by Kal Spriggs
He leaned forward. “I want off this world. I want my ship back.” He stared into her eyes. He added impulsively, “I want to know who you are and why you want those ships.”
Lauren closed her eyes. “Done.”
She stepped out of the booth and moved to stand in front of the six men.
They stopped. “You Lauren Kelly?” The one in the lead pushed back his visor to speak. His face was scarred and pitted. “We’re Anvil Security. You need to come with us.”
The woman didn’t move for a long moment.
The door opened, several more people stepped inside.
The bartender gave a muttered curse. Mason watched him go into the back room and shut the door. He could hear the locks snap shut on the door.
The six uniformed men looked back at the newcomers. Three men and two women faced them, armed with assault weapons they’d hidden beneath heavy coats.
Lauren spoke coldly, “No, I don’t think I’ll be going with you.” She drew her pistol but kept it pointed at the floor. “We can fight this out and all of you will die... or you can raise your hands and surrender. We already jammed your radios, so don’t think about calling for help.”
The leader cursed something under his breath. “You won’t get out of this system, we don’t know who you are, but we’ve seen your ships. There’s a force lying in wait already.”
“Let me worry about that.” Lauren answered.
The leader glanced at his men, back at Lauren. No one moved for a long moment.
She moved so quickly that she’d fired before the leader had his pistol fully out of the holster. The shot sounded impossibly loud in the close bar. The rank smell of burning blood and voided bowels filled the air. The five remaining security men stood silent behind their visors as the sergeant dropped to the floor dead. They slowly raised their hands.
Lauren turned back to Mason. “We already got your ship out. The Baron said you’d want it as payment.”
“Baron?” Mason asked, puzzled.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
***
January 2, 2403 Earth Standard Time
Zeta Tau System
Unclaimed Space
Amalgamated Worlds’ largest training facility off of Earth was once Alpha Seven. That ended when a passing ship spotted a lurking Provisional Colonial Republican Army force. Orders were sent, and the base shut down, its personnel boarded ships on a passing convoy where they displaced the intended cargo.
Unfortunately for those men and women, the PCRA targeted the convoy and its cargo. The ships of that convoy became the airless tombs for some thirty thousand people who died. The butchery of Alpha Seven became the first of many atrocities committed by both sides, all caused by one ship in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All of that had occurred nearly a century ago. It was the first significant defeat for the Amalgamated Worlds Fleet and it was soon followed by several others. The PCRA had been one of the bigger downfalls of Amalgamated Worlds, but the death of its enemy brought the fall of the colonial army, for without a common enemy, the worlds began to fear and fight each other. That had led to the squabble that enveloped the Colonial Republic in present times, Lucius knew.
The base shut down, its equipment mothballed, the corridors and chambers carefully cleaned, the entire facility eased into standby, waiting for the trainees that would never return.
When the War Shrike arrived, Lucius had found the moon base almost entirely intact.
It wasn’t surprising. Amalgamated Worlds Fleet never left weapons or other sensitive items lying unguarded. That didn’t stop people from looking. Numerous scavengers and salvagers previously prowled the base and the surrounding area. They’d looked for weapons caches, computer equipment, and the like. Someone had scavenged some of the environmental equipment. Some others had performed minor acts of vandalism and graffiti.
Even those events hardly marred the surface of the base. The main hub was designed for training up to forty thousand people at a time where they would have run raw recruits through basic training before they shifted them to Fleet or Marines or Army. The four external wings held quarters for another twenty thousand people each. The base was massive, a city in its own right.
It took a total of three weeks to get power, heating, and air restored to the northern wing. The fusion plants were buried deep beneath the surface, embedded in solid concrete and rock. Looters hadn’t bothered to try and remove the huge reactors. It would have been far too much work for too little gain.
The base had lain abandoned for almost a century. Most people had forgotten it existed, with reason. No one needed the base. It contained nothing of worth, and was located in a relatively empty sector of space.
Lucius only knew about it because he had been part of a planning committee to use it as a base of operations against the Chxor, eight years previously.
The problem was the same then as it was now, why bother?
Baron Lucius Giovanni stood and moved around his desk to study the screen on the wall. It showed the moon, an overview of the base and its structures. Just over sixteen thousand refugees filled the north wing of the base. They had plenty of room, with ample, comfortable quarters. The furniture had been left behind, and while it was older and plain, it still made the quarters tolerable.
The base was everything they needed right now. It was an overlooked relic that no one would think to search any time soon. The odd scavenger who wondered in could be captured and held until they moved on. If they moved on.
Lucius shook his head. Thoughts like those would get him nowhere.
“Captain, the rest of the committee is assembled,” a voice warned him over his intercom.
“Thank you,” Lucius sighed and moved to the door. “Time for the difficult part.”
***
Just after their rendezvous in the Zeta Tau system, home to Alpha Seven’s airless moon, Lucius had asked the civilians to form some sort of temporary governance. He had seriously underestimated the mess that would result.
He quickly discovered three groups among his refugees. The smallest group was made up of Faraday military and their families, those who sided with the Contractor chose to leave while they could. Most of the military forces had stayed behind and chose to abide by the legal government.
Ordinary Faraday citizens made up a significant portion. These people had either panicked or had dealings with people in the know, and ran while they could. This group consisted of Faraday citizens of every stripe, from lady friends of the crew who’d been warned to flee, to businessmen and merchant captains.
The experienced refugees made up the majority. These people had fled before, either once, or several times. The displaced masses, those who knew how to survive. They’d lived for years, sometimes even decades on Faraday, but never considered it home. The hardiest, the toughest, they knew how to live on the run. Many had little liking for the citizens of Faraday who treated them like scum when they’d immigrated.
After a great deal of politicking, five chosen representatives came forward to meet with Lucius. Lucius told them where he stood right from the first. He would tolerate no commands, not now and not ever. He controlled the fleet, he controlled the crews. He would do his best to defend the refugees, to see them to a decent world, but he would do things his way.
The five councilors fought him over it. In this he hadn’t budged. The experienced refugees understood the thin edge of survival. The Contractor, who the military refugees had selected, didn’t like it, but accepted it. The fifth councilor Lucius replaced twice before the Faraday citizens came to accept that they lived on Lucius’ conscience alone.
The five council members sat in the briefing room near the command section of Alpha Seven. The former Contractor, now using her actual name, Kate Bueller, sat to the right of Lucius’ chair. The experienced refugees’ three representatives were two men, Aaron Dallas and Max Nyguyen, and an Iodan, whose name involved limb movements that humans couldn’t replicate.
The Iodanians apparently made up a substantial part of the refugee populace, surprising since their worlds lay quite distant from Faraday. Lucius had yet to get the story out of them as to how three thousand of them had ended up in the back end of space.
The last representative was Matthew Nogita. The small man who ran the fighter facility on Faraday took the place of the last two representatives after Lucius refused to deal with them. How he managed to get elected, Lucius didn’t know. He suspected Nogita to have spread about the fact that he worked with Lucius before. It didn’t matter, Matthew was perfectly happy to make polite noises and go along with whatever Lucius said, as long as it didn’t hurt his people.
All in all, the council worked because the other four had similar opinions.
They argued and fought with him when they disagreed, but when the matter was finished, they backed him and took his reasoning to their people. The council maintained a unified front, because they needed to.
Lucius had become a warlord, somehow, somewhere. He had lost his lands when he lost his homeworld, but he had gained followers. His ships' crews were startlingly loyal and they trusted him. Lucius had learned that the trust they gave him went both ways. He could no more abandon the refugees than he could cut off his own leg. They’d become his people –even the loudmouthed ones.
He shook off those thoughts as he took a seat. He looked around at the expectant faces, and the pile of writhing tentacles that was the Iodan. “Anything new?” he asked, informally. There was no reason for formalities. They didn’t have the time or patience for it.
They all signaled negative. Each of them had taken over different tasks, Matthew Nogita managed salvage and repair operations around the base. Kate Bueller managed personnel, she found people with the necessary training to fill needed positions. Aaron Dallas and Max Nyguyen worked together to solve problems that involved resource management, everything from food acquisition, their most pressing problem, to the sale of items they’d salvaged, mined or made. The Iodan managed their medical and biological needs. The creatures had already stopped one viral outbreak and performed wonders on the environmental systems in the abandoned base. Their knowledge had brought the systems online far more rapidly than would have otherwise been possible.
“I may have found a buyer for the last of this gold.” Max Nyguyen said, finally. “It’s too early to say, but it looks like this guy will trade fair for it.”
Lucius grinned wryly, “It will be nice not to have to discourage pirates from following our trading ships anymore.” They’d found a damaged mining ship in the asteroids of the inner system. From the ship’s log, it was evident that the miners had struck it rich when they discovered an almost pure lode of gold in one asteroid. The crew had celebrated with copious amounts of alcohol and thirty years later, Lucius’ salvagers had discovered the ship, holed from a collision with a medium sized piece of space detritus.
Lesson learned: don’t let a drunk pilot get behind the controls.
Trying to sell a large quantity of pure gold ingots, unfortunately, seemed to draw scavengers like flies. Burbeg intercepted five pirate craft and two mining vessels who had attempted to follow their trade ships.
Three of those pirate ships would never bother anyone again. The other two were taken intact. Lucius had both corvette-sized ships out to scout the local systems for any other potential salvage opportunities. The small vessels served well to scare off further mining ships without the need to reveal their larger vessels.
“I got a message from one of our agents. She’s on her way back with the man who reported the sighting.” As Lucius spoke, he brought up the recording up on the wall screen.
Everyone turned to look. The image was grainy. It was a copy off of a pirate’s computer after the pirate ship in question got smashed to wreckage. The pirate’s encoded copy came from the black market. Governments didn’t pay individuals for that kind of information. They took it.
The vessel revealed was large, larger than a Chxor dreadnought, if the scaling was correct. It was a squashed cylinder, heavy armor formed an arc at top and bottom, to sandwich the vessel in the center. Massive doors and paneling along the side showed what might be hangar bays. Part of one engine was visible in the frame, a massive protrusion from the hull. All in all, the vessel was a ponderous seven kilometers long and one kilometer wide, perhaps half a kilometer thick at its deepest. Parts of the ship were masked in what looked like a dust or vapor cloud.
The visual feed zoomed in to focus on the stark lettering that had to be fifty meters tall. Between the grainy feed and whatever cloud enveloped it, it was hard to make out, but it appeared to say AWS Patriot.
“What is the purpose of finding this vessel?” The translation software the Iodan used was emotionless, it sounded like how a Chxor wanted to sound. Lucius realized that non-humans probably didn’t have much human history spoon-fed to them.
“The AWS Patriot was said to have been Admiral Dreyfus’ command ship…” Lucius began. He paused, thinking for a moment. “Eighty-four years ago, Amalgamated Worlds created a large fleet of very advanced warships. Those ships were far more advanced than anything they’d ever made before. The cost was incredible. The Fleet was named the Agathan Fleet, for the design of the command ship, a ship deemed so expensive it was never made.”
Kate Bueller spoke, “And several million rogue psychics hijacked that fleet and escaped into shadow space with it. They went on the run, and they smashed every Amalgamated Worlds fleet that tried to follow.”
The Iodan twitched its limbs, and the translation software spoke, “I thought Amalgamated Worlds was defeated by the Colonials.”
Lucius nodded, “They were. The psychics fled persecution, they weren’t out to overthrow the system.” Well, not that we know, in any case, Lucius mentally added. “They still represented a tangible threat to Amalgamated Worlds, who… well, their general paranoia and specific hatred against ESP caused them to put a lot of resources towards exterminating that threat.”
He typed in some commands, and the hologram put up an overlay showing six massive ships, surrounded by a haze of other vessels. “They constructed the Dreyfus fleet. It was designed with the sole purpose of hunting down and exterminating that threat.” He shrugged, “Not a moment of human history of which to be particularly proud.”
“This Admiral Dreyfus succeeded then?” The Iodan asked, “Was he a great warrior?”
Lucius stared off into the distance as he remembered books he had studied in his youth. “He was their best. Dreyfus was one of the rare Amalgamated Worlds Fleet officers who was outside their normal politics. He wasn't a political appointee or someone's nephew or son, he was the military figure they turned to when they needed to win. He defeated the Wrethe Incursion. He smashed the Tersal Pirates. He…” Lucius shook his head, “He was their best.” Those words said it all, he decided.
“He came out of retirement and told Amalgamated Worlds Fleet what he’d need. They gave him everything he asked for.” Lucius didn’t need to look up the list to recite the numbers, “Half a million ship crew, selected from the best and brightest of the Fleet. Two hundred thousand Marines, again, the best and brightest.” He shook his head, “Six ships, each of them larger than any human ship ever built, larger than any ship the human race had encountered. Those ships carried dozens of parasite frigates. They had a full escort of battlecruisers, cruisers, and destroyers. They had a dozen massive transports for equipment, supplies and personnel.”
“Over a million personnel departed under Admiral Dreyfus, they set out from Earth on the Fourth of July, in a huge celebration.” Lucius snorted, “Admiral Dreyfus broadcast a final message from Alpha Centauri on the Eleventh of July. They were never heard from again.”
“What happened?”
“No one knows. No one ever found any sign of them.” Mathew Nogita said, “There have been rumored sightings, ghost stories, legends…”
Lucius brought up the gritty picture, the battered lettering only just legib
le. “Until now.”
***
January 6, 2403 Earth Standard Time
Zeta Tau System
Unclaimed Space
Mason frowned and shot a glare over at Lauren. “Never again.”
She quirked an eyebrow at him as he kicked the organic detritus off of his boots.
“Never again.” He repeated. “Once you get those, those...” McGann paused at a lack for words. “Once they’re off, never again will something that foul board my ship.”
The foul creatures in question mooed, as several people began to herd them off the ship.
“You got your ship back and we’re paying you for carrying a cargo on top of that, which we loaded and unloaded ourselves, after we broke your ship out of a government impound,” she answered. “Now, you’re free, you’re here, where without a doubt, someone will be glad to tell you our story as soon as you ask. I believe you owe me something.”
“I’ll take you there,” he replied, “just as soon as you get my ship cleaned up.”
She shook her head, “The deal was that you give us the coordinates.”
“If Mr. McGann wants to take us there personally, he can do so,” a calm, cultured voice said from behind.
Mason turned. He found himself looking at a short middle aged man in a crisp black military uniform. “Who are you? Dark Helmet?” Mason asked.
Surprisingly the man caught the reference, “You’re hardly Lonestar, though you may look the part.” He bowed politely, “I am Baron Lucius Giovanni, late of the Nova Roma Fleet, Captain of the battleship War Shrike and commander of several other vessels.”
“Hmmm,” Mason paused for a moment in thought. “Some kind of warlord?”
The man smiled politely, “Something like that.” He turned to Lauren Kelly, “Excellent job, Lieutenant. I know you probably want a break, but could you get our guest up to the War Shrike?”
She nodded, “Yes, sir.”
With that, Baron Giovanni turned and strode away. Mason looked after him, “Interesting fellow.” The man didn't look imposing, but he had a certain spark, one that even a cynic like Mason could feel. Men like that inspired from their own actions, Mason knew. They also tended to get themselves and a lot of other people killed, from his experience. People with dedication like that don't know when to quit, he thought.
