Beyond the Rim (Rebels and Patriots Book 2)

by A. G. Claymore

  He walked back to his chair and retrieved the beer from the floor, sliding it into his pocket. With one last look around the room, he took a deep breath and started for the front door.

  There was an exit from the building on Darius’ floor but Paul resisted the urge to use it. He took the stairs up five flights and walked out onto the pedway, turning at random until he found a quiet park area with recycler chutes.

  He dropped the bottle in and walked on, moving back out to the heavier pedestrian traffic. He mounted a spiral staircase and removed his disposable, dark hoodie and gloves, rolling them into a compact ball. When he emerged into the open on the next level, he moved over to the right edge of the flow, shoving the clothing into another receptacle.

  As he walked, he began gathering everything he could find on Gilbert Thuringia.

  Team-Building

  Julia looked up from the flyer. “We’re recruiting privateersmen, Hale, not customers for a gentlemen’s club.”

  Hale held out his hands. “What?”

  She held up the flyer. “I don’t even want to get into how you got my image data, but why did you have to make… them so… prominent, and what’s with the overly dramatic account of my exploits?”

  “Hey, it’s not like people are signing up in the hopes of getting a better look,” Hale protested. “We need a crew quick, if we want to keep our commission.” He waved at the long line of men and women waiting to speak with one of the officers from the Mary Starbuck. Many of the hopefuls had arrived at the hotel conference room eight hours early just so they could be near the front of the line.

  “There’s a lot of competition for the best crewmen and an unpopular captain always ends up with the dregs. We’ve got to convince folks that you’re blessed by the Fates themselves. You had yourself a two-ship fleet within hours of your rescue, and one of those ships was a freaking Gray cruiser!

  “That’s got them thinking what their share would have been in the Ava Klum, if they’d been aboard at the time. Hell, I can just retire, keep my share in her and look forward to a tidy flow of credits as a partial ship-owner. These folks,” he nodded toward the long line, “all have visions of country estates dancing in their heads.”

  “Alright, fine,” she cut him off, “but the image?” She brandished the flyer at him.

  “Same thing, Captain,” Hale said simply. “They want to believe you’re favored by the gods. Even a shot of your face would have done the trick but we’re talking about advertising, here; you gotta exaggerate.

  “Looks are something you can’t do much about. It’s mostly up to luck.” He took the flyer and brandished it right back at her. “Can you honestly tell me the woman in this picture isn’t lucky?”

  Julia looked away from the image, but the frown died on her face when she realized most of the people in the line were looking her way. She knew Hale was right about playing up her reputation, at least, so she gave them a smile and a nod. The great captain wouldn’t dream of pandering to them by waving, of course.

  She understood the need to use her as a symbol. It was a part of leadership. If her crewmen believed in her, it improved their belief in their crew and, by extension, themselves. She knew she was a good leader. She’d made it all the way to her first star because of her skill, rather than her connections.

  What bothered her was the image on the flyer. True, nothing had been outright altered, but they’d set up her avatar for the render in a way that looked far too hot. She felt like a fraud. She was nowhere close to being that good-looking.

  She looked down at the image again. Wasn’t she?

  “We’ve got the engineering crew selected already,” Hale cut into her reverie. “They’re in the next room, voting on the positions right now. It’d be a good idea to go in and meet them. You want to make sure whoever gets the chief engineer spot will remember you when you stand for commodore.”

  “Commodore of a measly two-ship force,” she groused.

  “I’m not that concerned,” Hale replied cheerfully. “We’ll just grab one of those planet-killers you told us about. It’s got a huge fleet of escorts to protect it, which, in your case, just makes it easier, right?”

  She snorted. “Jackass!”

  He preened. “About time someone recognized me for my talents!” He made a shooing motion. “Go see your tinkerers.”

  She was only a few steps away from the double doors when they opened and a young woman stepped through. The tall redhead closed the doors and turned, eyes growing wide as she noticed Julia.

  “Oh, hey! It’s really you!” She blurted, drawing herself up to stand a little straighter. She held out a hand and Julia took it.

  “I’m Karen Savage.” She was shaking Julia’s hand enthusiastically. “We’re all damn glad you came along. Some of us have been stuck planetside for a hell of a long time. If you don’t know the right people, you just can’t get into a new crew.”

  Julia managed to extract her hand. “Hi, Karen. You’re going to be on the engineering team?”

  She nodded. Eyes shining. “Yes, I am, though we’re about to find out whether I’m going to be an engineer’s mate or the chief engineer.”

  Julia tilted her head up a fraction, her eyebrows rising. “Oh, the vote’s happening right now?”

  “Yeah. I think my chances are pretty good. I’ve got the experience and the other guy really came on a bit too strong, especially for someone who’s never been top wrench.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll wait out here with you,” Julia said. “I don’t want to barge in there in the middle of an election.” She frowned slightly. “What did you mean earlier? It sounded like my presence somehow made it easier for you to get back out there?”

  Karen nodded again. “Well, yeah. An existing crew can be pretty political. It gets to a point where you need one of them to fight tooth and nail to get you into a vacancy and I just don’t know the right people on the right ships.”

  “So a new crew doesn’t have the political baggage?”

  “Usually. A new ship tends to be staffed through a pretty small group like you have here, with Mr. Hale and the officers he brought down with him.” She smiled over at the line. “They have more than enough room on a new crew to make their friends happy. The rest is pretty much based on skill alone, and your guys have enough sense to leave the back scratching out of it when they’re staffing the engineering department.”

  The doors opened behind Karen and a middle aged man opened his mouth but snapped it shut again when he saw who was standing with her. He opened it again. “It’s you!”

  “Yeah.” Julia grinned at him. “I’ve been getting that a bit lately. I’m thinking of changing my name to You just to make things a little less confusing.”

  “Ah…” He scratched the back of his head. “Sorry. It’s just that I don’t really know what to call you, seeing as most of us would like to start calling you Commodore rather than Captain, but until the vote…” He trailed off.

  “You’ll be fine,” Julia quipped, her grin taking the sting from the jibe. “So, don’t leave Ms. Savage hanging. How did the vote go?”

  “Oh!” He shook his head. “Sorry, Karen. You got the job!”

  Julia couldn’t help but smile at the look on Karen’s face. The woman had been just another unemployed hopeful in a long line a few hours ago and now she was the chief engineer of a licensed privateer. And not any old converted garbage scow.

  She was the top wrench of a real-life, purpose-built warship.

  Julia shook her hand again. “Congratulations, Chief Engineer Savage!” She nodded at the doors. “Let’s go inside and meet your team.”

  It was a simple enough thing, but one that had to be taken seriously. Julia met every single member of Savage’s team and her CPU stored their facial patterns and names. She flagged anything personal they felt like telling her and linked them to her growing crew database as well.

  It meant a lot for a crewman to be recognized by a senior officer. It meant even more if that off
icer was actively looking out for them. Someone who desperately needed to clear some debts might be more likely to find himself assigned to a prize crew. He’d be among the first to receive his share when the prize was delivered to the consignment yards.

  Someone with a sick relative might also get the same treatment. Bringing in a prize could mean a relatively long stay planetside and the prize crew would be able to spend time with family without losing out on subsequent shares.

  After she’d had time to meet each member of the engineering team, she put a hand on Savage’s shoulder. “Forty-three’s a good start, Karen, but let’s double your staff while we still have applicants outside.”

  The chief engineer frowned. “We should have enough, based on the schematics we saw after Mr. Hale hired us on. If we double the engineering team, we dilute everyone else’s share of the prize money.”

  Julia smiled. “We’re going to need someone to look after the engine rooms of those prizes and I intend to take a lot of enemy ships.” She led Karen out the doors to the main room.

  A stack of tables lay against the wall behind the recruiters and Julia waved her over, grabbing one end and waiting for Savage to grab the other. They set it up next to the row of officers from the Mary Starbuck and pulled over a couple of chairs.

  Hale approached, his face showing mild bemusement.

  “We need a larger crew for the cruiser,” Julia told him. “I’ve negotiated a deal to get improved intelligence and it would be wasted if we don’t have enough warm bodies to form prize crews.”

  “Improved intelligence?”

  She leaned in close. “The Brotherhood is putting a monk on the Ava Klum for a five-year hitch.”

  Hale’s eyes nearly doubled in size. “You realize you’re talking about putting a spy in our midst?”

  She nodded. “There are some pretty strict ground rules, but the Brotherhood would have insisted on them, if I hadn’t. They need to walk a tight line to avoid betraying crews and destroying their own reputation. There’s still a lot of data they can collect this way without giving up tactical information about our own activities.”

  He shuddered. “It still sounds dicey.”

  She grinned at him. “What, having an intelligence service that serves both sides of a conflict? I’ll admit it sounds unworkable, but they’re going to start offering the same deal to everyone if this works out. They won’t be able to tell us where their brothers’ ships are, but they can tell us about a large collection of commercial orders destined for an enemy world, as long as they haven’t heard of it from their own crewmates.”

  “This monk’ll be on the Mary Starbuck?” He asked.

  Her grin took on a wolfish quality. “No, he’ll be on the Ava Klum. He’s going to have free run of the ship.”

  “But he’ll be able to tell the Brotherhood every secret, every weakness that Gray cruisers have!” Hale hissed.

  “Exactly!” Julia pounced on his objection in triumph. “And they would have found all that soon enough but, this way, they’re unable to sell the information to anyone else.”

  “Huh!” Hale grunted in surprise. “And they agreed to that?”

  “They’re holding out for the real prize,” she told him. “I have detailed schematics from the Gray carrier we stole.”

  “Including the origin-directed wormhole generator developed by that Daffyd fella?” He raised one eyebrow. “We hear things out here, you know.”

  She forced a rueful look. Daffyd hadn’t invented the damn thing; he’d just found it when they seized the carrier. The only way to keep the geniuses at CentCom from ordering it destroyed was to fabricate a palatable cover story. Admitting an alien race had built something that Humans couldn’t wrap their heads around was tantamount to heresy.

  She and Paul had gone to great lengths to ‘cover up’ Daffyd’s role as the ‘inventor’ and, naturally enough, the rumor spread like wildfire.

  “That was actually never mentioned in the negotiations,” she told him. “Anyway, start padding our new crew with enough bodies to get prizes back to Roanoke. We’re going to flood the local market with second-hand ships.”

  He grinned and headed back to his other recruiting officers.

  Julia put a hand on Karen’s shoulder. “Folks,” she shouted, “this is Karen Savage, the new chief engineer of the Ava Klum.”

  Despite still being unemployed, the prospective crewmembers in the long line gave Savage a hearty cheer.

  “Because we have reason to feel optimistic,” Julia continued, “she has an announcement to make.”

  Karen looked mildly surprised to be put on the spot but not actually flustered at all. “We’re going to need a lot of engineering specialists so we can get our prizes back to Hatteras Station,” she said in a loud, firm voice.

  The presence of a new table and officer had focused everyone in the line. Hearing there was an announcement had shut them up completely and she didn’t need to shout over them as Julia had.

  “Anyone with a verifiable engineering rating is welcome to give up their spot in that long line and take their chances at forty new spots we’ve just opened up in my division. Don’t move yet,” she roared.

  Julia was impressed that Karen had managed to halt what would have been a stampede.

  “Remember, I’m looking to hire engineers, not a herd of damn cats. I want you to step out of the line and walk perpendicular from the main line to a point opposite me. Then you’ll compress yourselves into a proper line, preserving the order you originally had in the first line. Anyone who fails to follow my orders isn’t welcome in engineering.”

  The candidates moved out of the main line as directed, looking around themselves to get an idea of how many they’d have to compete with for the forty spots.

  They weren’t the only ones counting. “Looks closer to fifty,” Savage said as she dropped into a chair.

  “If they’re qualified,” Julia told her, “hire them all.”

  Aggressive Interrogation

  Paul would have liked to wear his armor for this, but walking around Ravenna in an advanced suit of light auxiliary armor wasn’t his idea of low profile. Anyone seeing him would know who he was through the simple fact that no armor industry existed outside of the Imperium.

  He’d had misgivings about using stun grenades but, as he moved deeper into the core of the city’s warehousing district, he began hearing more blasts, shots and outright gunfights. The core was too far from the landing zones at the outskirts to get much business and so the cavernous spaces were mostly in criminal hands.

  Nobody would notice a few stun grenades going off down here.

  He’d tied into the camera network but, unsurprisingly, none of them were intact. He figured that worked to his advantage. Nobody would know he was down here at all.

  He had no problem using his augmented abilities here. He looked over the concrete retaining wall of a catwalk running above the space used by Gilbert Thuringia and his cronies. The pigeons were all in the roost.

  Time to drop a cat in their midst.

  He grabbed a handful of small stunners and slid first his right leg and then his left over the retaining wall. Giving a little push with his butt, he dropped in their midst, squatting deep to give his augmented skeletal system time to dissipate the force through the joints.

  He stood up and gave them a cheerful grin. “Hey, numbskulls!” He looked around at the shocked faces. “Who ordered the bad day?”

  He gave them a heartbeat to work through the implications and then he tossed the stunners.

  He’d set them with a short delay. Not so short they’d go off prematurely and scorch him and not so long that his targets would get a chance to escape. The small devices erupted before they even hit the floor, sending out over one hundred seventy decibels of sound and more than a million candela of light. They rendered Gilbert and his men temporarily blind, deaf and off balance.

  Three of the five men were hit by the balls directly, which prevented the balls from detonatin
g. They’d switched over to contact mode and delivered an electric shock instead. They could wait until he secured the other two.

  All in all, it was a pretty lucky dispersal. Paul had hoped to zap at least two but he’d take three with no complaining. His implants, partly left over from his days in the Imperial Marine Corps and partly from his later association with the powerful Nathaniel family, had protected his senses from the effects.

  He grabbed Gilbert first and slammed him over an office desk, securing his wrists with a nylon quick lock before turning to slam a fist into the face of the second man who was starting to recover from the blast.

  He secured the second man and turned his attention to the three men who lay, gently twitching, on a greasy-looking old rug in front of the couch they’d been sitting on when he dropped.

  That done, he took a deep breath and exhaled the stress of the encounter. All told, it had been less than a minute from drop to secure. He’d even worked in an amusing greeting on the fly.

  He’d almost say he was enjoying himself, but then he remembered that these five men had stolen a young girl from her mother. His own niece. Even if he didn’t need to keep his tracks covered, he would still have wanted to kill these men, just on general principle.

  He arranged his prisoners on the couch, which was a bit too small for five. He ended up having to lay one of them across the laps of the other four.

  He then made a quick and dirty job of tossing the place, dumping boxes and crates out on the floor and making a general mess. He wanted it to look like someone had been here trying to find something, which was technically true, but he simply wanted the appearance of a disagreement between rival criminal factions.

  He came back to check on his newest informants. They were all awake now and, typical of guys who make violence a way of life, they were eyeing him carefully.