by Blaze Ward
So, we are becoming fellow travelers, perhaps? Will that work to our benefit over the short term? What about the long?
“Barnaul,” the tall officer answered with a small laugh.
“How did you land there?” Kiel pressed on, changing languages on the fly. “I thought this ship was too large?”
Lan knew a moment of shock when he realized that both he and his spouse were learning as much Bulgarian, apparently, and becoming as comfortable in it, as the barbarians were learning the civilized tongue. He wondered if that crime would also be on their heads.
“It is,” Lau said. “We used yours instead.”
“Really?” Lan burst out, panicked at the thought of wanted posters with his face adorning every customs office in The Holding.
“It should be safe for you,” Lau continued. “The crew customized the engine transponder to that of one of your competitors, according to the notes I have seen.”
And yet another crime against humanity on his ledger. Lan wondered if The Eldest would recognize Force majeure as a defense, or if he and his spouse would be adjudicated guilty of Lèse-majesté, when it was all over.
“You assaulted the refrigerated warehouse?” Kiel asked.
She was the one who knew every planet, every culture, and every bureaucrat. Lan was just the bookkeeper on this team.
“Snuck in,” Director Kosnett joined the conversation now. “My Second Officer has taken it upon herself to become a pirate. They landed, stole a flatbed, and liberated two large shipping containers and several dozen small ones before the authorities chased them off.”
“Oh ho,” Kiel laughed. “I would have liked to have seen the look on Beel’s face when that happened. He has always been a stickler for rules, with no sense of humor. Now where are we headed, if I may ask without offering insult?”
Kosnett paused. The table paused with him. Lan realized that he and his spouse had possibly gotten too close to the heart of the matter with an innocent question. Perhaps reminded the man that they were prisoners of war, and not mere passengers.
“Normally, the path home would be to skirt Ninagirsu,” he finally answered, surprising Lan, who had expected to be unceremoniously marched back to the cabin for their effrontery. “But, as you might expect, we think those lanes will be too heavily patrolled right now for us to sneak through. It would be less of an effort if the ship was whole, but we cannot stay in JumpSpace for weeks on end without repairs. Our jumps, as you might have noticed, are not much longer than yours would have been, on your ship.”
Lan heard Kiel’s quiet gasp of surprise. They had been married for more than twenty years. Others might have missed it.
Had they just been admitted to the criminal enterprise as junior members?
Kiel nodded after a shocked blip.
“For now, we are running parallel to the M’Hanii Gulf, looking for an area I believe will be safe enough for us to sneak through, a possum trying to cross a highway.”
“First Officer Lau suggested at one point that you were using my notes on the sector, as a Gazetteer, Director Kosnett,” Kiel observed neutrally.
“That is correct,” Lau interjected. “We need to avoid the heavily-armed systems.”
“How many more raids do you anticipate?” Kiel asked.
“Two,” Kosnett said simply. “One now, and one on the far side to replenish stocks.”
“I have never crossed the border frontier,” Kiel said. “Trade in the Militarized Zone is tightly proscribed.”
She stopped and Lan watched her eyes grow distant, squinting at something she was calculating in her head. The whole table fell silent with her, poised.
“If one drew a straight line between Barnaul and Ninagirsu, as a navigation course,” she suggested carefully, “one might have taken a different path. Down forty degrees and left fifty.”
Lan started almost as hard as Officer Lau did, across the table.
“Thirty-eight and forty-four,” she answered after a second. “How did you know we’d go after Laptev?”
Kiel smiled. She glanced over at Lan. He found reassurance in that simple grin. Whatever she was up to, he would walk with her, always. Hopefully, it did not end in their execution as traitors or spies.
“It is the most isolated world facing the river of darkness,” Kiel said. “Far enough from Ninagirsu. And a farming world, where you will be able to fill your holds with grains and vegetables frozen for transport to places like Barnaul. I cannot speak to the Militarized Zone.”
“My notes on that side are actually much more extensive,” Kosnett replied. “Nearly complete. We are a scout, leading Admiral Keller’s fleet, so I have needed to maintain and update an encyclopedia of all those worlds we have explored or raided. I will send you home with some of my notes, minus only the militarily-sensitive additions.”
It was Lan’s turn to gasp, although Kiel joined him.
What would be that value to a merchant, of already knowing all the worlds in a new sector, were The Eldest to open it to trade?
Or worse, if The Eldest was pushed back by the dangerous warlord Keller, and perhaps the Altai Sector became the frontier? Would the barbarians welcome trade with civilized worlds?
Could they get rich, in what some might see as treason?
Rednecking (May 4, 402)
“What am I looking at?” Siobhan asked, standing in the hatchway to the machine shop, studying the thing Markus Dunklin was holding in two hands.
It looked vaguely like a pulse rifle. Bastard cousin, maybe. Pistol grips front and back. All black. But the barrel looked big enough for her to put a fist down it.
Trinidad was hovering over her shoulder as they watched, but he hadn’t said anything yet. Just breathing quietly on her.
“So Nakisha wanted a bigger boom,” Markus said defensively.
Nakisha always wanted a bigger boom. That girl was a little unbalanced, even for a marine.
“Uh huh,” Siobhan grunted ambiguously.
That was the problem with motivated folks. Occasionally they went sideways on you. She had no idea what was up, other than Markus asking her and Trinidad to come down to the machine shop to see something.
“Had an idea the other day,” Markus continued, holding his new prize up for them to look at.
“What does it do?” Siobhan prodded the man.
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Right. It’s a rocket launcher.”
“A what?” Trinidad asked.
His tone was even more unbelieving.
“I looked up arrows,” Markus said, going utterly sideways on them. “Works kinda like a crossbow.”
“Back up,” Siobhan stopped him cold. “Why did you build a rocket launcher?”
“Well, because I don’t have the parts to build a pulse cannon,” he answered.
Siobhan counted the three in her head. She had phrased her question badly. He had answered it. She was willing to give her favorite crazy redneck that. It probably made perfect sense to him.
“Why do we need a rocket launcher, perhaps?” she corrected herself.
“Oh, right,” he repeated himself. Must be a nervous twitch. She had known enough engineers to see that. “So we might have gotten into trouble, back on the mining world. Pulse rifle won’t kill anything with any amount of armor. Figure that riot control truck would have just laughed at us. And we couldn’t get close enough to roll a grenade under him, like we did the police car. Plus the dirt wouldn’t have been as effective to shape the explosion upward.”
“Okay, I’m with you so far,” Siobhan admitted. Had those cops been on the ball faster, over at the mine, then they might not have made it off of Barnaul at all. “Continue.”
“We got grenades,” Markus said. “Crates of them, according to Nakisha and Gerry, over on 405. Had an idea about how to deliver them. Haven’t tested it yet, but the theory works.”
Thank the Creator he hadn’t tested it. The ship was already crowded, even with both of those big shipping containers moved over to the mothership, since
the flatbed truck stayed here.
“Tell me the theory, Dunklin,” Trinidad spoke up.
“So I got a tube,” the engineer said. “Machined it clean and then added a single spiral of rifling. That’s steel. Machined another tube of steel, smaller, and then coated it over with a thin layer of lead, so I could cam it into place like a bullet and hold it when the fuel ignited.”
“Fuel?” Siobhan asked, concerned where this boy was headed.
“Yeah,” Markus’s whole face lit up with a smile. “That was the genius idea. Lined the inner tube with a layer of solid combustible. That’s the rocket fuel. But the back bit is a different mix. It’ll burn a little slower, and a lot cooler. Just enough oomph to get the rocket out of the barrel, and spinning slightly for stability, when the burn-through hits the hot stuff and it goes zip. Well, crack, technically.”
“Technically?” Siobhan wondered if she had wandered into an intellectual desert and gotten lost.
“Breaking the sound barrier, boss,” Markus said helpfully. “We’re subsonic in the barrel, so lower pressure. Once clear, we can go faster. On the front, I machined some cradles to hold standard grenades. You arm it when you put the rocket in the barrel, and then it will explode on impact. Just don’t try to shoot through trees or something.”
“Okay,” Trinidad said. “I’m not a rocket physicist, even if I did play one in a vid. Who did the math on all this?”
“I did,” Markus replied. “Nothing more complex than some orbital geometry stuff, plus a lot of pressure modeling for the metallurgy. Got it all saved in the computer for Bok to review at some point.”
Siobhan made a note to send that file to Bok the very next time the two ships were within communication range of each other, and long before they needed to use Dunklin’s new toy.
“And Nakisha can kill a riot patrol vehicle with it?” Trinidad asked.
“Should,” Markus smiled a kilometer wide. “She gave me the specs for the model she used to drive when she was Shore Patrol. Pretty sure a direct hit will shatter a decent-sized hole in the side. Lower and you can break an axle, if it has wheels, or put all sorts of shrapnel into the repulsors, which is just as good.”
“And we need this…why?” Siobhan asked.
“We’re pirates,” Markus pronounced, as if it was obvious and she was a little too dense to see that.
“And you need to test this on a planetary surface?” she continued. Emphasis on you, since there was no way in hell she was going to be anywhere near it. Let Markus and Nakisha take those risks.
“Don’t need atmosphere,” Markus noted. “Just a surface g of at least forty percent, so we can approximate flight dynamics. 405’s got the sensors for that.”
“And it will take smoke grenades?” Trinidad asked.
“Uhm, probably,” Markus’s face fell into so much confusion that Siobhan nearly laughed out loud.
Trust the redneck to worry about blowing things up, rather than just hiding from bad guys.
They were pirates, after all.
Council of War (May 11, 402)
How many times had he sat on that side of the conversation and watched Keller do this? Phil couldn’t really count, unless every big raid or event counted. He had that number in his head.
Motivate the troops, but not by appealing to their patriotic nature. After all, they carried the flag of the Fribourg Empire, these days. A few of the others even wore the uniform, although Phil couldn’t ever see himself going down that path.
No, Keller had always made her point in light of some greater mission. He had even gone back and viewed some of the operational logs from events with the old, inner circle, back when it was just her with Denis Jež, Alber’ d’Maine, and Tomas Kigali. Even Robbie Aeliaes had only come along later, although he had known Jessica from before, when she commanded Brightoak and he was part of her squadron.
Greater cause. In those early days, starting a psychological war with Fribourg on a normally quiet border, the place where tertiary fleets patrolled just enough to keep pirates and smugglers at bay, but never challenged the big gap between nations. Until Keller came along.
Rather like M’Hanii.
Jessica would appeal to this group in the light of saving galactic humanity from being taken under the heel of a deathless machine intent on becoming a god.
But Jessica wasn’t here today. First Expeditionary Fleet had hopefully made the right assumption that something had gone wrong, and that they needed to vanish into the night. One captured corvette was a tragedy. Losing First Expeditionary would have been a catastrophe. He and his people were forlorn, at this point.
As they should be.
Phil looked down the conference table at his team. It wasn’t much, as councils of war went, but it was all he had. Heather, Kam, Evan, and Bok from the main crew. Trinidad and Siobhan, who he had taken to thinking of as Lady Blackbeard, from the prize.
The conference room felt fuller than it was, but that was the outsized personalities involved. The sense of mission and confidence that they were making a difference here.
That much, he could promise to Keller as success on his part, as they made their way home. He had already done damage to Buran’s economy, however small it was, by capturing Resolute Revolution, and by the raid on Barnaul.
But the psychological impact had to be much greater. Keller had never actively captured freighters, only destroying a few at places like Yenisei and Stanovoy. And she had never set troops down on a planetary surface, after that very first raid, even before Trusski, when she wanted to anchor a line of retreat.
Phil Kosnett had upped the ante with Buran. Planetary constabularies would be clamoring for defensive forces, this far behind the nominal lines. More ships. More missiles. More troops. And those would have to come from somewhere. More importantly, word would get out.
But it wasn’t going to be enough, and he knew that. They were going to need to do more. Get meaner, and start punching well above their weight category. This was a warship of the Republic of Aquitaine Navy, by the gods.
Keller had told them that her mission was to make the people of The Holding fear her more than they did their overlord. If the Lord of Winter started to look weak, how many worlds would panic?
The faces had grown expectant, in Phil’s moments of introspection. Calm, but with a layer of anger just under the surface. Poised.
Nobody would forget St. Legier. What it meant to Centurion Wiegand. What The Eldest had done to the galaxy. He needed to tap that rage now.
“I had considered the need to load up Queen Anne’s Revenge with as much food as it would hold,” Phil suddenly began, the conversations in his head taking shape to include his commanders as his eyes lit on Siobhan Skokomish. Lady Blackbeard. “Sending you home as fast as you could run, to make arrangements for a supply ship to get us parts and food out here, while we hid in a safe, quiet place.”
Phil placed both hands flat on the surface of the table as the others began to lean in. He wasn’t a dominating, charismatic speaker. Not like Keller. But he could make an effective point verbally when he needed to. Like now.
“But we’re in the middle of a war zone out here, people,” he continued. “We already know what the defenses are like, across the Gulf, and, thanks to Kiel’s notes, we have a pretty good idea what we’ll face over here, at least until those folks start shifting in bigger fleets to stop us and Keller from raiding at will.”
He paused for a moment, scanning every face.
Yes, they were in, whatever it was. They would be there with him.
“Keller always believed that Buran’s fleet is actually not that much larger than Fribourg’s, counting vessels,” he said. “Their different technology and tactics made them more effective, at least until we came along with Expeditionary classes. The Corvette/Scout design is the weakest line warship in the fleet, right now. That’s us. We can’t charge in and blow things up, like a Heavy Dreadnaught can, so we have to be sneaky. And with a crew of just over two hundre
d souls, it’s not like we can capture a planet, or even hold a station for long.”
Nods now. His people, used to the way he thought. Phil Kosnett, Explorer. Rather than Phil Kosnett, Berserker-At-Arms. He was no Tom Kigali.
But he was still a sailor in the Republic of Aquitaine Navy. It was time they remembered what that meant.
“I had considered sneaking us all home and calling it good,” he observed. “Certainly, that would have been enough, to fulfill our standing orders, especially with the raids we would need to do on the way, just to keep eating and stay away from the oatmeal.”
Chuckles. Faces turning to Siobhan. Blackbeard’s normally dark face actually showing a blush, something Phil wasn’t sure he had ever seen before.
“We’re not doing that,” Phil dropped his first bombshell.
“We’re not?” Heather managed to speak over the sudden noise from everyone.
“No,” Phil said, eyes boring in on Siobhan’s. “We’re going to take the war to Buran and do as much damage as we can, here and now. Keller will have to move Forward Base Omicron, since she can’t take the risk that we were captured and might reveal its location. That will take her offline for a while, which can’t be helped. I have no intention of letting Buran have the time to relax and recover.”
“So after Laptev?” Siobhan’s voice managed to be both quiet and fierce at the same time. Her eyes seemed to be filled with a black plasma that glowed, even as dark as they were.
“I want to know how much food we can steal at Laptev,” Phil said. “That’s our limiting factor right now, since the JumpSails are about as good as they can get without us taking the ship apart in a drydock. Even with improvised fixed, Bok thinks we have a handle on them. At least enough of one. How long can we stay out here, blowing things up and setting minds on fire, while Keller recovers?”
“Second front?” Heather asked.
Phil laughed.
“If there were warships I could somehow steal, then, yes,” he replied. “But no freighters are armed, and Buran’s warships are all Sentient. But very few systems are truly defended, right now, on this side of the frontier. How many of those little, automated stations can we rob or destroy? How much panic can we induce, with one Corvette/Scout and an attitude problem?”
