance, but it would allow Fenris to maneuver almost instantly if they came under another attack.
“Brian is still complaining that he didn't get to kill anyone,” Fenris replied. “I'll admit that the engagement was rather brief, I still haven't had the opportunity to fully exercise the entirety of my armament.”
“If we don't have to fire another shot for the rest of the time here, or be fired at, for that matter, I'll be perfectly happy,” Mel answered.
Fenris didn't speak for a long moment. In fact, Mel felt surprise at how long it was until he did speak. Normally his responses were immediate, he could contemplate his responses before she'd finished speaking, after all. That he took so long to talk suggested that he spent a very long time contemplating what he wanted to say.
“I have come to accept the possibility that I may have a soul, Mel. I have come to accept that I have free will... yet there is no changing at my root what I am... I am a warship. I was designed with a purpose and the things that excite me, the things that bring me joy, come back to that purpose. I was designed for the crucible of battle, Mel. To bring destruction upon my enemies. In that, as in many ways, I am similar to Brian. Without serving my purpose... what am I?”
Mel's heart ached at his words. In many ways, Fenris was as human as any of her crew. She heard a bit of anguish in his rough voice, yet she also heard his rock-hard certainty. Fenris could no more cease being a weapon than she could give up on him and the others and walk away. Purpose, she thought, perhaps I too have a purpose... She pushed that t
hought to the back of her mind and spoke, “I understand. But, all the same, I'll take an easy win over a hard-fought loss, how about that?”
Fenris gave a harsh chuckle, “I'll take any win over a loss, any day, Mel.”
“Well, then, on that we can all agree,” Mel said. “Now, let's just hope we've established to any potential enemies that they're better off avoiding us, right?”
***
“It looks like Admiral Mizra jumped the gun,” Colonel Frost muttered.
“Sir?” Rawn asked, looking up from his datapad.
“Our Protectorate allies tried to take out Admiral Rao,” Colonel Frost shook his head and waved at his datapad. “It's all over the news, they hired a pirate, not one of ours thankfully, to take a shot at the ship carrying Admiral Rao. They missed, the pirates got captured and they're all squealing like rats, trying to avoid getting spaced as pirates.” He sighed. “Sometimes I despair at the quality of our allies.”
Rawn didn't have a response to that. Colonel Frost never seemed to hesitate to recruit criminals or pirates to their cause, either with promises, pay, or appeals to their baser natures. Still, he seemed to view hired help like that as expendable, even as he accepted their behavior without flinching.
“The good news is that we know about it because the mercenaries went public and that our allies didn't screw us directly by using one of our ships. The bad news is that Admiral Rao's popularity just jumped five points on the polls,” Colonel Frost scowled. “The further bad news is that they're going to be more alert. Stand down our boarding team. We'll have to give them a few days to relax before we make our attempt.”
“Yes, Colonel,” Rawn nodded. He actually felt a bit of relief. The mission to board a big ship like the one that Admiral Rao was aboard would be dangerous under the best of circumstances. Rawn hadn't so much as volunteered for the mission as he'd resigned himself to doing it. Of all their people, he and Colonel Frost had the most experience fighting aboard ship, and the Colonel couldn't be spared, not even for this important of a mission.
