“Um… both of those were long ago. I’m not sure I can remember enough that will be of use.”
Her voice took on the calm, soothing tone she used when trying to get him to open up. “That’s okay, Bren, let’s just start with what you can remember. Tell me about the boarding action on that slaver when you were serving with the light cruiser, Thor, what were your impressions of the Taslians and slavers?”
Holding back the sigh, he made himself comfortable in the chair and tried to order his thoughts, casting his mind back to those earlier years. They seemed so far away, almost like they had happened to someone else.
“I’d just been made an Able Spacer and I think I was about eighteen or nineteen at the time. Like I said, it’s been ages since I’ve thought about those years. It was six months after I finished my training at Yarrow, and the Thor was on an extended anti-piracy cruise in the Frontier, trying to stem some of the merchant losses. As a general duty rating and because of the nature of my past, the Petty Officer for my division gave me the honourable duty of ensuring the heads were kept clean.”
He laughed to himself, remembering the extra duty they would assign him and the worst jobs imagined, all to try and break his spirit. It hadn’t worked, instead it made him strive harder, just to prove to everybody that could be as good as any of them or better.
“The only saving grace for me was they always chose me for boarding parties, thanks to my weapon skills, and that’s what happened the day the ship came across a Batavian Clipper trying to slip past our patrol. They’d come the long way down from where they’d bought the slaves at wholesale, trying to make it out to one of the slave centre planets in the Hinterlands.
“I wasn’t in the first party sent across on the pinnaces, that was full of marines, but I came on the second with the naval contingent.” He paused, sucking in his breath at the memory. “It was one of those epiphany moments, you know where everything you believe changes in an instant? It wasn’t the combat, fighting off slavers that had hidden from the marines and then appeared when we stormed aboard…. It wasn’t the sheer terror when you find yourself cut off from the others in the boarding party and surrounded by three desperate crewmen looking to stick you with their swords or daggers…. No, it was the slaves.
“There were hundreds of them, mostly Taslian but a few dozen from other worlds out on the rim of the Great Empty. They were stacked into cargo holds not fit for human passengers, where there wasn’t even enough space for washing facilities or meeting any basic hygiene standard you’d expect to see in a tramp freighter, let alone for hundreds of slaves. Chained like cattle to each other and the bunks, they needed to bring a dozen others with them if they wanted to use the head out in the centre of the hold. And then, the slavers don’t care if some of them die during the long journey because the profits made from selling one is a fortune and if half the cargo survives, it can keep a man in riches for the rest of his life. That’s how valuable the Taslian slaves were… like living, breathing gold and almost worth their weight in the metal too! Not like the other slaves you hear about on the news from lesser fortunate systems out on the Frontier… the Taslians are seen as a valued treasure and you can understand why when you see them all cleaned up and fed properly.
“All of them on the ship were female, mostly young, but a few hitting forty or so although it’s hard to tell with Taslians as they seem to have good genetics. I mean, any of them could be fifty and still look eighteen, but it’s not from anagathic medication so I don’t know why they seem to age really well. When you first see them on the slaver, you’re struck dumb with shock at the way they’ve been treated, and the way those large, almond shape eyes peer back just rips the breath from your lungs.
“Imagine the sight, Doc, hundreds of eyes of different colours; amber, violet, red, or black, as well as the normal shades we see here and all of them watching you and wondering if you were going to kill them or sell them like cattle down the market. All were pulling back in fear of the new arrivals, watching with those multi-hued, bright eyes and waiting anxiously as you took a half step into the hold. Most of them didn’t even know basic Anglic at that stage, it’s something they learn in the slave training later depending on which cartel or trading group buys them, so you can’t even tell them that they’re safe and sign language just doesn’t convey the same meaning in a situation like that.”
His voice tapered off, remembering the foul stench of humanity pressed together in horrid conditions with the barest of environmental systems functioning to keep them alive. The sight had stayed in his mind for a long time after that boarding action, horrified at the depths man could go against his fellow beings.
Looking up, he saw her making a note in the comlink and then peered up to catch him watching. He leaned forward, clenching his fists at the memory he was forced to dredge up for her benefit.
“Doctor, when you see something like that, especially when you’ve come from somewhere like I have and was still young and innocent… it rips you up. Your first emotion is to make the bastards pay that are doing this, but killing them is too merciful so you want to draw it out and make them suffer in turn for the suffering they cause. For some it hardens them and they get immune to sights like this… but tell me, how can a teenager be the same again when he sees that the first time?”
* * *
The thirty minutes had turned into another hour. When he finally made it out of the office and found his way to the cargo bay, Farquhar was on the temporary range that had been set up and was sending rapid bursts of gauss rifle fire downrange.
The Packet Boat they were aboard was one of the ubiquitous vessels keeping the numerous, far flung worlds of the kingdom up to date with dispatches and news. The kingdom was dispersed across more than two dozen worlds close to the centre of the Core Sector, and with travel between stars limited by the fundamentals of TEL physics, it came down to ships like this to keep news, data and mail flowing between worlds.
The TEL drive had been discovered back on old-Earth and it changed humanity for the better, or so they say. It enabled an overcrowded world to send out colony ships, offloading millions to new worlds to start fresh. Over time, clusters of cultures developed, mimicking old-Earth history and forming extensions of Earth’s nations. Even today, you still have most of the Core Sector dominated by several of these, such as the Britannic Kingdom, Merovingian or Frankish kingdoms, the Independent and Federal States of America, and many others.
Due to the limitations of physics, starship drives were only able to traverse a maximum of seven parsecs at a time, taking a week or 168 hours in a different dimension called TEL Space. In practice, starships could travel a varied amount of distance based on the TEL generator model fitted inside the hull; a TEL-1 drive would travel one parsec in TEL space through the lowest layers of this dimension. A TEL-2 drive can take the ship up to two parsecs through TEL space, and so on through to the TEL-7 drives that likewise travel through higher layers of the dimension and greater distances, but never beyond the fixed limit of seven parsecs or that same immovable time period. It was as if nature had decried enough of playing outside the rules and set this limit, forcing mankind to obey the immutable laws of physics.
The restriction meant that communication was limited to the speed of travel by starship, necessitating the use of fast ships like this Packet Boat with a high-performance TEL drive. Displacing close to one thousand d-tons, the boat was larger than those commonly used by the government for diplomatic and civilian purposes, but smaller than the enormous freighters and merchantman carrying bulk cargo between worlds. Lightly armed with only two dual fusion cannon turrets on the dorsal surface, it depended on speed and agility to evade threats when traversing hostile reaches of space. Cabins and recreational facilities were sparse and small, most of the internals given over to carrying fuel for the TEL turbines and large powerplant, with any remaining space being used for the long and wide cargo bay that ran the length of the needle-shaped vessel’s spine.
; Casting his eyes down the cargo bay, he watched Farquhar squeeze off several more rounds. The range had been custom fitted into this Packet Boat, making him wonder if it was reserved just for Special Forces or related operational tasks to this project. This vessel was pennanted by the navy and carried only himself and several others destined for the Artemis Project facilities on Lexington, as well as the fifteen officers and crew who kept themselves separate from the passengers as much as possible.
With the sharp whoosh-crack of the gauss rifle firing drawing his attention, he observed the impacts of the flechette rounds downrange. The targets were the traditional human silhouette figures, and as his carefully aimed bursts tore one after another apart, he had to offer a grin at the sight. The man knew more about dirty brawling and hand to hand combat than he’d ever learned, but when it came time to shoot on the makeshift range, he knew he could hold his own. Ever since being forced into the navy, he’d focussed on his weapon skills whether pistol, rifle or blade. Even as an officer and a pilot, he’d borne the brunt of jokes from his squadron-mates for this dedication to perfecting weapon skills.
It was one of the holdovers from his young days, when he found himself outside the formal schooling system and resorted to learning from books or flex at his own pace. He used to thrill at the tales of ancient heroes on Earth flying ancient aircraft in combat, and one maxim that he’d learned from those stories was that to be a good combat pilot, you needed to learn how to shoot pistols and rifles. It wasn’t enough knowing about physics and engineering, or trigonometry and calculus, but understanding how a weapon handled when firing at a fast moving target, whether on the range or out in the forest, was a valuable skill to master. It had stayed with him, and even when he was in the navy as a general service rating with no hope of ever seeing a fighter or attack boat, he continued the training. It had been one of the reasons he was always chosen for boarding parties or shore brigades when there was a risk of combat.
Casting his eyes over to the other weapons arrayed close by, he wished again that he had his trusty naval sabre with him to use in the bladed weapon training sessions, instead of the shorter cutlass. He preferred the longer weapon and the different martial art in using the sabre verse the cutlass, but that was somewhere else and if he was lucky it might be in Lexington when he arrived.
With the man ‘safing’ the weapon and turning to face him, he saw the customary frown set on the face. “You’re late… again. These sessions might save your life, Montclare, so if you have any interest in staying alive out there in the black, it’ll pay for you to show attention to your schedule. We only have a limited space of time until we arrive and you need to improve your skills if you want to stay in one piece.”
He gave the man a wave in return and held back his sarcastic comment. Farquhar hadn’t declared which branch of the military he served in, neither had he advertised if he was working for one of the alphabet soup government intelligence agencies. All he’d been told was that the man served the Artemis Project and was involved in the high-level planning and staffing of personnel. He could have been from the SSB, or Secret Service Bureau, the BJSIA or Britannic Joint Services Intelligence Agency, or one of the dozens of other agencies serving the interests of the kingdom against its many enemies. What he did know was that the man was highly skilled in unarmed and armed combat, with the many bruises from their brawling sessions owing testament to the knowledge and skill.
“You’re too late for our unarmed combat session, so we’ll follow that up after dinner tonight. For the moment, we’re going to go over gauss weapons again, starting with the Grail carbine, then the Reaper rifle, and ending with your Martina pistol. Your ship will have all those carried aboard, and that’s why we’re focussing on them so much.”
He glanced over to the weapon in the man’s hands and nodded.
“First up, I’m going to retest you on fieldstripping the carbine. You’ll have two minutes to pull it apart ready for cleaning, and two minutes to put it back together.”
He shrugged. “That’s not too bad, we did that yesterday.”
The man smiled, although there was no warmth in the expression. “Yes, except this time you’ll be blindfolded and immersed in a combat environment sim. If you were a Marine, I’d demand you do it in less than thirty seconds. Now, come over here and show me that the sieve you call a brain can do a simple enough task for once.”
Chapter 4
Johnson System, Core Sector
“All hands, all hands, brace for scooping operations in ten minutes. Duty roster, secure internal hatches and rig for atmospheric turbulence.”
He listened as the voice repeated itself, alerting the ship of the pending atmosphere dive into a Gas Giant to scoop for hydrogen and refine into fuel. They were in an intermediary system between the Britannic Kingdom and the Independent States of America, one that could be called a no man’s land between the two domains. Cleansed of life during the Great War against the Genalts, the system’s main world was nothing but a barren wasteland teeming with biological agents still hostile to normal humans.
The Core Sector had several worlds like this, but on the Frontier and further out in the Hinterlands there were dozens in each subsector. The Genalts had waged a scorched-earth war against humanity, ensuring that any world they left would be unusable and dangerous for anyone coming after them. In the Core Sector, instead of just using biological agents, the Genalts had also used different means to fight their wars, including widespread logic bombs and EMP weapons to destroy datastores and records. It was often said, this was the main contributor to the Long Night and de-civilisation of humanity for almost a thousand years after the war finally ended.
Over the last century, while the Core Sector worlds regrew into star-faring domains and formed alliances in a race to control the sector, a time known as the Reformation Wars, Britannia had emerged as one of the dominant powers. With allies from the Independent States of America, itself an offshoot from a larger American domain, the two had become closer diplomatically and through their military. Combined, the kingdom and the ISA struggled to resist all attempts by the United Systems Empire to control the sector.
The Ukies, as the United Systems Empire was known, had developed from a coalition of worlds forming into a kingdom, pulling together worlds with similar cultures and ideology, and now the main threat to peace within the region. The Ukies had a very different culture to most of the others in the Core Sector, deriving from scattered tribes and peoples of Turkic or Middle-Asian origin upon old Earth, they absorbed new worlds into their empire and forced them to adopt the rigid laws and rules that were an anathema to the ideals of democracy and freedom upheld by the Britannic Kingdom and ISA.
There were many other cultures and domains making up the realms of known space, he’d even been to some of them like the Merovingian Kingdom and Sitari Union, but this would be the first time he went to the free American worlds. The Indies had fought a war of succession from the Federal States about one hundred years ago, and with the support of the Britannic Kingdom gained their freedom from the totalitarian domain. As with much of the rest of the Core Sector, the Indies and the Feds continued on-again, off-again wars since their succession.
While he watched out the window as the bright purple and red hues of the Gas Giant grew ever closer, he smiled at the recollection of some of his earlier cruises and visits to other domains. It was one of the elements that had kept him serving in the navy all these years, enjoying the opportunity to see new worlds and different cultures. There was also the flying, and he had to admit that was one of the major reasons too, even if he was only flying the older Swordfish class Torpedo Attack Boats.
Watching out the window, he smiled at the view. If it weren’t for the navy, he wouldn’t see sights like this all the time. Civilian travel was expensive and traditionally reserved for the very rich, although that seemed to be changing these days in the kingdom with budget merchants and transport services beginning to appear. Out in the Hinterland
s and the Frontier, he knew it was still a rarity for starships on some worlds, just like his briefing flex and the comments from Farquhar or the Doc had illustrated.
The Packet Boat was about to dive into the Gas Giant’s upper atmosphere, scooping hydrogen to replenish the tanks for the final set of transitions into Indie space. Diving for fuel was a common enough occurrence in naval vessels, almost all faced it as a normal activity, and although there were Fleet Support Units and Tankers that followed battlegroups and fleets to assist in fuel replenishment; Packet Boats and independent vessels didn’t have such a luxury.
Beneath the ship on the ventral surfaces, wide scoops would be opening to gather the heavy atmosphere, pulling it into the tanks to be refined and purified and then used to fuel the powerplant and drives. For a ship of this size and tankage, it would be several hours of a very uncomfortable and bumpy plunge through the atmosphere. The inertial compensators would buffer most of the turbulence effects, but there were always pockets of atmosphere or localised storms that seemed to make any ship undergoing in-the-wild scooping give it’s crew a time that made amusement park rides pale in comparison.
Without a duty station on the Packet Boat, and as nothing but a piece of cargo for the crew to deliver, he was confined to his single berth cabin and strapped into the bunk, waiting for the wild ride to start. His eyes remained fixed on the window, taking in the view as the Gas Giant obscured the view of everything else. At any moment, it would start and those not used to this process would discover new reasons to hate space travel.
Artemis Files 0.5: Lexington Page 4
