by Blaze Ward
“You’re forgetting Anna’s Vindication,” Siobhan barked.
“No more than I would Odysseus’s Horse, Skokomish,” Phil replied. “I want you to take down the walls of Troy for me.”
Her eyes got the look Phil was waiting for. Distant, angry, contemplative. She nodded.
No words were necessary. He had them now.
It was time for them to start a second front in Keller’s War.
Dwarf Giant (May 27, 402)
As always in these situations, Phil put himself on the Main Bridge, with Heather forward in the Emergency Bridge. The big change today was that he had rotated Evan Brinich forward, so that Heather had the Science Officer with her in the same space, instead of just on the comm.
This was a combat setting. She had Tactical command and would need every edge she could get.
In the past, CS-405 had been the third choice for scouting. At least in Keller’s mind. But then, she had the Galactic Survey Cruiser Ballard, with some of the best folks in the business, plus CP-406, a dedicated scout/raider with portable firepower far in excess of the smaller Corvette/Scout. They could sneak, scout, AND shoot.
405’s job had been to protect the inner squadron while Keller sent the other two out to do things. His mission had been defensive, always. Blinding their enemies while sailing in the line ahead of Vanguard, and before that, Auberon. Taking shots at targets of opportunity with his short-range beams, while the other girls and boys tangled with the big enemies.
Today, it was their mission to do the long-range scouting for the rest of the team.
They were exactly backwards to the normal approach, as Phil checked his screens. Anna’s Vindication was a few light years away, quietly waiting in the darkness for them to return, while Heather and her team sidled into the Laptev system and scouted it for a raid.
“All hands, prepare to transition to JumpSpace,” Heather’s voice filled the bridge as Phil watched. “Phase Two complete.”
So far, so good.
Laptev’s stellar parent was about as boring as they went: an orange Mainstream at the dwarf end of things, just warm enough to have a broad habitable zone for colonization, but generally throwing out a lesser solar wind than many of the yellower stars. Phil presumed it was an older generation of star, and thus middle-aged.
One world with a population, centered almost exactly in the habitable zone.
Closer in to the star was a cinder of a planet where lead ran liquid on the surface and the core had long since cooled to solid iron. Farther out, another dead world, this one more black from surface layers of carbon, that never had enough oxygen to be worth terraforming.
Their next drop-out into RealSpace would put the ship into close orbit of a dwarf gas giant, a world just barely large enough to have retained that depth of atmosphere, without the solar wind stripping it off. Interestingly, at least to the explorer in his soul, this world was largely red, having gotten most of the iron that should have been part of a rockier world closer in.
He wondered what had happened to disturb the early solar system here, but was glad it had. The dwarf giant was noted for having sixteen moons of various sizes and inclinations, with most of them comprised almost exclusively of base iron, one of the most common materials a stellar technology had access to.
And thus, nothing worth even maintaining a simple mining outpost here. That was good. No reason to even be in the vicinity.
Phil checked his boards. Bok had figured out just how much stress the secondary JumpSail could take before the matrix started to feed on itself and overheat. They didn’t have the tools or materials to hold it together when it did, but they could plan their jumps by the number of minutes they had, under normal circumstances, before they needed to shut it down and let it cool while they reset the controllers.
Nothing about today, hopefully, would be pushing that envelope.
“Stand by for emergence,” Heather called to the crew. “All gun crews, you are unlocked for possible combat.”
Better to try to kill something if they managed to stumble into a bad situation right now, than to spend precious moments letting another ship get away and warn the redcoats.
With Siobhan’s team elsewhere, there were no friendly vessels local. Just risk and complications.
Emergence. Back on the blind side of the planet, seen from the perspective of Laptev’s orbit. And far enough away that nobody would see you, as long as you were quiet.
Clear sailing awaited them. Nothing on the sensors but moons.
Time to get to work.
“All gun teams, you are now locked,” Heather said over the line. “Remain on standby for emergency action, if necessary.”
There was a technique to being a scout in hostile territory. Phil missed having Siobhan here, right now, as she had an absolute flair for maneuvering, but West would do good enough.
This job called for patience, above everything. West had that, in spades.
“Stand by to broach,” Heather walked forward with the process.
From here, they would be just another moon, only partially visible on the far side of the dwarf giant, and then only if someone locked on the area with active sensors, which would make them stand out against the darkness and warn 405. Even on optical cameras, the dwarf’s atmosphere was too rough for this ship to get any attention as they suddenly appeared around a horizon.
Main Bridge was keyed up, since West was still here, rather than up front, but they were all virtually in the same room right now.
“Pilot, execute your broach,” came the order.
Phil wasn’t mirroring Evan’s boards. That would be overwhelming right now, with the amount of data the scout would be gathering.
Unlike the Galactic Survey Cruisers, the Corvette/Scout had sensor arrays at both ends of the vessel, where other corvettes had their Type-3 beams installations. These were as good as Ballard’s, but having them that far apart meant that Evan could also get an amazing parallax on a target, even at eight AU from the star, just over one light hour, and roughly the same distance to Laptev, currently coming up on the dwarf giant’s orbit from behind.
No, Phil wanted to see what was out there. Or rather, who.
Kiel had fantastic notes on the planetary culture and bureaucratic tides, but the possible defenses were a blank spot. Something she took for granted.
Plus, she and Lan had only been here a few times, since the planet tended to import and export in massive bulk, rather than small, specialist transports like Anna’s Vindication.
Phil watched Evan’s sensors assemble an image of Laptev’s orbital occupants.
There, the station. Larger than the little, automated ones around most worlds, since Laptev had a significantly-large interstellar economy, compared to many of Buran’s worlds in this sector. Phil assumed it had some level of firepower, since they had run into a similar platform at Yenisei. Probably heavy cruiser-levels of firepower or better, if he was dumb enough to get into a duel with it. Those folks would eat his lunch.
Briefly, idly, he wondered if they could program the autopilot on Anna’s Vindication to simply ram the station and blow itself up, possibly destroying the station in the process.
Not worth the other troubles, since that ship was the only Trojan Horse he had right now, but worth considering, if he was serious about taking up destructive piracy as a vocation.
Something didn’t look right in the image. Phil puzzled at it for several seconds, until finally Evan’s sensors gathered enough data to resolve the visuals better. He had probably run into the same question himself, and tweaked things.
The thing they were seeing was a stock design, after all. Buran was all about standards for things. Mass standardization whenever possible. What had thrown everything off was that docked with the station was a ship that was larger than CS-405. Hell, that thing was bigger than the Heavy Dreadnaught Vanguard. Maybe approaching a Star Controller, for scale.
Quickly, Phil flipped to the Imperial recognition file, augmented
significantly after the raids at Stanovoy and Yenisei.
There. Oh, my.
“Evan, confirm the signal I’ve highlighted,” Phil ordered over the line, sending an image from the file forward to the Emergency Bridge.
Heather was in tactical command right now, but it was Phil’s boat.
And Phil’s mission.
“Confirmed, Commander,” Evan replied after a few moments. “Trying to read his signals with the station now. They’re encrypted, but it’s not a military-grade cypher. Should be able to punch through it in a bit.”
“Keep me posted, EmBridge,” Phil said. “This changes things significantly for us.”
“What’s on your mind, Phil?” Heather asked.
He could hear the careful tones, like she knew he was up to even worse no-good than normal.
“You’re going to join Siobhan on this one, Heather,” he replied.
There was a pause.
“Think we can do it?” she pressed.
“Blackbeard and Trinidad will see it as a challenge, Tactical,” he smiled. It felt like a shark’s smile.
“Roger that,” Heather said. “Stand by to dive.”
Back down behind the shield of the planet, so they could turn and run for deep space.
Things were about to get thrilling.
And perilous.
Odysseus (June 1, 402)
Siobhan remembered to shut her mouth when it fell open in shock.
Eventually.
The thing Evan was projecting on the conference room screen was huge. As starships went, it was the biggest civilian vessel she had ever encountered. Aquitaine went in for smaller ships, running on more efficient direct spokes, as a rule, rather than using an older, railroad model, where you flew a fixed pattern of systems. Fribourg trade networks never really even got that big, working within a culture that believed in righteous self-sufficiency for most planets.
But Buran was all about eking out the maximum efficiency at the minimum cost. Whenever, wherever, however it needed to do that. It probably helped that they weren’t all that into free trade, at least when official policy favored something one of her instructors had once classified as industrialism.
No, Buran commanded the heights, and ran its economy that way. Little people, like Kiel and Lan, made do at the margins, bringing in specialty goods that were a rare treat, and could make a good living at it, but they would never be an economic threat.
Because that monster over there could haul gigatons of freight, world to world, working on planetary scales and budgets.
Wow.
As Evan worked, he brought up a second image beside the first, this one from the standard recognition file. Sure enough. Big monster. A bit under two kilometers, from bow to stern, but lacking any of the elegance of a warship. Just as an efficient a use of volume as physically possible.
Honestly, it looked like a stick of butter with a stack of engines tacked onto the end.
“Because Buran’s warships look vaguely like terrestrial sharks, we believe that is the reason The Holding names them thus,” Evan was saying. “But nobody has ever encountered one of these beasts in its native habitat, nor gotten close enough to capture one. They only run on this side of the M’Hanii Gulf. For our notes, we’ve classified it as a humpback whale. Big and slow, krill feeder, rather than predator, but not the biggest possible cetacean. There is a larger size of freight-hauling vessel, almost a mobile station, that Fribourg calls a Blue Whale class.”
“So how do we know this intel?” Siobhan felt her hand go up. The bright kid with the annoying questions in the orbital dynamic class.
“Fribourg has a few spies,” Phil replied instead. “And Keller’s tame defector has been happily filling in details. This he did back when he hoped trade would settle the border disputes.”
“So those numbers are believable?” she continued. “Total crew of only about thirty people on a ship Auberon’s size?”
“You’d be amazed, how much of that volume is pure cargo, Siobhan,” Evan said, clicking something to shift to a schematic drawing and lighting various areas up. “The engines are all of this section, just to push against that much mass and get it moving. The control tower is here with living spaces above. The spine runs all the way forward, but all it does is define an area. Those two big containers you stole at Barnaul? Things like those go two-deep, end to end, in silos inserted into the belly, twelve to a row-width, and something like one hundred rows long. Fully loaded, we’re looking at something in the neighborhood of two hundred and forty silos by count, but many of the boxes here are much larger instead, taking up a full depth, by four spaces on each side.”
“How the hell do you move them around?” Siobhan heard herself ask.
“Specialized freighters like Anna’s Vindication, give or take,” Heather replied. “Cargo tugs like CT-9492, that hauls the parts of our mobile base. In this case, they can transport something like four of the big pods between ground and sky.”
“And you want to steal this thing?” Siobhan turned to Phil.
She hadn’t believed him then. Still wasn’t sure she did now. As piracy went, this was off the charts-crazy.
And right up her alley, if she had to admit it in public, which she probably would, with this group.
“You and Heather,” Phil answered. “And Queen Anne’s Revenge.”
“What about the station?” Siobhan pursued. “Thing’s armed.”
“I want you to think about how you would do it,” Phil smiled at her like a shark.
She grinned back. Let her mind wander a bit.
Considered Trinidad and Nakisha, making a pirate vid. All the myriad, silly ways they might bluff their way in, scramble door codes, cut airlock hatches. The lies they would have to come up with.
She nodded to Phil and felt the grin broaden into a smile.
“Can’t be done,” she said simply. “We haven’t got the bodies or firepower to raid a station like that and get away safe. Certainly not to steal a ship like that from under their noses.”
Faces fell around her as she dashed their hopes. That ship represented a massive amount of food. Perhaps as much as two years without a single bit of rationing. Never again oatmeal. And that was not taking into account the value of the hull itself, or the disruption of trade that would result from taking it out of the line.
Siobhan felt her own evil angels start a merry pirate’s chorus in her head. It was a good thing she was an officer and a gentlewoman, and not a full-time buccaneer, because she might get pretty good at this.
Briefly, she considered her Plan B, which was to just hammer the damned thing to rubble with the Type-1-Pulse beams, setting the generators to run hot and then woodpeckering the bastard.
But that was nowhere near as much fun as Plan A.
“However,” Siobhan continued before anyone got too sad, “there is a much easier way to do this. You all have been approaching this like a military target. That’s just all levels of wrong.”
“How should we be thinking?” Heather asked, face scrunched up.
Siobhan liked Heather. Respected her as a damned good officer who would be a great commander, one of these years. If anything, the woman was a little too spit-and-polish for this sort of thing. They could fix that.
“First, we’ll need to turn you into a proper pirate,” Siobhan smirked.
In Wait (June 4, 402)
Heather felt like an outsider here, but that was only natural. Siobhan and her team had been in residence in Anna’s Vindication for two months now, which was enough time to begin to personalize things.
Like the shipping label for a crate of berries, apparently stolen as part of the raid on Barnaul, and now attached to the front bulkhead of the bridge, a little below the view port. Above it, a picture of a tuna had been stuck to the wall as well, so possibly Heather was seeing the beginnings of a totem pole, or at least a visual chain of raids.
She was in the left-hand seat today. Heather could fly the little freighter from
here, but Siobhan was handling that from the right. Aft, all of the original raiders were waiting in suits, plus an extra group of engineers who Bok considered safe enough with prybars to not hurt anyone accidentally.
It felt odd, not being in uniform. According to regulations, they all should have been in full uniforms when performing this mission, so that they would be treated as prisoners of war, rather than pirates, if something went wrong and they were captured, but The Holding had never established formal, diplomatic ties to Fribourg or Aquitaine, so the Laws of War were not officially in practice.
Keller had just enforced them anyway, at Trusski.
But being in civilian gear, according to Siobhan, would get Heather into the right mindset to become a swashbuckler, whatever that meant. The lifesuits they would wear for EVA were standard fleet issue, so there would be no doubt that Heather belonged to an organized military force. It was just the clothing underneath.
Still, it felt odd. It tugged odd, and wrinkled strangely, compared to her uniform. Maybe that was the whole point.
Siobhan’s people rarely called the woman by her name, Heather had noted. Instead, Lady Blackbeard, or some variant of it, seemed to be the preferred nomenclature. And Trinidad Mildon had become Stunt Dude, which made no sense at all to Heather, but invariably generated giggles within that group.
Heather wondered if she would need a pirate nickname, before this was all done. And what that might entail. While she was technically the senior officer present, Phil had impressed upon her that Siobhan was command centurion on the raider Anna’s Vindication, what everyone had gone back to calling Queen Anne’s Revenge in private, however brevet Siobhan’s rank might be. It was her ship.
And, if they managed to take the other one, Heather would brevet as well, commanding a freighter large enough to have multiple telecomm codes.
