by Blaze Ward
The Lord of Winter would help these barbarians come to their senses.
The tall redhead led them to another chamber, up a deck and some distance from their original cabin. The halls had remained remarkably empty, but Lan supposed that prisoners being moved about should be kept from the crew, so as not to endanger them.
As if a forty-four-year-old merchant with the slightest pot belly was a threat to body-builders with guns.
“Commander Officer here,” the redhead said and gestured as the door opened.
The new room was larger than their cabin. A large, wooden table dominated it, with chairs all the way around. Two more soldiers with pistols stood watch on the far wall with faceplates down. In their armor, it was hard to gender them, especially considering how tall the woman escort was.
Not that it mattered, the commander was seated beyond the small sea of wood.
He rose as they entered, and smiled welcomingly. He was a big man as well, perhaps one hundred-eighty-eight centimeters tall. Broad in the shoulders and impressive, Lan guessed ninety-five kilograms, with muscles everywhere and dark, blond hair. Another European genotype, so common among the barbarians.
He gestured to the two chairs on this side of the table.
“Thank you for joining me,” he began in Mandarin. “I understand you are fluent enough that we can converse?”
“We are,” Kiel spoke up, moving to grab a chair and slide it back.
Interestingly, the legs of the chairs had magnets attached, holding to the floor, but allowing one to move it around easily enough. Resolute Revolution’s chairs were either flip-down jumpseats that retracted to the hull when not in use, or sat on swivel posts, like the bridge.
Lan waited for his spouse to sit, and then joined her.
“Command Centurion Phil Kosnett,” the tall, strange, pirate captain introduced himself. “Commander of this vessel, CS-405. My apologies that we had to commandeer your ship for the time being.”
“The time being?” Kiel asked.
Lan knew his spouse was smarter than he was, so he let her talk to the barbarians now. Perhaps he could learn something, just watching.
“Yes,” Kosnett said.
Kosnett. What a strange culture, to not have one of the eight Clan names, nor a crèche. Just a family group and a personal name. How bereft they must be, not to belong.
“I am Nu Ulap Narah Kiel,” she introduced herself. “Half owner of the freighter Resolute Revolution. My spouse, Xi Arakh Goran Lan. How long are we to be prisoners, Command Centurion?”
They had not spoken previously with any of the officers in charge of this crew, just men and women with guns, however polite those people had attempted to be.
The man Kosnett had an expressive face. It was not an evil one, like that ethnotype frequently was in movies. Perhaps more the Magic Anglo.
“I would like to offer you a choice, Kiel,” he said succinctly.
Lan was reminded of the ancient choice Faust made, when confronted by Mephistopheles. He wondered what black magics these foreign devils might have brought with them.
“Go on,” Kiel replied coolly. She was always better at keeping her emotions in check than Lan found himself to be. She was the one who negotiated deals with new brokers, when they traveled to different planets.
Kosnett nodded and checked both of their faces before proceeding.
“Our ship suffered damage during a recent attack on Severnaya Zemlya,” he said.
“You attacked the sector capital?” Kiel sounded as shocked as Lan felt.
“We were part of Jessica Keller’s fleet,” he admitted. “She did serious damage to the station before departing. This ship was unable to keep up, and has been left behind. This is a military secret, but there is nobody that you can tell it to currently. At some future point, it will not matter. We captured your ship of necessity, and will use it.”
“And the choice you would offer us in blood?” Kiel sneered awesomely at the barbarian.
“Not blood,” Kosnett corrected. “We are in the process of sneaking to a safe place, using your ship as a scout. I can deposit you at the first Holding planet we encounter, where you will be safe. Or you can choose to stay with us until we are safely home, at which time I will return your ship to you and send you on your way, hopefully with a new cargo to replace the one I have stolen from you. The risk in the interim is that you would be destroyed if we were.”
Lan was shocked. Disbelief rose up and clouded his eyes, but Kiel reached out a hand and squeezed his, reminding him who he was. Deals with devils were never beneficial. Briefly, he wondered if The Eldest would punish them for not resisting more forcefully. As if there was anything they could have done.
And would it be better to escape with what they knew at the first opportunity, or get their ship back, if the man kept his spurious promise?
Carrots, dangled in front of cart horses.
“Just like that?” Kiel asked skeptically.
“Yes,” the man agreed. “We are strangers here, and you have been accidentally swept up in our larger web. If we were savages, it would have been easier to have simply killed you when we took your ship. That’s not my way. Keller’s war is with The Eldest, and civilians will be hurt. Have been hurt. But it was always contained violence. Once her point was made, at places like Yenisei and Stanovoy, she allowed people to escape her wrath, even if they floated right beneath us in orbit, unable to maneuver from the damage we had done to them while battle raged. She has also ordered us to behave as civilized folk in the houses of strangers.”
Lan caught Kiel’s nearly-silent gasp of shock. Felt it himself. That was a line straight from a training crèche video: behaving as civilized folk in the houses of strangers.
Kosnett could not have stumbled onto the phrase accidentally. The look on his face made that clear. No, he had spoken with a scholar of The Holding at some point. That much was obvious. Learned enough of their ways to conduct himself appropriately.
“And if we choose to remain?” Kiel asked. “To travel with you to whatever safe destination you might find? You would return our ship?”
“If I can,” the man said. “This is war, and things happen. If I cannot, then I will find a way to make you whole.”
It was another interesting turn of phrase. Lan wondered if the man understood that in the legal sense, as those words had a special meaning in The Holding. Losing Resolute Revolution would not cause them to fall into poverty. They had enough credit with The Eldest to start over, perhaps buying another old freighter and returning to their merchant ways.
To be made whole would possibly involve the barbarians giving them a new ship, if the old one was lost.
Kiel glanced over for his opinion. Lan nodded. He was pretty sure what her choice would be, but he would back her one hundred percent, either way. He would be nothing without this woman by his side.
“We will accompany you, then, Command Centurion Kosnett,” she announced. “We will see your ways, that we can report them home when we return.”
Lan wondered what The Eldest would say, if they came home in a barbarian ship, loaded with barbarian goods for trade. But was not the purpose of The Holding to bring the barbarians to civilization?
Internally, he chuckled that the fates had chosen two such unlikely messiahs to convey that message.
Peeking (April 11, 402)
The bridge of Anna’s Vindication was crowded, but Siobhan wanted everyone up here to see what she was seeing, as well as to understand what sneakiness she had in mind. She had the right-hand seat, looking out through the big, front windshield. Max was in the left seat, with Markus right behind him. Nakisha and Trinidad were crammed into the open hatch. They had arrived at this system ahead of CS-405, but that was partly due to Siobhan pushing her piloting.
There was a feel to JumpSpace. Every gravity well and hydrogen cloud you encountered altered your trajectory in unpredictable ways. With modern JumpSails, you just ended up doing something like the equivalent of tacki
ng occasionally, or perhaps lagging over or under big systems you needed to get by. Anna’s Vindication was using the older JumpDrives, so on top of it all, she could only throw herself on a certain vector blindly and hope she didn’t miss her target zone by too much. Capable grav-sensors would have made this so much easier.
But Siobhan had discovered in herself something of a feel for it, after the second or third try. It was like trying to nail a deer with an arrow in a crosswind, while it was bounding back and forth away from you. She couldn’t describe it, but when everything lined up just right, her fourth jump had been almost exactly on the bullseye, missing zero by less than three light seconds, over a distance of more than three light-years.
And, according to the old logs, the best Lan would have been able to do with a run like this was take nine hops, when she had done it in six, and just under half the time he would have.
“Where are we, anyway?” Max asked. “I was busy converting a closet to a medbay when you explained it over the PA earlier, and was mostly ignoring you.”
Siobhan grinned at that. Max always had his priorities lined up right, and part of that was him assuming she knew what the hell she was doing. And she might even, at that.
“That’s Barnaul,” Nakisha spoke up before Siobhan could answer, pointing to the map Siobhan was displaying on her screen, scaled up for everyone to see. “A pimple on the ass-end of beyond. Here there be dragons kind of place.”
“She right?” Max turned to face his new commander.
“More or less,” Siobhan agreed. “It’s a relatively new mining colony. Only about forty years old, according to Lan’s notes. They were planning on heading out here on a jaunt sometime, bringing exotic foodstuffs from either Severnaya Zemlya or Ninagirsu. Maybe Altai itself, although the planet that gave this sector its name is a forgotten backwater these days.”
“Okay, I’m missing something,” Max said ruefully. He was good at that. “Why do we want to go there if Kiel and Lan were looking to haul them food? Wouldn’t we want to hit a farming world?”
“The key word is exotics, Max,” Siobhan said. “Think all those tuna steaks we have in back, only even weirder. Kiel’s notes say things like sides of cetacean or shark carcasses from Rivers. Or strange fruits from some of the more exotic worlds. Stuff like dreamberries or their cousins, the swampberries, that come from Altai. Those were originally bred up from a gooseberry bush, back in the Concord days, according to the encyclopedia that 405 translated for me.”
“I get the feeling you had this in mind two minutes after Phil offered you command,” Trinidad grinned at her.
“Two minutes before,” she admitted with a laugh. “How I would become a pirate, given the chance?”
“Berries?” Max asked, still lost.
“Kiel has extensive notes on every inhabited system in the sector, and what sorts of trade goods might work well,” Siobhan said. “She and Lan were really successful at what they did, right up until we stole their ship. All that tuna would have made them a nice profit, back at the capital.”
“Okay, so what’s the play?” Max pressed on.
Medics were always trying to get ahead of you, so they knew how to arrange a field hospital, based on expected injuries. If it was a party, then lots of aspirin, ice packs, and the staple gun. EVA assaults necessitated treatment for death-pressure exposure. Gun fights would mean salve and cotton bandages for pulse rifle burns or broken bones.
“So Barnaul’s entire economy can be found in one, big, pit mine,” Siobhan answered. “With a small landing field well off to one side, and a single, small town located just about between them. Map of the town is in the navigation system. Miners are mostly housed in barracks right at the top of the hole, well outside town, ’cause a shift goes down every eight hours to keep things humming, and only come into town on scattered rest days. The rest of the place is pretty quiet, and pretty provincial.”
Siobhan paused long enough to swap the planetary view for the map of the city. Two warehouses got highlighted in pink against the gray of the rest.
“So, we land about here,” she said, adding a starburst to the map, clear up in what looked like a forgotten corner of the landing field, the northeast, when the road to town was in the southeast. “Note that we’re accidentally almost right on top of the control tower for the field.”
A circle turned crimson as she pressed a button.
“We land, as close to the middle of the night as possible,” she continued. “Sneak out and capture the tower. Then we try to steal a truck or something, drive it to one of those two warehouses, and break in. The smaller one is mostly refrigerated or frozen goods. The big one has some food, and bunch of general supplies. It being the most efficient method, thought up by a most-efficient robot, everything for the colony is pretty much in one of those two places, with most stores only keeping a few days’ worth of stuff on hand.”
“Thank the Creator we stole this ship,” Trinidad offered like a benediction. “Can you imagine trying something like this without good intel? Land blind and stumble our way around?”
“Oh, we’re still going to do that, Tee,” Siobhan replied. “You got what, six marines under your command?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“So my plan is to meet up with Phil and Heather,” Siobhan continued. “Get all of your people, plus Bok and a couple of his teams for strong backs and bring them all aboard Anna. Hit that place like a whirlwind, totally overwhelm them, steal everything we can, and then run like hell.”
“So you’re taking the whole piracy thing to heart?” Markus spoke up. “Like in a bad vid?”
She turned and speared him with a serious eye.
“Dude, I’m trying to figure out what kind of pirate hat I need to have made,” she replied.
That got a laugh, but it was half-hearted. They knew she was serious.
The locals might later identify the raider as Anna’s Vindication, but in Siobhan’s heart, the vessel was always going to be Queen Anne’s Revenge. And she was about to introduce them to a bad-ass, lady-pirate named Blackbeard.
The Professor (April 17, 402)
Professor Kosnett.
That was how Phil had started thinking of himself. This whole disaster had turned into the sort of extended training exercise that made or broke careers in the Navy. A place where the grading was done on a curve, but so was a fast drive along a cliff edge.
He entered the larger conference room and found himself in what his mind insisted on calling a pirate conclave.
Siobhan and Trinidad, off the prize. Kam and Bok, up from engineering. Heather as the Tactical expert. Evan as the sensors genius.
And Professor Kosnett, attempting to herd goldfish.
Except here, it looked like his job was going to involve pulling on the reins, when a team of semi-wild horses wanted to go like hell. Another job for a command centurion. It was way easier slowing a motivated crew than to kick a lackadaisical one into motion.
Everyone paused as he entered, faces turned expectantly towards him. Silence fell jaggedly.
Phil took the empty seat at the head of the table, feeling like Zeus overseeing the arguments that would lead to the Trojan War, among the various Olympians. Hopefully, nobody would need to get zapped by a lightning bolt today, because Siobhan Skokomish, with skin almost the color of night, and curly brown hair starting to get long and kinky, had a look in those dark brown eyes that reminded him of nothing so much as Pallas Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare.
He sat and silently placed both hands palm down on the table top. He hadn’t bothered to bring a tablet computer in here. Either one of them would show him something on a local projection, or they could use the big one overhead.
Professor Kosnett was here to grade the first term papers turned in. There were still more papers later, and a final exam ahead, but they had begun.
He decided to throw them a curveball, finding Trinidad Mildon at the far end of the table.
“Is security
going to be an issue, with all of your people off-vessel, Centurion?” he asked with a hard glare. Zeus, Lord of All.
Trinidad blinked rapidly. Good.
“If we have a spy or anarchist aboard this vessel, Phil, they’ve kept a remarkably low-profile to date,” Trinidad replied. “I have six because the regulations for a vessel this size indicate six. And we’re about to do the thing that is our reason for being here: initiate ground combat with an enemy force. Navin Crncevic’s just going to be mad when he hears about it, that we went off and did this without him.”
That got a laugh. Navin the Black was notorious for wanting to do more boarding actions. Against pirates or Fribourg, it even made a terrible sort of sense. Buran’s Sentient warships could escape too easily, or blew themselves up rather than being captured. Jessica had done the nigh-impossible by knocking one out long enough to kill the AI and capture the ship intact.
And any Sentient warship they ran into out here would eat CS-405 alive, one bite at a time.
Phil nodded. Just about exactly what he expected, but that just meant that Trinidad was thinking well ahead. All of them were. It was up to the professor to listen and guide. Or Zeus to cast someone down from Mount Olympus.
“Siobhan,” he turned next to the head pirate. “Why a mining colony? The gender breakdown is heavily skewed towards strong, able-bodied males, the kind that can cause lots of trouble for raiders.”
“And who are almost all generally confined to barracks over at the mine,” she replied with a diamond-bright gleam in those dark eyes. “The city itself, according to Kiel’s notes, actually leans female, presumably young women looking for a husky, hunky husband grown rich in the mines.”
She paused long enough to project the city map onto the tabletop: starport on Phil’s port side, mine to starboard.
