“Get specked, you treasonous cur,” Wainwright ground out, “any marine who follows the Lieutenant Colonel in his personal treason can expect my blade through his heart when next we meet! To abandon even one fellow marine when we are still in the fight with victory yet within our grasp,” Wainwright breathed heavily into the mike, “such a person is no fellow marine of mine.”
With a slashing motion, Wainwright reached over and cut the signal.
“A courageous move,” Suffic said after a moment.
Wainwright glared at him with hot and angry eyes, “You can take your courageous move and go shove it straight into a reactor,” he said angrily.
Akantha of Messene, that crazy woman, stood up from the Captain’s Chair.
“For honor’s sake you have burnt your bridges with the traitorous scum, Colonel,” she said in an imperious tone of voice and then thrust out her hand, “accept this hand of friendship and reaffirm your Brigade’s loyalty to the Confederation and its Fleet Commanders, and I swear to you on my unborn daughters that the Pirates of Omicron Station and our various enemies gathered here will come to rue the day they left you and your men out here to die!”
“It’s a sad day when your allies are just as crazy as your enemies,” he grudged, then with a sigh reached out and clasped Akantha’s hand. It’s not like he had much of a choice at this point. He could refuse and fight the hysterical woman and her several thousand, mostly native Tracto-an lancers, or he could pay lip service to a lost cause and hopefully kill a few more pirates along the way. When put like that…
“I reaffirm the commitment of both myself and any of members of my Brigade still following orders to the Confederation Fleet,” he sighed. “Long live the Confederation,” he added and gave a lackluster cheer, the words like sawdust in his mouth, but she clearly needed to hear them and if that’s what it took to get her and her people motivated, then so be it.
The crazy gleam entering the eyes of Suffic and his Lancers made clear he’d guessed right. The most important thing, he reminded himself, was keeping his boys and girls alive for as long as possible. Failing that…their goal was to take as many of those pirates with them as possible.
Chapter 51: Recovering from Cupid’s Arrow
He was the very model of a recently upgraded Space Engineer.
Gants visibly started and then started coughing.
“It’s not as funny as all that, Gants,” Spalding glared at him.
“Of course not, Chief,” Gants agreed, hiding a smile behind his hand.
“If I had my old hair back, I wouldn’t be a half bad catch,” the old Engineer objected, sitting back down on his bed with a plop and gathering the pieces of his eye.
“Did you know before, or after she took apart your eye,” Gants asked with such a straight face that Spalding peered up from the remnants of his disassembled eye suspiciously.
“It was a gradual process,” Spalding allowed, throwing his arm wide for emphasis before bending down to pick up the supposedly defective chip, “could have been just before or just after.”
“Gants looked perplexed, “After what?”
“My eye, you fool,” Spalding snapped, looking up from the scattered remains of his eye, “before she just went and jerked it out. That’s when I started to suspect my current love-struck condition.” He shook his head sadly at the Armory transfer. “I see yer time in the armory has turned your brain all soft and flabby. We’ll have to work on that and get you back into thinking trim!”
“Right, Sir,” Gants replied, not looking at all enthusiastic. “Anyway, that was Ms. Baldwin. She’s the head of the Space Construction and Repair Committee, so it might be important to stay on her good side.” he urged.
“When Cupid strings his bow, men like ourselves — that’s you and me, Gants — should run for the hills.” Then Spalding stopped abruptly, processing the younger man’s last words. “A Committee,” he barked. “What’s this I hear about a blasted Repair and Construction Committee?”
“Well, Ms. Baldwin said we should just let her repair and build things,” Gants explained slowly.
“The first sensible thing I’d have heard all day, if she wasn’t a Civilian,” Spalding agreed.
“Right, she’s a civilian,” Gants agreed, nodding his head. “The Admiral put me in charge, but Doctor Presbyter is a real officer and actually outranks me. Of course, neither of us are actually engineering officers; I was only a rating before I transferred, since you never finished training me. So we decided to set up the committee with a number of the top civilian engineers from the Constructor included, so we could get ideas and veto anything that didn’t sound right.”
“Oh lad,” Spalding groaned, “you can’t get anything done with a committee!”
“It’s been a lot slower than I would have liked,” Gants admitted, “but I think that on whole…”
Spalding couldn’t stand hearing another word.
“A committee is like a mob,” the old Engineer shook his head fiercely, even as he leaned over the remains of his eye and began reassembling it. “You take the average IQ of the group and then divide it by however many members are present, and that’s how smart — or more realistically, just how stupid — a Committee really is!”
“I just didn’t have the experience, Sir,” Gants explained in a small voice, his eyes turning to the floor. “I can fight and maybe run the armory by myself but I’ve never done any of this administrative stuff before. Presbyter was no help, all he wanted to do was build his facility hospital and he’s a real officer.”
“Saint Murphy, preserve us,” Spalding snapped as he struggled with his tempter, staring up at the ceiling for patience and inspiration, “we’ve had a former rating and a Medical Quack trying to run things through a civilian talk shop. This is the very definition of insanity.”
“We did our best, Sir,” Gants said defensively.
“Well, there’ll be no more of this Committee nonsense once I’m out of Medical,” Spalding growled, “they’re bad business is what they are!”
“I’m not sure if they’re going to agree to that,” Gants began nervously, “I mean the owner of the Constructor, he might call for a work slowdown or a strike.”
Spalding stared at the younger man and had to forcibly remind himself that he was a good lad; he just needed a firm hand and a lot more training.
“You’d just let him strike,” old Engineer asked in a deceptively mild voice, “and stop building the things the Little Admiral and our fellows back on the Clover are going to need?”
“Of course not, Lieutenant Spalding,” Gants blurted indignantly, “but if I just locked him up, what would I do if the rest of the work force decided to stop working… kill them all?” The younger man threw his arms in the air. “Then who’s going to build the things we need?”
“There’s ways, lad,” the old Engineer paused, a gleam entering his eyes at the thought of an entire shift of slackers trying to pull an unauthorized strike on his watch, possibly even shutting down the one thing that could get him back to his beloved Clover, “and then… there’s ‘other’ ways…” his voice trailed off as he contemplated a number of ways he’d ‘encouraged’ under-motivated work crews in the past.
Gants eyed him uneasily.
Spalding gave himself a stern shake.
“But don’t you worry, Gants. I’m certain they’ll see the path to sweet reason just as soon as I explain it all to them,” the half-borged Lieutenant said in what he thought was a quite reasonable tone.
From the look in Gants eye, he hadn’t sounded quite as reasonable as he might have hoped.
“There’s another other thing, Lieutenant Spalding, Sir: the Cruiser,” Gants tried to change the subject, but was doing such a terrible job of it by beating around the bush that Spalding scowled at him.
“Well, what about it,” he growled.
Gants tugged at his collar. “Well, other than delaying the rebuild of the Strike Cruiser in favor of new Medical Complex, the Space D
ock and the orbital refiner?” he asked with a weak smile.
Spalding stared at him in astonishment.
“You mean you really haven’t finished fixing her after all these months? I thought that was all just a bunch of poppycock and nonsense to talk me down,” the old Engineer glared.
Gants turned red.
“We started to work on her but the committee kept getting new ideas and everyone argued, so since we needed to build the Complex, the Station and the Space Dock anyway—” he stumbled to a halt.
“You’re not sayin’ you left her in pieces,” Spalding cried, staring at the younger man.
Gants looked guilty as sin.
“Not a man I trained, not you Gants.” Spalding shook his head in disbelief. “You wouldn’t take a ship apart and then just leave it half finished. Handing the job over to a bungling committee,” his voice rose as he expressed genuine disappointment.
The younger man mumbled and looked as if someone had just hit him. “That’s why we need you back, Presbyter said the Medical Complex took priority and then left it all up to me. It’s like trying to wrangle a bunch of cats in there,” he complained.
Spalding purpled.
“The Military isn’t a debating society,” he roared, glaring at the young man, “now I know why Saint Murphy went and took away my snooze button!”
“We’re all glad you’re back, Chief,” the head of the Armory said quickly.
“From a well-deserved slumber, I’ll have you know,” Spalding glared before turning back to his bed side table and quickly finishing the reassembly of his eye, “these old bones aren’t what they used to be…why; most of those bones are gone!”
“The Doctor said I wasn’t to get you too worked up,” Gants said before beating a hasty retreat towards the door.
“I’ll need a new processing chip for this contraption, or at least a diagnostic set,” Spalding ordered, lining up his eye and shoving it back into the socket. White fire flared through his head more painful than the worst migraine he’d ever had. Fortunately it was over with quickly, just in time for him to see Gants try to slip out the door.
“I’ll need a complete set of tools,” he barked at the door, letting the younger man know he wasn’t getting away that easily.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Gants replied with such a lack of enthusiasm that Spalding just knew that meddling quack of a doctor had gotten to him first!
Then a crafty gleam entered his eye. The doctor might have spoken with Gants about forbidding him from anything that smacked of work, but there were ways and then there were ‘other’ ways of getting what a man needed.
“On second thought, just leave me a porta-com. I’m too old and too sick to be jumping out of my bed all the time, so you can bring the tools tomorrow,” he said cannily, his voice the veritable note of sweet reason.
Gants gave him a suspicious look but Spalding lay back in his bed and draped an arm over his forehead dramatically.
“This eye, it’s still terribly out of alignment, Gants,” he lied, trying to sound as piteous as possible, “I just need something to take my mind off the pain.”
Gants shook his head and pursed his lips sourly before glancing from side to side as if to check if anyone was looking.
Ah ha! Spalding thought triumphantly, that Quack was still trying to keep an honest old engineer from doing an honest day’s labor. His mirth started to darken and then it was all he could do to keep the scowl off his face until after Gants had quietly placed a com-link on the bedside table.
The younger man bolted for the door and this time Spalding didn’t stop him.
Looking with interest, he observed that in addition to the hand comm. there was not one, but in fact two data slates.
Engineer Spalding grinned. It seemed he wasn’t the only one eager to foil the good doctor!
Chapter 52: Blood of my Blood, Steel of my Steel!
Akantha stepped back to the Captain’s Chair and swept the Bridge with her cool gaze.
“Have the Lyconese Companies been dispatched to deal with the incursion,” she demanded, eager to move on to new business.
“Do you happen to have a battle plan, My Lady,” Wainwright inquired mildly. She could still see poorly concealed doubt in his face but she didn’t care. “Battle by committee planning is one of the most hazardous ways of fighting a war known to man,” he began with a curt nod. “Perhaps we should agree to an outline. A general set of guidelines and objectives and then set the various formation commanders free to take and hold their individual objectives.”
“These pirates will rue the day they heard the name Akantha of Messene and backed a ruthless Blood Lord who, far from being an honorable Bandit King… if such a thing even exists, ran out on them at the first opportunity,” she declared, thrusting her sword at the main screen.
“A fine sentiment, I’m sure,” Wainwright started gruffly but Akantha cut him off.
“Mothers will teach their children to cower beneath their beds when they hear my name,” Akantha said fiercely, “a generation of pirates will be raised to know that everything fell apart for their parents the day they crossed the Hold Mistress of Messene!”
“Right, because that’s what we want, children cowering under their beds at the mere mention of our names,” Wainwright said mildly shaking his head with disgust.
“You’ll take a more respectful tone when addressing the Lady,” Colonel Suffic warned, stepping up to the Marine Colonel.
“And just who’s going to make me, a jumped up junior officer without the starch to stay in military service when the going got tough,” Wainwright challenged, sticking out his chin. “You and what army, Suffic?”
Akantha slashed her sword between them, rising sparks from the floor. “First, we will stop fighting amongst ourselves,” she ordered brutally, “the next one to insult the other gets my sword to the gut.”
“Next,” she continued in a carrying voice, momentarily at a loss of just what to say.
“Colonels, Lady,” interrupted a Marine over at the sensor station, “I’m reading a large number of escape pods breaking free of the Lucky Clover.”
“Our people causing damage on the inside of the ship, perhaps,” Suffic mused after an angry pause.
“Or abandoning ship, as Riggs and his Jacks put the boots to anyone who isn’t loudly and enthusiastically enamored with their new Elected Cause,” Wainwright suggested sourly.
“Then we must first ensure they are our loyal people, then guide them to the safety of this Battleship, the Armor Prince,” Akantha said firmly.
“Or as sure as we can be, over an open communication line, that they are your people,” Wainwright said unhappily, “this still does nothing towards unifying our command structure.” The Marine Colonel shoved a cigar in his mouth before realizing his new suit of armor didn’t have a built in lighter in pinky finger of his gauntlets.
“Command shall be thus,” Akantha said firmly, “you shall each of you command your own people, there is no point in merging your bands in the middle of combat.”
“Still doesn’t clarify who is in overall command of our allied forces,” Wainwright said pointedly.
“As the Commander of this Battleship, the two of you will both answer to me,” Akantha replied with a regal nod to each of the men.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Lady…Akantha,” Wainwright added at the last moment, “but not only are you not a Confederation Officer, but other than waving your arms around and getting other people to do things for you, you don’t actually command anything onboard this ship.”
“Is that a fact,” Akantha said coolly, then produced first one then a second command crystal. Inserting the one she’d taken off the dead pirate Captain and then the Admiral’s Key given her by Jason just before leaving the Lucky Clover, she inserted them into the Captain’s Chair.
The Chair activated and she twisted it from side to side to make her point. Then thinking that perhaps her point was not yet clear enough, she spoke.
>
“As I recall, it is possible to activate any system from the confines of an active command chair,” she said arching a brow, “should I test it, just to be absolutely clear I am actually in command of this warship?”
Wainwright stared at her for a long moment then threw his hands in the air. “What are your orders, Commander of the Prize Ship the Armor Prince,” he asked, his voice heavily laden with irony.
“My first order as your Commander is thus,” she said stabbing her sword so high in the air raked the ceiling, causing sparks to shower them. “We counterattack, into the Omicron herself,” Akantha declared with ringing authority.
Colonel Suffic coughed, “Estimates are the Omicron houses several hundred thousand pirates and their supporting staff, My Lady. Are you sure this is the wisest course of action,” he asked in a reasonable tone of voice.
Unfortunately, Akantha wasn’t feeling at all reasonable right at the moment.
“These Star Bandits and Oathbreakers have declared to all and sundry, over the long talkers, that they have slain Protector Jason. Then they turned their backs on me, choosing to take their ships — our ship! – elsewhere, as if I am the sort of Hold Mistress one may easily turn his back on without fear of retribution,” she finished fiercely, stabbing her sword into the floor. It sank in several inches thanks to her power assisted musculature.
“I will show these bandits that when my Protector was lost, they lost more than just a powerful foe. They lost any protection they might have had from the wrath of a Hold Mistress of Tracto enraged,” she snarled.
“Somehow, I doubt that two thousand Lancers and three or so thousand Marines are going to be able to defeat a fortified Space Station numbering in the hundreds of thousands, many if not most of them heavily armed pirates,” Wainwright argued, shaking his head. “They are strong words, but we lack the weight of numbers to make them stick, to say nothing of the fact our men are spread from one side of the Omicron to the other, and for all any of us know, are engaged in half a dozen disjointed boarding actions. Any several of which could be taking place on the same ship, independent of the knowledge of anyone including another strike team!”
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