by Blaze Ward
A marble hung in the darkness before them. Mostly blue and gray, but with some big green spots as well. Life.
So far, so good.
“Initiating forward thrusters,” Siobhan announced in a bigger voice than normal. “Nothing going to break back there, right, Markus?”
“Not on my watch, boss,” the man rumbled back.
Siobhan grinned and plotted an insertion path into orbit.
It took her a few seconds to realize what it was that was making her nervous.
Every other planet they had visited in this sector always had at least those same, four radio signals Buran always left in orbit for navigation purposes. One satellite on the exact north pole. Two more on the equator, ninety degrees apart. One small, fully automated station in orbit, filled with metal in bars, tubes, and sheets, plus a massive tank of water that could be used as fluid or broken down into gases as needed.
There was nothing here.
Even the path of radio beacons that Holding vessels used to navigate, the thing they called Pochtovyi Trakt, didn’t come this direction.
Queen Anne’s Revenge was well and truly in the middle of nowhere.
Siobhan set the ship to listening for signals and scanning the planet below them as her folks watched out the front port. She had inverted the ship so that they were watching the planet rotate above them.
“Now what?” Max finally breathed.
After ten minutes, any new planet got boring. Especially when there didn’t appear to be anyone home.
At least, nobody with technology. Siobhan lived in slight terror that they might find an iron age culture, some lost civilization on one of these worlds. She really didn’t want to do that whole First Contact thing.
Thank the gods that the records were accurate and nobody lived there.
“Now the rest of you go back to what you were doing, and I keep scanning this rock for signs of life,” Siobhan answered.
They all filed out. With no immediate radio signals to listen in on, she had hours, and maybe days of survey work ahead of her. CS-405 and Packmule were probably a day and a half behind her. Actually, they were probably still sitting quietly right now at the most recent rendezvous spot, ten light-years away.
Had this place been occupied, she would have either run at the first warning, or done some song and dance routine to escape and warn them.
Hopefully, there was nobody here.
Forward Operating Base (July 20, 402)
CS-405 had gotten there ahead of Packmule, but Heather wasn’t surprised by that. She was still learning how her ship wanted to slide through JumpSpace. Which way it would drift in a hydrogen cloud. How sensitive the grav-sensors were for possible anomalies.
The other two ships were already in orbit when Packmule returned to RealSpace. This vessel also maneuvered like a small asteroid, so she had to take her time doing things, coming out at a greater distance than the two smaller ships and easing into a parking orbit.
Whoever built Packmule originally, designed her for a commander and a small crew of specialists to fly it, with a larger crew of stevedores and pilots doing most of the work below with shuttles and mover pods. She had one pilot for three shuttle craft, instead of six people. And nobody but herself to fly the main vessel right now, so she had parked Andre in the Director’s seat where he could watch and relearn all the things he had worked so hard to forget as a nurse and not a command officer on the bridge.
She smiled at the thought.
“What’s so funny?” Andre asked.
“Phil’s always harping on about getting everyone cross-trained to work together,” Heather said. “Don’t think he ever got this far in his planning.”
“The day I’m called upon to take over command of CS-405, it’s going to be because I can’t blackmail an Engineering Yeoman like Galin into doing it,” he replied. “I’m a nurse, ya know. Not a ship-handler.”
“Maybe we should fix that,” Heather teased, ever so slightly, just to watch Andre’s back come up, but whether out of fear or anger wasn’t immediately clear.
Damned good nurse. Probably never fired a weapon in his life.
Hopefully, she could keep that streak alive for a while longer.
“405, this is Packmule,” she said, opening a line. “Entering orbit now. Rendezvous in about three hours.”
“Roger that,” Evan’s voice came back a few seconds later. “Think we’ve identified a landing zone in the southern hemisphere, on the smaller continent. You might want to prep your pilot. Siobhan’s dropping out now to inspect from low altitude. If this is good, we’ll drop the first box of supplies as soon as we can.”
“Understood, Evan,” Heather replied.
Instead of just calling the pilot directly, she opened the ship-wide intercom so everyone could listen in.
“All hands, this is the bridge,” she said. “In roughly three hours, we may be ready to send the first two containers down to the surface, pending ground team. Plan your day accordingly and we’ll have lunch in about ninety minutes.”
She cut the line and turned to her First Officer. He was getting more confident in doing this, but she was planning on making things a little more complicated for him.
“You’ll be in command while I’m gone,” she announced with a grin at the horrified look on the man’s face. “I’m leaving you, Galin, and Vlad, while I ride down to the surface with Zubaida and Dedra aboard Ryouichi’s shuttle. Listen to Galin if he has opinions, and don’t be afraid to radio, but you make the decisions from the moment I step off the deck, Andre.”
Her response from the man was a heavy sigh. Honestly, if she had offered him a blindfold and a cigarette right now, he might look more enthusiastic.
“Just remember, we’re the Republic of Aquitaine Navy, Centurion,” she reminded him in a stern voice. “They’re running scared of us right now.”
“As well they should,” he answered heavily. “We’re plum crazy.”
Most Republic ships carried simple administrative shuttles to move personnel and cargo around. Heather had made sure that she brought 405’s primary pilot with her to Packmule, and then had the man spend all his spare time training how to fly the new kind of shuttle that Buran used.
The records called it an insertion shuttle, and it reminded her of nothing so much as a radically scaled-down version of CT-9492, the cargo tug that was assigned to Arott Whughy’s Forward Operating Monitor. The size was vastly different, but both operated on the presumption of a long, skinny spine, with engines aft and a small crew section forward. In between were two spots where cargo modules could be attached on each side, like butterfly wings.
On CT-9492, those were full-sized cargo pods, while the insertion shuttle docked two of the largest standard transport packs Buran used: six meters by six meters by eighteen. They looked tiny, growing out of the belly of Packmule, but that ship was designed to carry two of them in a single silo, end to end, with twelve silos in a single row across and one hundred and eight rows front to back.
She had a few larger pods in the ship’s belly, a full silo deep by four silos square, but no way to move them to the ground. Fortunately, those were carrying bulk liquids and grain shipments, so she could eventually empty them into smaller transport packs by hand. The squadron still had nearly a year and a half of food before they had to start worrying.
Heather was riding in the co-pilot seat, above and behind Yeoman Yamaguchi as he backed out of the flight hangar. They had loaded the shuttle up in deep space at the last laager, when Heather could bring over a whole mass of experts to handle those big boxes safely.
Now they were going to land them and maybe create the beginnings of a farm. Because if you want to go crazy, how much weirder could it get than to steal an uninhabited but viable planet behind enemy lines and set up an illegal cattle ranch?
Heather glanced at the other two passengers, Zubaida and Dedra. This shuttle could hold six, and she was about to go get the other two off of CS-405.
“CS-
405, this is Saddlebags, departing Packmule now,” Yamaguchi said with the slightest superiority. “Let my passengers know so I don’t have to hang around for them all day?”
Heather chuckled. It didn’t matter what they flew. Pilots would be pilots the galaxy over.
“Roger that, Saddlebags,” Evan called back a moment later. “Two for transport.”
Ryouichi had gotten quite good at his task. It helped that the shuttle itself was programmed to be easy for anyone to fly, assisting the pilot by compensating for the load. The first two containers going down were mostly camping and building supplies, rather than bulk food, so they were flying light. Later loads would get interesting.
Docking took all of three minutes. Ryouichi didn’t even shut the engines down, so much as idle them as he opened the hatch to the crew space.
Heather laughed again when she saw the two of them approach. Bok Battenhouse was the oldest sailor she knew, sixty-two years Standard with nearly forty-two of that on active duty. Even old-timers usually retired after thirty, but Bok claimed he wanted to see sixty years in, just to teach the young punks how to do the job right.
And he was a great teacher. Plus, he was 405’s Boatswain, the senior enlisted man on board. That didn’t mean as much in the RAN as other places, since so many Yeomen took the step to Centurion rather than Chief, but Bok had never wanted the responsibility of a commission.
The Chief was short and broad, like he had been carved out of an oak tree stump. His companion, on the other hand, was his opposite in just about every way possible.
Able Spacer Avelina Indovina was a tall, skinny woman, towering over Bok by at least ten centimeters, but she was all bones and whipcord. And young. Bok claimed he had shoes older than Indovina, which wasn’t a great stretch, since the Spacer was barely twenty-one.
But the tall brunette, with long hair always pulled up into a severe bun, had also been raised on a cattle ranch, similar to Bok, and still had a civilian veterinary medical certificate she had gotten from a local farmer’s organization back home as teenager.
Both carried field backpacks as they boarded, stowing them overhead and finding seats.
“Ready for an adventure, you two?” Heather asked as the shuttle took off.
“I offered her Missus Battenhouse,” Bok said with a laugh. “She suggested Mister Indovina instead.”
“Although,” the young woman volleyed back as she settled in. “Now that I think about it, I’ll be up in the main house and you can stay down in the barn, at least until you manage to build yourself a bunkhouse or something.”
That got a laugh. It was good. The two of them would be alone on the surface for a while when everyone else left, getting ready for a future that might never come, if something went wrong.
Heather kept her face neutral as her subconscious insisted on listing all the possibilities, the least frightening of which involved these two as Adam and Eve in a forgotten paradise.
Hopefully, there were no large predators or weird diseases on this new planet.
The shuttle ride down was sedate, if Heather had to pick a word. The systems were designed to bring cargo to the surface without damage. In a pinch, it was apparently possible to program one of the shuttles to fly itself reasonably well. A crewmember just sat in the seat and made sure nothing went wrong.
The planet below was Earth-like, in the way the Homeworld supposedly had been, in the time before. Mostly ocean, with about a dozen continents of various sizes arrayed in odd patterns as things moved around. Their target was in the northern hemisphere, a medium-sized continent that was more or less attached to a larger one, divided off by a wall of mountains running north and south as the two slowly ground together. South, another continent was just far enough away to create a calm, almost inland sea, with only three outlets to the wider, world-spanning ocean.
Saddlebags was coming in from the south, across a small mountain range covered with an alpine forest. Heather had been born a city kid, but the place looked lovely.
Scanners picked up Queen Anne’s Revenge, sitting close to the shore of a long rift lake that bisected a valley. From the scale, it had to be around twenty kilometers wide in most places, and perhaps two hundred long, but the mountains on all sides formed a solid rim over four thousand meters tall in most places.
Isolated. What Bok had specifically requested. An island, except land-locked. Bok had explained that he didn’t know a damned thing about boats bigger than the kind he could row around a pond, so it would do him no good to be on an ocean shore.
Heather wondered if she should suggest a more interesting advanced survival training program, when they got home. There were enough inhabited planets out there, but few people other than specialist marines could probably survive living rough for a long period.
But how many people were as crazy as Phil Kosnett, to even suggest something like this?
She turned to Bok and Avelina, watching them as they stared out a window. Low murmurs flowed back and forth between them, but they sounded good.
“Thoughts?” Heather raised her voice.
Both of them looked back at her, then each other. Bok shrugged and nodded to Avelina.
“Assuming fish in that lake, and tools to make a boat, we should be good,” the young woman said. “Island effect should reduce the size of any large animals likely to be running around, and I can set traps for the little ones.”
“We’ll still need to thin the big-game predators a little, presuming there are any,” Bok added. “Then we should be able to let stock run loose for the most part. Make sure to steal me a half dozen horses, so I don’t need a ground vehicle all the time.”
Heather nodded and added that to the list in her head. Avelina would be training folks how to handle large animals and supervise them in space, while she and Bok stayed here to establish the first buildings of what the man was calling Lighthouse Station.
Seriously, a cattle ranch as a forward operating base behind enemy lines. But the Fleet Centurion had wanted crazy.
They landed just upslope from the other freighter and debarked into a cool, cloudy afternoon. This area was a huge meadow, possibly caused by flooding from spring runoff drowning trees, or something.
Big area, a kilometer long and a third of that wide, mostly composed of tall grass and shrubs, with bigger trees in every other direction. Birds overhead appeared to be looking for critters scared off by the bigger birds. Or maybe just curious. Everyone was armed, just in case.
And Markus Dunklin, Siobhan’s favorite redneck engineer, was holding a thing he described as a shotgun. Metal stock shaped for a shoulder. Round tube nearly three-quarters of a meter long, and big enough for two of her fingers to fit inside. Apparently, it used a chemical reaction called gunpowder to fling a thumb-sized cylinder of ball bearings at a target. The other version fired a slug of lead with a steel core, supposedly proof against big cats.
Heather checked that her pulse pistol was charged, safe, and accessible.
“What’s the season?” Avelina was asking the redneck engineer.
“Late spring, local,” Siobhan replied instead. “Not much axial tilt, and no moon overhead. Evan Brinich figures that we won’t see more than about fifteen degrees temperature difference across an entire year, up here. Plus, the mountains funnel weather in weird ways, so it will be lots of drizzle, year around, but probably not heavy snow. Of course, never going to be all that warm and sunny, either.”
“About like home,” Avelina observed. “What about the lake?”
“What about it?” Siobhan asked.
“Fish?”
“How the hell would I know?”
Avelina turned to Bok and motioned he and Markus closer.
“So I need to do some fishing,” the tall woman said. “One of you could help, so it goes faster.”
“Take Markus,” Bok said. “I need to site things for the landing pad, then figure out where we want the shipping containers, and then where the rest of the buildings will go.”
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br /> He turned away from them and gathered the rest of the people together as Heather listened.
“Queen Anne has that damned repulsor truck for moving containers around, which is good,” he growled, thinking out loud now that he had touched the earth himself. “Long term, a dozer of some sort would be good. Maybe a full tractor, with a back hoe and tools to drill a well. We can run pipes down to the lake and bury them, for now. Same with a septic tank and a drain field.”
“So this place meets your needs, Chief?” Heather asked the obvious question.
“Ask me tomorrow,” he replied. “But we’ll make it work.”
Bok looked around at the dozen or so people in a loose circle.
“I need to take a hike in a big circle with Trinidad and Nakisha,” he gestured to them. “Dedra, you come with me. Zubaida, you supervise putting the boxes here and there, in an L-shape, upwind and uphill, respectively, with the main side accesses facing into a quad we’ll stomp down with as many feet moving around as we can. Heather, can you call 405 and get me as many people as Phil and Kam can spare?”
Heather took a step back and tried to envision things as she relayed the message to Evan in orbit. Getting the ball rolling.
Too many moving parts right now, but she didn’t need to do anything but be a strong back helping unpack the containers when they were placed for now.
Lighthouse Station was going to become a thing, very soon.
Campaign, Phase Two (August 17, 402)
The ship had felt almost derelict, with so many crew off-ship over the last month. Most of them were down on the planet, setting up the depot that Bok was going to turn into a forward base when the ship left. Another group were aboard Packmule right now, getting that ship ready to start rustling cattle.
Literally.
Phil stared around the conference room on CS-405 where so many of his plans had taken shape. Not much to look at, just off-white walls, a wood conference table, and heavy-duty tan carpeting, but all the craziness was contained in these walls, perhaps just waiting to bleed out and infect the next crew, after the First Lord had him Court Martialed and grounded permanently.
