Packmule

by Blaze Ward

  “We’ve got about two days until this location is in the shadow, as seen from Mansi-B,” Heather noted. “Let’s spend that time seeing what we can do. After you check the bigger hulls, I need you to touch the third location and see if any of those fighter craft are worth stealing, as well. We’ve potentially got space to get two or three away, if they can fly, and stuff them aboard both big ships. Better to do it now, since we may not get a second chance at this.”

  “Right,” Siobhan said, pointing at the group in front of her. “Group flagged as Team-A is with me, so sit tight. Team-B is going with Heather. You’ve got emergency shelters ready to deploy, and the two shuttles will be on the ground until we load them or get chased off, so it’s time for you to suit up and play rock prospectors.”

  Heather could identify the two groups by the groans and ribbing going back and forth over hot meals and hot showers, something Anna’s crew would get, while Heather’s would be living rough. She made a mental note to ask Granville and Yamaguchi about modifying the third shuttle, the one they flew the least, into something like a recreational vehicle, with showers and a kitchen, for long stakeouts.

  Perhaps they should fix one or two containers as troop transports, as well. That might be useful for a hit and fade mission.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Heather said to the group congregating around her. “In case you haven’t met him previously, this is Flight Centurion Granville Veitengruber, formerly an Imperial officer, and a Holding Slave. He’ll be calling the shots as we go look into stealing a warship for Phil.”

  Prospector (October 12, 402)

  Granville couldn’t help the blush. He had not been expecting Captain Lau to introduce him to the group that way. Nor to hold him up as the decision-maker about their collective future, stealing back Imperial warships so they could return them to duty.

  But Deni smiled at him from one side of the group, and that was what he needed. Another outsider being welcomed here.

  Chief Engineer Rushforth was joining this team. His team. She was a Senior Centurion, the same as Captain Lau, but both were deferring to his experience and authority, whatever of it there actually was left, after seven years on a prison farm.

  “What do we know?” he asked Rushforth as an opener.

  She had been on the ground for a day already, so she had to have crawled through all of them, looking at damage and assessing reparability.

  “There are four here in reasonable shape,” she said. “Plus two others that had suffered significant damage, but one of those appeared to be an engine detonation that took out the rear of the ship, and the other appeared to have taken a direct hit forward, possibly losing everything to that first major frame, if they are truly built in thirds.”

  “I have been studying Aquitaine ships,” he said with a grin. “At least as much as my current security clearance allows. Your ships, pardon, our ships are built with more frames, and less standardization. Fribourg vessels tend to be cookie-cutter designs. In the case of the cutters, rather than building a new ship, it would be possible to remove and salvage any lost third, and replace it with newer equipment. Not necessarily cheaper, in the long run, but much faster to build and repair, and it allows the entire fleet to be slowly upgraded in place, rather than build new hulls and retire perfectly serviceable old ones.”

  “That would explain something Phil suggested about Buran, but wasn’t the case on the ground,” Heather said. “He said he was expecting two of any design captured, to make sure that one wasn’t a one-off design, if you needed to go back and inspect them later.”

  Granville watched the nods. It made perfect sense. For cruisers, that was exactly what would happen. Frigates, to a lesser extent, but the E-hulls would also tend to be standardized on a single design and then dozens or hundreds of them decanted.

  D-type hulls and below tended to be a much more random selection of things. Hopefully, that would work to his advantage.

  “If so, then that explains keeping six,” Granville grinned. “And Captain Skokomish will encounter something similar when she goes to look at the site with the D-type hulls, although those tend to be done in quarters, rather than thirds.”

  “Is that why they’re a third bigger?” Yeoman Tuason asked, a little metaphorical light bulb coming on over his head. “You build them all in the same yard and just assemble different pieces as you go?”

  “Indeed,” Granville acknowledged with a fierce grin. “It allows shipyards to standardize as well, so C- and D-hulls can be put out from the same line, as needed.”

  “And you think we can pull them apart on the ground?” Kam asked, somewhat incredulous.

  “As I said earlier,” he replied mildly. “The gravity here is one-seventh. But the insertion shuttle and the transport truck both have winch capabilities, so I believe we might be able to dismantle sections, and then lift them, or possibly reassemble them on the ground.”

  The Chief Engineer fixed him with a hard stare for several seconds before she finally spoke.

  “Galin’s correct, Veitengruber,” she said. “You are nuts. But it might work, and we can always bring in Anna and the other shuttle if we need extra lifting capacity.”

  “Very good, sir,” he said, “Then we need to go look at the relics and see if we can commit mayhem.”

  Somehow, he ended up in the first group to exit the airlock, down the external stairs, and across the dusty ground. There was enough atmosphere to have wind, mostly driven by convection from the star, and a little off of the gas giant. Reports from Centurion Brinich had suggested some additional level of volcanic activity, location currently unknown, but likely to be discovered, if CS-405 spent several days in low orbit, hiding in the planetary umbra and scanning the ground for more prospecting sites.

  Granville Veitengruber had always sneered down his nose at the crews of the police cutters. As a young, mouthy, hotshot fighter pilot, he had frequently had more offensive capacity in his A-6j fighter than one of these C-type hulls. And a higher spot in the social pecking order.

  Seven years as a slave had knocked most of those edges off his soul. These ships had not gone to Samara with a fleet to beat back the invaders. Fleet took nothing smaller than D-class hulls, and those only as escorts for carriers, which told him that these ships had been captured somewhere else.

  Most likely from Buran raids? Captain Lau hadn’t mentioned any, except to suggest that perhaps Fribourg had not been particularly forthcoming with certain embarrassing information.

  He could see that. Who wanted to admit that they could not defend their own worlds? And yet, wasn’t that exactly what Admiral Kosnett was attempting to do? Holding warships could not be captured, with the notable exception of what Admiral Keller had apparently managed with surprise and something called a Heavy Dreadnaught.

  Granville followed the Chief Engineer as she stalked her prey. The dust here was almost orange, a mix of iron, carbon, and silicates that looked like an ugly, endless beach under an eternally-sunsetting sky with a dread-bringing cat’s-eye in the sky overhead.

  Heather Lau walked with the Chief Engineer, and Deni strode at his side. It made a nicely balanced picture. Two fierce naval officers. Two ex-slaves still trying to figure out what freedom might taste like.

  Rushforth’s first target was the one that had gotten its nose punched in by something bigger, meaner, and angrier. Not that hard, in a C-type cutter, when almost anything else in space qualified.

  The ship was flat on its belly in the sand, rather than resting on landing skids, like the four others in better shape. Someone, presumably one of Rushforth’s engineers, had forced an airlock aft, but Granville steered the group forward, counting steps against his memory of naval college midshipman cruises, over a decade ago.

  He found the spot that marked the first major frame. It was obvious to the naked eye when he got there, where scouring winds had stripped off the electroplating that protected the ship against solar wind. Two rings, each about a meter thick, pressed up against eac
h other and running a complete circumference around the ship.

  Yes, the join spot.

  Yeoman Tuason was close by, so Granville grabbed the man and touched face plates with him briefly.

  “Find me an airlock forward of this spot,” he ordered the young man, pointing at the frame line in the hull.

  Tuason nodded and approached the hull, while Granville stepped back to try to envision the whole of the ship. Four decks in total, with the top and bottom pinching in on the sides and a central hallway, and the two decks in the middle having two corridors running fore to aft.

  Daylight caught his eye and Granville stepped a little to his right. The damage in the hull made sense now. Something had hit the hull hard enough to punch a hole cleanly through. Given the shape of the external hull plates visible, the shot had been coming at him from port, and exited through the starboard side, right where he was looking.

  And if he had counted his steps correctly, it had passed almost exactly through the tiny ship’s bridge. Larger ships might survive and continue fighting, but C-type hulls only had one control space. Lose that, and you lost the ability to see, fly, or fight.

  Battle over, and quickly. Ship captured and carried off to examine it to see if it had any military secrets worth noting. And given the damage, the forward turret was possibly too badly damaged to even consider, but he would have one of the engineers look at it anyway. This piece would be lighter to haul to space, with a core punched out of it like a giant apple. Easier to access the weapon space, perhaps.

  Tuason found a spot and cranked the forward airlock open by hand. It was normally at the bottom of the door, but that presumed the ship was landed normally, instead of being dumped. Here, it was about at his shoulder level, which would make climbing in interesting, since everybody would misjudge the jump in low gravity.

  But the man got it open quickly enough. Rushforth and Lau let him lead at this point, with Tuason, Galin, staying close by.

  Granville really was in charge. At least as much as he wanted to be.

  The ship was dark, but their suits had lights. Dust had blown into these hallways over time, which told him that the kill had been fast and efficient, and nothing forward of this frame had probably survived.

  He found himself on a sunlit bridge, cursing the bastards that had ambushed a helpless police cutter and killed it. Probably a Mako chomping down on a helpless guppy.

  But he was correct about the forward turret. It might be more easily salvageable, depending on the other ships. That would give them an extra gun they could consider mounting on CS-405 to replace one of the defense turrets, if Admiral Kosnett chose that path.

  Aft, the tale was different. The first frame had held, from the looks of things. Again, that made sense if a shark suddenly dropped out of jump on top of you and fired a bullet through your ship’s brain. The rest of the corpse might still be pretty.

  “Thoughts?” Captain Lau asked over the radio after he had spent several minutes tinkering around and looking over Galin’s shoulder.

  “The bow is a loss,” Granville replied. “Stern two-thirds appear to be in reasonable shape. I want to consider separating the bow and taking it, anyway, though. The weapon might be repairable, and taking a bow third missing so much mass would make it easier to lift.”

  “Noted,” she said, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with his assessment.

  There were still five more corpses to look at.

  Coroner (October 13, 402)

  Granville sat on a handy landing skid and let the ship take his weight. Even in one-seventh gravity, he had done more work today than he could remember, at least since calving last spring.

  If time was no pressure, there were probably three ships that could be assembled from mismatched parts. All that required was turning the surface of this moon into a petite dry-dock and bringing in a few overhead cranes that could move this sort of mass.

  He watched a light appear on the too-near horizon and approach, resolving itself into Queen Anne’s Revenge and landing on the far side of his insertion shuttle, Saddlebags in her wake.

  Over the last nine hours, he had walked, climbed, squatted, and cursed the other five derelicts, touching each section in turn and consulting with Galin, Heather, and Kam about the relative merits of each.

  Number one was still his favorite, even laying in the sand rather than resting on skids like the rest. Three and four had fought back before being taken. They had suffered damage across much of their hulls, and probably had internal systems that would require too much love and time to fix. Number two had indeed suffered some manner of engine failure, catastrophically and in sequence. The outer hull had peeled back from the aft forward, as though the explosion had been contained by the hull and the frame, with everything in the middle melted and shredded.

  At the same time, the bow of the second ship looked almost pristine. Granville would have guessed that the last section was the oldest, and should have been replaced when the bow was, then not too long after that trouble had come for them and they had been destroyed at the moment they brought everything on line.

  Five and six had nothing particularly interesting or flawed about them. But they were the oldest ones here. As with two and three, damage was spread across all sections, but not so bad that it couldn’t be repaired.

  Given time.

  Granville looked up in surprise when a hand landed on his shoulder. Deni smiled down at him.

  Heather had knelt in front of him when he wasn’t looking, putting their eyes about on a plane.

  “As your commanding officer, I have one thing to say,” she muttered. “How the hell are you still able to keep going, after all that?”

  A hand gestured at the half-dozen corpses lined up for the coroner to inspect. Granville realized that time on a cattle ranch had given him and Deni far deeper reserves of endurance than a naval officer on active duty might have. He considered that the marines under Trinidad Mildon might be the only other crew members that could have easily kept up today.

  He grinned at her.

  “Calves don’t care how many hours you’ve been awake, Commander,” he replied. “They’re coming, and coming now, and you better be there to help.”

  “Ugh,” she groaned, rising slowly to her feet. “I intend to claim seniority and take the first shower after the briefing. Shall we?”

  Granville rose as well.

  “Break time,” he called over the team channel.

  Everyone was in sight at this point, many of them collapsed against hulls and skids from the effort of the last day. Granville still had more pep, so he ended up in the first batch of crew through the airlock, simply because his feet weren’t dragging. Deni and Heather joined him, along with Galin and one of the crew he didn’t immediately know on sight yet.

  Up, through, aft, down. This ship wasn’t designed with an airlock on the cargo deck. Instead, the assumption was that it would dock against a station, establish a seal against the hull, and lower the front hatch as a ramp.

  Crew inside were already in hammocks slung around the outer walls when he got there. He found Captain Skokomish and several of her crew seated on handy boxes and jumpseats, but Markus Dunklin was the man he really wanted to talk to.

  “Four hulls?” Granville asked as he got close. “How were they?”

  Markus looked up with bloodshot eyes. The man might have been awake for two days, with only catnaps. That was okay. Everybody would sleep for a while now, as the leaders figured out their next course of action.

  “One of them is probably only worth melting down for metals,” Dunklin said. “Two got scragged pretty good in battle, but look like they could still fly. One of them looks almost cherry.”

  It took Granville a moment to place the euphemism. From the Mongolian everyone was speaking, it translated into English as something rather rude. But he got the gist of it.

  “Fuel on the last one?” he asked.

  “Drained, but it looked like the ship was powered down clea
nly and winterized, for lack of a better term. Didn’t bring it live, but we could have, tapping the tanks on Saddlebags. Didn’t feel right, if that makes any sense?”

  Granville smiled. Markus and Galin were what Heather and the commanders called rednecks. Both would have settled right in on that ranch without much fuss. You had to make do with what you had, rather than cursing what you didn’t. And adapt things to do tasks they were never intended for, when that was all you had.

  “I suspect it was a trap,” Granville said. “A honey pot.”

  Even tired, Dunklin’s eyes lit up with savage anger.

  “Yes,” he said. “Too perfect. That’s why it felt wrong.”

  “Explanation, in small words, please?” Heather asked.

  She, Siobhan, and Kam had perked up, arrayed to one side while Granville and Galin talked to Markus.

  “Let’s envision some sort of escape from the prison world,” Granville said, pitching his voice loud enough that some of the others around the room could hear. “A stealthy rocket or something without JumpDrives, but capable of getting you to space. A few men, rather than a bunch.”

  “Sure,” Heather nodded, unsure where he was going.

  “There are captured warships in the LaGrange orbits of Mansi-B, but those are large vessels, requiring crews of scores or perhaps hundreds to operate,” Granville continued. “But you know that there smaller ships parked over here, so you race over and look for something that can escape. Most people would be crew off of bigger vessels, so they would gravitate towards the D-type hulls. Police cutters are frequently the lowest rung on the social ladder in Fribourg’s Fleet, as I can attest.”

  He paused to examine his audience. Most of the folks awake were listening. Probably the ones asleep as well, since that was a skill every sailor learned early.