Packmule

by Blaze Ward

  Packmule

  CS-405: Book Two

  Blaze Ward

  Knotted Road Press

  Contents

  Explorers (July 1, 402)

  The Back of Beyond (July 18, 402)

  Forward Operating Base (July 20, 402)

  Campaign, Phase Two (August 17, 402)

  Lighthouse Station (August 18, 402)

  Abakn (September 4, 402)

  Stunt Dude (September 5, 402)

  Dawnlight (September 5, 402)

  Rustlers (September 5, 402)

  Prisoners (September 5, 402)

  Free (September 6, 402)

  Hay Stacks (September 8, 402)

  Spoils of War (September 10, 402)

  Truck Driver (September 14, 402)

  Ghost (September 15, 402)

  Cowboy (September 20, 402)

  Raider (September 29, 402)

  Bandits (October 1, 402)

  War Plan (October 3, 402)

  Portals (October 11, 402)

  Three (October 12, 402)

  Zeus Above (October 12, 402)

  Archaeologists (October 12, 402)

  Prospector (October 12, 402)

  Coroner (October 13, 402)

  Intruder (October 14, 402)

  Mechanic (October 14, 402)

  Morning Edition (October 14, 402)

  Persephone (October 14, 402)

  Homeward Bound (October 18, 402)

  Read More!

  About the Author

  Also by Blaze Ward

  About Knotted Road Press

  Explorers (July 1, 402)

  It was odd that three weeks away would make her old ship seem like a foreign country, but Heather had spent most of June aboard the captured prize they had renamed Packmule. Coming back to CS-405 was almost unsettling, by comparison.

  But Phil had been adamant that the prisoners she wanted to interview remain aboard the Scout Corvette at all times, and he was in charge. Command Centurion Phil Kosnett, squadron commander. He was in his rights. Heather Lau was just a Senior Centurion, and normally Phil’s Executive Officer, but she had breveted to command centurion when she took command of the monstrous freighter they had captured from Buran at Laptev.

  And things were about to get a little crazy, out here so far behind lines in Buran space.

  Heather made her way down the last hallway and opened the hatch to the main conference room. Phil was already there, along with Evan Brinich, who was taking over as First Officer while she was away, as well as Bok Battenhouse, the Boatswain who would figure so heavily into the next phase of the great plan.

  Siobhan had brought Trinidad with her from the first prize, Queen Anne’s Revenge. The crew had nicknamed the ship Anna from their transponder designation of Anna’s Vindication. Siobhan’s whole crew consisted of a couple of marines, an engineer, and a medic in Trinidad, Nakisha, Markus, and Max.

  Heather had a much bigger vessel to command, but hadn’t taken that many folks with her. Two Yeomen, Ryouichi Yamaguchi as a pilot for Packmule’s insertion shuttle, and Galin Tuason to handle engineering. Three First-Rate-Spacers: Engineers Dedra Janowski and Zubaida El-Hashem, and marine Vlad Faurot. Everyone was working impossible hours with miniscule tools, but they were getting the job done.

  The only other officer Heather had with her was Centurion Andre Gave, who had previously been the Chief Nurse under 405’s Surgeon, Kermit Hanley. Andre was still a little freaked out at being suddenly promoted to First Officer on a freighter, but Heather needed a medic as well as an officer, and CS-405 had only shipped out with three dedicated medical staff, so he got elected.

  CS-405 only had an official crew of two hundred and seven before three had died in the explosion that crippled the ship’s JumpSails. With Siobhan normally over on Queen Anne’s Revenge, along with four others, and the six people Heather had taken to Packmule, everyone else had to step up and learn new things.

  Andre followed Heather into the conference room and found a spot to sit on her right. He was reacting to shock by falling back on his training, nearly a decade ago since he had moved onto a nursing track at the Academy. Siobhan had promised they would all think like pirates soon, which apparently was a bridge too far for Andre right now.

  But he was at least trying.

  Heather ended up across from Siobhan, with Phil on the end next to a pair of open seats for today’s guests. It was going to be a weird show, no two ways about it.

  Phil smiled at her. He had always been a good commander, taking great pains to make sure his entire crew was well-trained and cohesive, but over the last two months, he had stepped it up another notch.

  Seriously, one Corvette/Scout, the least-armed warship in the Republic of Aquitaine Navy, was single-handedly planning to take on the entire sector defensive fleet. Well, perhaps not take them on directly. Phil was sneakier than that. But they were making waves well out of scope for their tonnage.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Phil’s gaze scanned everyone with a warm, hungry smile. “Welcome to Phase Two of the great invasion plan. Evan has found us a potential destination world, and I plan on asking our two guests a few questions today. I want you to pay attention to everything, and not share any militarily-sensitive information with them.”

  That got a laugh. Everything these days was top secret, after Phil had decided to stay put and do more damage in this sector, rather than successfully sail home with two stolen freighters.

  “Questions?” Phil continued.

  Heather shook her head and saw Siobhan do the same. Those would come later, when they needed to nail down the last few details and plan some raids.

  The door opened a minute later and a marine escorted Phil Kosnett’s two guests into the conference room.

  Technically, Lan and Kiel were prisoners of war, but they were kept under minimum security most of the time. Siobhan’s raider ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, had been their own little freighter Resolute Revolution, just five months ago.

  Phil rose and gestured for them to take the last two seats at the table. They were dressed like civilians. All of their clothing and personal gear had been brought over and stored. And they would get it all back, one of these days, after Phil finally decided he had done enough damage to Buran.

  “Welcome,” Phil said after a few minutes to get settled and have some coffee. “We have gone through your extensive notes on this sector, and had a few questions. Everyone is here because it factors in to our current plans.”

  “Have we really become pirates?” the woman, Kiel, asked with a grin.

  She was the more easy-going of the two. Heather had also decided she was the smarter spouse. Lan had been the pilot on their ship. Kiel had handled the engineering duties, as well as negotiated all their trades.

  “Only on a technicality,” Phil grinned back. “You have not enrolled into the RAN, and we have not pressed you into formal service, so you are my prisoners for now. But yes, the rest of us are pirates. Lady Blackbeard here is cutting a swathe of fear across the quieter parts of the Altai Sector.”

  That latter aimed at Siobhan got a laugh out of everyone, including the two prisoners.

  “So what grand evil scheme will we be compelled to participate in next?” Kiel continued in a light voice and a bright smile.

  Phil’s face turned serious now. Sober. The others fell into line.

  “What do you know about the colony on Abakn?” he asked simply. “Your notes are almost blank.”

  “Middle of bloody nowhere,” Lan spoke up, instead of his spouse. He was almost always quieter, so it was something of a surprise. “A standard colonial organization, with one city at the center, a few satellite towns on spokes, and rings of farms slowly fading to wilderness. We’ve never been because we can’t make enough in trade for the time nec
essary to get there and back from anywhere.”

  “Nothing?” Siobhan asked.

  “My spouse speaks truth,” Kiel added. “The colony is only a century or so old. It was intended to be a launching point for other colonizing efforts in that region of space, before The Eldest pushed harder towards the Fribourg Empire instead. The world generally withered on the vine of irrelevance. While it might make a nice raid, I’m not sure anyone would even notice, when you seem to prefer notoriety.”

  Chuckles from everyone, including Lan. This was about as far from a military interrogation as Heather could imagine being.

  “Heather?” Phil turned in her direction.

  Heather put both hands flat on the tabletop and leaned forward a little as she organized her thoughts.

  “You are aware that we captured one of The Holding’s primary sector food transports, yes?” she asked.

  Both nodded, eyes much bigger than before. Capturing their little ship had been nothing. But there were only six of the big ships, running a dedicated loop around the Altai Sector, constantly moving food stocks between worlds. Most planets were largely self-sufficient, but the trade route allowed them to specialize, and then tiny ships like Lan and Kiel’s could bring in exotics from other places for a nifty profit.

  “I have been reviewing the logs and navigation records of that vessel as it walks the counter clockwise orbits to each of its seventeen stops,” Heather said. “There are hints of some things we have been trying to get answers to, but it appears like the information is purposefully obscured. Possibly for the very reasons I am asking.”

  The two stared at her carefully, aware that what was coming next might not be all fun and games. The woman saw the trap, that much was obvious.

  “Go on,” Kiel prompted after Heather let the moment dangle.

  “What does The Eldest do with Imperial prisoners captured at places like Samara?” Heather asked.

  She found it fascinating that both spouses blinked abruptly and turned to look at each other simultaneously, puzzled, eyes down. Nobody had ever asked that question.

  Lan’s eyes suddenly lit up in surprise and shock. He focused on Heather and his mouth opened, but no words came out. Nerves overcame him a moment later and he clammed up hard.

  “Lan?” she asked.

  The man was grinding his teeth, but she couldn’t tell if it was rage or embarrassment.

  “Dearest?” Kiel leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder.

  Tense moments passed as two different factions in the man’s deep, brown eyes warred with each other.

  Finally, he sighed and wrapped one arm around his spouse, kissing her on the top of the head as his eyes came back from whatever distance they had focused.

  “It was well before you, dearest,” he murmured to Kiel. “When I was very young and had just gone into space for the first time, a generation ago.”

  Heather remembered to breathe, and fought not to interrupt the man with questions.

  “I was working on a medium freighter out of Lena,” he mused distantly. “The next sector anti-spinward from Altai. We had to deliver a load of industrial, farming equipment to Mansi, because the original equipment for the colony had finally gotten too old to maintain, and there were no factories allowed outside the kremlin itself.”

  “Mansi?” Heather asked carefully.

  “You won’t find it in the records,” Lan laughed raggedly. “It doesn’t exist. We were told that. And that if we ever spoke of it again, we would join the prisoners down below and never leave the planet again.”

  “Prisoners?” Phil probed.

  “Aye,” the man agreed. “Exiles. Except that I do not believe they came from The Holding, Director Kosnett. The whole planet is an inverted prison. Prisoners are marched out of the main gate of the kremlin and forgotten. They must till the soil or starve. Several armed stations sit in orbit, watching for transmissions or ships trying to escape the atmosphere. Those are destroyed.”

  He turned to his spouse and smiled wanly.

  “I remember the place so well because The Eldest had parked several old warships in high orbit, captured from someplace I had never heard of,” he told her as he hugged the woman close. “I had always hoped to maybe sneak back and steal one when I got older. Before I found a way to buy my own and see the stars.”

  He turned now and picked out the three commanders of this little pirate squadron.

  “Perhaps I am now a traitor,” he mused. “But you have promised to send us home, one of these days, and even make us whole in the bargain. I do not believe those men ever got that opportunity.”

  “Can you find that world again?” Phil asked in a hard voice, angry at someone else.

  “I can try, Director.”

  The Back of Beyond (July 18, 402)

  Siobhan knew she would miss the little freighter, one of these days when they had to give it back, but she was truly enjoying sailing the wee beastie as a scout for the other two vessels.

  Instead of the JumpSails that Aquitaine and Fribourg used, Buran had modern versions of the ancient JumpDrives that had given humanity the galaxy. You aimed at a point in space and threw yourself like a rock. Landing, you spent a while looking around, until you managed to identify your coordinates against your intentions, and then did it again.

  For humans, an incredibly inefficient way to travel. Henri Baudin had invented the JumpSail so you no longer had to stop to check where you were. Just keep flying. Buran didn’t care about the stopping, because all The Eldest’s warships were Sentient, controlled by artificially intelligent computers that could land and find their next jump within minutes, rather than hours it normally took a human.

  But Siobhan was getting pretty good at galactic geometry, as filtered through the lens of gravity-zone interaction. And CS-405, while it had managed to repair the secondary JumpSails, still overheated them regularly and had to drop into RealSpace to let them cool, as well as reconfigure the matrix as the wobble got progressively worse every minute in flight.

  Siobhan could outrun both Phil on 405 and Heather on Packmule, as a result. Plus, she was just another of the Holding’s light freighters, wandering the stars trying to make a profit, if anyone saw her. It made sense that she should be well out front, scouting. If somebody actually lived here, she could maybe bluff things, running away fast enough to warn the other two ships off.

  But she hoped not. It was insane, the thought of stealing an entire planet. She wanted to be first.

  Today, she was alone on her bridge. Trinidad, Nakisha, Markus, and Max were below and aft, doing whatever they needed to do to keep the ship flying. Siobhan just had the gray fuzziness of JumpSpace to keep her company, but she was almost to their destination.

  It didn’t have a name, the planet ahead. Just a number in the stellar cartography records they had merged from the three ships in the squadron. Nothing in any of their databases suggested that humans had been here in so long that it frightened Siobhan to even consider the scale.

  According to the oldest records she had consulted, the era known as The Terraforming had begun some ten thousand years ago, and then lasted for at least a millennium as a concerted effort, with more terraforming on various local scales for another six thousand years after that. Right up until the Sentient systems almost managed to wipe out humanity.

  This place was well and truly gone from everywhere else, more than eighty degrees of galactic arc from the Homeworld. So nobody might have seen these skies from the ground in five or eight thousand years.

  “Emergence in four minutes,” Siobhan said over the internal speakers.

  Sure enough, the clatter of feet running this way. Forward on the main deck, up the stairs.

  Suddenly, she had an audience. Max had gotten here first, probably waiting in the kitchen while Markus was all the way aft and the other two busy midship. Max was a skinny guy with blond hair. While he might tease her about skin nearly the color of coal, she had found a great counter, referring to him as Oatmeal
occasionally. His skin was about the same hue. And everyone knew how much she liked to eat it.

  But being first meant he got the left-hand seat and the others had to stand at the back of the tiny bridge and watch over shoulders. He grinned at her and pivoted the seat forward, careful not to touch anything.

  Nakisha, closest behind him, got a smirk from Max over his shoulder as he turned away, so she walked up and leaned her forearms on his shoulders and her chin on the top of his head. If he moved too quickly, he would probably get one of her breasts smooshed into an ear.

  Siobhan nearly giggled as the man realized that and turned beet red. He sat perfectly still. Trinidad chuckled from the door, but didn’t say anything. Max was still a little shy around girls.

  The countdown clock ticked the numbers down, and then they emerged into the universe again when the system hit zero.

  She had gotten the hang of these drives. The last jump had been from the very outer edge of the system, when the local star was just the brightest one, but nothing special, and the few worlds just suggestions on distant scanners.

  They had already eliminated one target on this path. It had been terraformed, but the star had cooled, or something. Much of that world had been locked into a serious ice age that covered most of the southern hemisphere and would play merry hell with growing seasons up north.

  But now, they had dropped out close to the inner edge of the gravity well. There was a touch to it. And the ship had been tuned to far tighter specs than it had ever known, probably even straight from the factory.