by Blaze Ward
Very much not good.
Siobhan saw sky through the windshield as she was hanging straight down. Her one hand turned to a deathgrip. And she wasn’t sure if she could grab the skid with her toes through steel-toed boots, but she was damned sure going to try.
The stunner went into her holster, and then she reached up and grabbed the open window like she did this stunt every day, and twice on Sundays.
She knew how to fly something like this, but needed to get it under control before it crashed.
Or Nakisha decided to put a rocket grenade into the bay.
Siobhan stabbed a hand in and pulled the stick more or less upright. The controls were more tricky, but she found a big, friendly button blinking in the center of the console in front of the stunned pilot.
Autopilot.
She mashed it with a fist and held on for dear life as the craft suddenly pitched to port and nearly dumped her out of the sky.
Okay, hovering. Good. Everything is zeroed in.
She sucked a hard breath down, pulling the freezing air into her lungs like fire, and pushed the stick forward gingerly, still hanging from the side of the aircraft like a lunatic spider.
Slowly, the craft agreed with her and descended. Siobhan shifted her feet around on the skid as ground came up to meet them. Cattle began to stampede madly away as they looked up at the terrible Roc about to pounce on them from above.
Contact.
In the cockpit, the autopilot beeped happily and began to shut the craft down.
Huh. Good, solid programming. Assume something bad happened to the pilot and the craft needed to listen to a panicked passenger, and then take care of them.
Siobhan was in the middle of a pasture. She found the handle to open the door and pulled. The pilot was easy enough to detach, so she pulled him out and dumped him for now.
Glancing into the passenger bay, a pair of huge eyes stared back at her, attached to a young woman who was the color of the snow outside.
Crap, missed someone.
Siobhan quickdrew her stunner and aimed it.
“Understand me?” she asked in a voice juiced with adrenaline and cold.
The passenger nodded.
“Undo your seatbelt and get off the craft,” Siobhan continued. “Anyone else aboard?”
Quick headshake no. A broken bobblehead doll.
The woman managed to unhook her harness on the third try, and slid across the bench, standing in the midday sun on shaky legs. Siobhan went around the bow of the craft and joined her.
They had flown almost two hundred meters before landing. Things looked to be under control over there. Markus was tearing across the field in the big truck, with Trinidad and Nakisha in the bed, when Siobhan looked around.
The truck grounded heavily and skidded forward. The two marines were at her side in a beat.
“Trying to take my job?” Stunt Dude asked as he covered the new prisoner.
“Hey,” Siobhan replied. “If you were out there doing the crazy shit, I wouldn’t have to now, would I?”
That got a laugh. Almost hysterical in tone, but humor was good.
Join the Navy. See the stars. Become a pirate and a cattle rustler.
It was time to get off this rock.
Prisoners (September 5, 402)
Heather hadn’t planned it this way, but hanging around with pirates was apparently rubbing off on her. At the first sign of trouble, she had drawn and shot the short, fat man who had stomped over to talk to her. Her second shot had hit one of his bodyguards, but that man was already unconscious, the target of three other bolts.
Now she had him tied to a chair on the front porch of the farmhouse, snow and crap all over his expensive-looking uniform from where he had face-planted. Gerry was keeping guard with a stunner drawn. They were going through plastic restraints at a prodigious rate, but those were replaceable.
Siobhan had brought along from the captured flyer a young woman who was apparently the man’s secretary.
Or whatever euphemism they used for it on this planet. Beautiful, curvy, and apparently about as smart as a box of rocks.
Heather seriously doubted her skills at shorthand.
Overhead, Evan checked in every five minutes, but nothing was moving that he could pick up with a regular hard ping of the surface. Somebody was probably getting a beep in the middle of their songs, depending on which frequency the Science Officer was using.
“Thoughts?” Siobhan asked in Bulgarian as Heather ruminated.
It was a language nobody but crew would understand.
“How close to loaded are we?” Heather replied similarly.
Short pause as Siobhan looked back over her shoulder.
“Probably, we could go now, if we had to,” Lady Blackbeard said. “In thirty minutes, we won’t have to repack things in orbit.”
“I’m feeling antsy,” Heather observed. “Pushing-luck-time. We should bail.”
“What about the prisoners?”
Heather stepped forward and tapped the man on the shoulder.
“Gerry, bring this one along on Anna,” she ordered.
The man nodded and pulled a long knife out and slid it in between flesh and zip tie with an expert’s touch.
“Any particular reason?” Siobhan asked.
Heather noted that she was more interested than concerned.
“Chaos,” Heather replied. “We’ve gone beyond simply robbing planets of gear and property. Now we’re holding prisoners for ransom. We can drop him on our next target. Speaking of which…”
She pulled out her comm and checked a countdown clock. The prisoners they were going to drop here would be on the ground in twelve minutes. That sounded like a good time to swap the twenty-seven coming down for one going up.
“All hands,” she said into the local comm. “Fifteen minutes to departure.”
The man Gerry was escorting was awake and moving stiffly, but in an obvious panic to be around strangers speaking a foreign language.
“Be calm and we’ll eventually release you,” Heather said in Mongolian.
His head snapped around at her words, but he seemed to relax.
Heather smiled at him, but it wasn’t particularly friendly.
This one was just another pawn in Phil’s Great Game.
Free (September 6, 402)
The one stranger was a tall man, lanky and somewhat forgettable. Brown hair that needed to be clipped soon. Nervous but hiding it reasonably well in Phil’s estimation.
Of course, to be aboard an Aquitaine warship was probably a worst nightmare for a man like Veitengruber, once upon a time. Now, he was in the process of being rescued. Or something.
Phil turned his gaze to the second man. Malondenishk Abarantakratar. Deni. Shorter than the pilot. Golden-brown skin that seemed to glow. Short, black hair. Fierce eyes.
The two men sat as close together as the conference table would allow, with Heather on the far right and Siobhan on the far left and four marines in the room with him and Evan.
“So your craft was disabled at Samara, and you were taken prisoner,” Phil repeated to the Flight Lieutenant. “Eventually, you ended up at Abakn, where you were expected to serve the greater cause of The Holding by doing manual labor on a cattle farm.”
Veitengruber nodded. It hadn’t been a question. He was still waiting for that shoe to drop, from the look on his face.
“Is this standard practice?” Phil asked. “There have been many ships lost at Samara over the years, but nobody knows what happens to them. Because Buran’s ships self-destruct when defeated, the Empire has never been sure they ever took prisoners. I presumed they did, based on what the defector told us.”
“Processing took about four months, from what I could tell at the time, Captain,” Veitengruber said. “Then I was rounded up with around fifty other men and shipped off. At each stop, a few men were separated and vanished. I left about in the middle, so there are more in whatever direction they went from here.”
“You are currentl
y still in the Altai Sector, Lieutenant,” Phil explained. “That’s the one directly across the M’Hanii Gulf from the Ural Starbase at Samara. We’re headed into a new sector to continue our raiding, after we drop off all the loot at our local base.”
“And what is to be our fate?” Deni asked in a polite voice still crafted from steel.
“What would be your preference?” Phil asked simply. “I understand from Heather Lau that you do not believe you would be welcomed home as a hero. The Empire has changed radically, but I agree with the sentiment that some changes will require more than our lifetimes.”
Veitengruber nodded, but remained silent.
“As commanding officer in the field, I have a great deal of latitude,” Phil continued. “We are headed to a world we call Lighthouse Station, where all the cattle and chickens will be delivered to a ranching outpost, along with the milking equipment. With that in place, the limiting factor on my squadron becomes wear on the parts, some of which are not replaceable with equivalents from The Holding, so eventually we will need to return home.”
Phil studied the two closely.
“You could return to ranching, if you desired,” he said simply. “The planet currently has a known population of two. You could also take up arms aboard my squadron. We are operating under a Fribourg flag for now, but we are still the Republic of Aquitaine Navy. And you do not need to make a decision today. We would like to ask other questions, if you are up to it?”
“How may we help the war effort, Captain?” Deni asked.
“Knowing that there are prisoners in penny packets, we can add a rescue effort to our campaign,” Phil said. “But our major limiting factor right now is firepower. This is a scout corvette, and the least-armed warship class in the fleet. Both freighters are completely unarmed.”
He left the rest dangling.
“All of Buran’s warships are Sentient,” the Imperial observed after a moment. “So stealing one would be impossible. What else is there?”
“He means our old ships, Granvie,” Deni leaned over and murmured quietly. “Captured Imperial and NovLao vessels that might be intact and could be stolen, correct, Captain?”
“Indeed,” Phil said. “Plus anything either of you might know about a planet known as Mansi.”
Veitengruber shuddered involuntarily at the name. Deni reached out a comforting hand and grasped his. After a moment, it slid under the table where nobody might notice.
Phil didn’t care. Neither did anybody else he knew. People with minds that small and closed didn’t last long in the Navy. Either they grew up or they shipped out.
“We were occasionally threatened with that name,” Deni said after a few moments. “Like the boogieman your parents might invoke if you were bad as a child. Behave, or we’ll send you to Mansi and nobody will ever hear from you again.”
“I see,” Phil said. “We think we have a location. Or rather, three target systems from which we will begin our survey.”
“Yes, but those are bodies of men,” Deni said. “You’ll want a graveyard, instead.”
“A what?” Evan spoke up suddenly, leaning forward to inject himself into the conversation.
“The Holding’s warships are alive,” Deni said, waving a hand as Evan started to counter. “The Eldest treats them as living creatures. Captured warships are thought of, spoken of, in the same way, so when ships are no longer useful, they are sent to cemeteries.”
“Old freighters taken out of service are dismantled and recast,” Evan said.
“That is my understanding, yes,” Deni answered. “But The Eldest does not desire the secrets of foreigners to be discovered, at least according to threats and intimations cast upon me by my captors. So the ships are sent to cemeteries. Perhaps your records will show such?”
“Crap,” Evan said with a nod to Phil. “Cultural miscommunications. Thank you, I will go back and start my work from scratch.”
“How soon until you return to the Empire?” Veitengruber spoke up in a small voice.
“Months, at the very least,” Phil said. “Jessica Keller has taken command of this frontier, but we were separated. Almost as lost as you. After her last great raid, she will need time to rearrange her forces on this border, so we are in the process of causing as much trouble as we can behind lines. Buran’s fleet is not much larger than Aquitaine or Fribourg, for many more worlds, so they have to thin themselves out to look for us, but at the same time they must maintain local superiority of firepower, so they cannot just send a single Hammerhead to every world, lest they stumble into Keller and she annihilates them. It is into that chaos that I have chosen to stick my blade.”
Both strangers nodded. As did his three officers.
“We will reconvene later,” Phil announced. “Go rest and eat as free men. The war will wait.”
Hay Stacks (September 8, 402)
Evan stared at the charts like he could make the computer give up its secrets by psionic brute force. It had stubbornly resisted him for two days now, but that was no surprise. Combining three radically different datasets into one always required some level of guesswork. Something had been missed, or misidentified.
In the end, he had gone back to the original data from Packmule, spinning up a new navigation database on a small computer system and installing the records there. Searching was slower this way, but progress was progress.
A door chime brought Evan back from too deep inside his head.
His cabin wasn’t a mess, but could have been cleaner. A plate from dinner he hadn’t had time to haul off to the wardroom. A notepad with a dozen pages folded over the top, filled with notes that were fast turning into meaningless doodles as nothing jumped out at him.
Evan ran a hand through his blond hair and reached a hand out to open the hatch. Company right now was probably a good idea, all things considered.
He was not expecting Phil to be standing in the door with a rueful look on his face.
“You look like hell,” the command centurion said as he entered and closed the hatch behind him. “When was the last time you slept?”
Evan stopped and tried to do math. The number he came up with was not a good one.
“Too long,” he replied, surprised at how exhausted his voice sounded.
“Thought as much,” Phil nodded. “You don’t have to solve it today. We’re still four or so days out from Lighthouse Station, and we’ll be there for probably a week, just unpacking things and settling everyone in.”
“It’s there, Phil,” Evan said, conviction underlying his tones. “I haven’t found it, but that’s because the computer keeps throwing too many false positives and I have to spend too much time tracking them down and eliminating them.”
“Change your parameters,” Phil said in a voice that wasn’t quite an order. “You’re trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
“That’s what this is, Phil,” Evan countered.
“No, actually. It’s not,” Phil smiled gruffly. “Eliminate anything not in Altai, M’Hanii, Samara, or Lena sectors, right off the bat. I have no intention of going any farther afield than that.”
“But that’s…”
“As far as my campaign goes right now, Brinich,” Phil overrode him. “If our target is outside that range, we’re probably better off running all the way home and bringing back Jessica. You’ve been trying to identify the entire Holding, haven’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” Evan said, somewhat sheepishly. “And I’ve found all sorts of useful intelligence, but not a stellar graveyard.”
“Good,” Phil continued in a voice that Evan squirmed a little at. “Then, eliminate any system that doesn’t have orbital navigation warnings.”
“Every system has junk, Phil,” Evan countered. “Asteroids, comets, moons. Something.”
“Yes, but for most systems, those don’t rise to the level of threat,” the command centurion said. “You’re thinking of this like a Science Officer, and not a pilot.”
“Huh?”
&n
bsp; “Pilots only care if something is going to get in their way, or if they have to avoid a certain area,” Phil said. “Such as a forbidden zone where enemy warships are laid up for salvage or intelligence.”
“I’ve been wondering about that,” Evan said. “Would they keep them? Or toss them into the nearest star or maybe crash land them on a planet?”
Phil finally moved deeper into the room from the hatch, taking a spot on the foot of Evan’s bunk, the green blanket tucked in tight and squared away.
“If I was in charge, I would have kept at least two of every class of thing we captured, or as many parts as could be salvaged,” Phil said.
“Why two?” Evan was confused.
“To make sure that the one was a standard design,” Phil said. “And not some random one-off captured and of no real intelligence value. Every time I caught a new version, I would probably discard the oldest remaining one, on the theory that new ships would have incremental improvements.”
That made sense, and Phil had been doing this for far longer than Evan had. Hell, this ship had been Evan’s first assignment out of school. He had just gotten incredibly lucky to have a Command Centurion like Phil Kosnett, so engaged in training his officers.
Just look at Heather Lau and Siobhan Skokomish. One of these days, it would be his turn.
“Huh,” Evan finally said, as Phil’s words broke through the barriers that had been keeping Evan running in circles. “Think it will work?”
“I have no idea, Evan,” he said, rising again and making his way to the hatch. “You eliminate most of the hay pile, and then find me any needles that remain.”
“Can do, Phil,” Evan said.
He looked at the screen as the hatch closed behind Phil, and started ruthlessly chopping huge chunks of data away. This would make it much faster.
Why hadn’t he thought of this two days ago?
Spoils of War (September 10, 402)
Heather sat in the tiny wardroom aboard Packmule and absolutely savored today’s dessert. Homemade ice cream, so fresh it had been inside a cow yesterday.
