“No, no I really don’t.”
“I won’t ruin the surprise,” the commando told the man. “Eric?”
“Yeah?”
“Need you to go check the house and the back yard where our friends outside were.” Hadrian pulled a small case out of a side pouch and held it out. If everything’s clear, send up two greens. I’ll take care of our two friends here.”
“Three,” Eric commented, taking the case.
“Three? No, I said two greens.”
Eric nodded at the sleeping bag while he inserted a fresh magazine into his rifle. “And I meant three prisoners. Female’s in there.”
“Oh. Well, three then. Stay on your toes in case we missed something.”
Eric nodded as he tucked the case into one of his pouches. “I’ll be back.”
“Oh, you boys made a right mess of this place. Turing is going to be so disappointed,” Hadrian muttered as Eric rounded the corner to the hole. The cold that greeted him outside surprised him. Was it that warm in there? How did I not notice? Meh, nerves. Wind must have shifted again.
Snow crunched underfoot as he made his way toward the house. He found the front door still locked, though the paneling around the door and the door itself had been deeply scored. Eric looked closer. Oh, that’s not wood. Surface is, I think, but steel underneath. Nice. He took his time checking the windows, partially not to miss anything, partially to give him time to listen and watch his surroundings. The back door fared similarly to the front, its wood exterior scuffed in places, but the steel underneath held. He peered into the dark interior through the last window. Inside, an empty glass sat on a coffee table. A blanket had been left draped over the edge of a couch. Except for the dust, the room looked as if someone had just gotten up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. If these doors aren’t actually wood, I wonder what the windows are made out of? Would have to be as hard as the steel, otherwise someone would have broken them out to get in. Maybe just the ground floor? Hadrian expected me to be able to shoot through them, right? He couldn’t remember for sure, but Eric was fairly certain that had been part of the plan.
Eric turned toward the newly created clearing behind him and picked his way through the fallen limbs. Having circled the clearing several times, he paused to pull out Hadrian’s case. Inside Eric discovered a simple break-action pistol and four sets of four flares. Thank God they’re labeled. Gotta love monochrome.
Eric loaded the pistol with a green flare and pointed it skyward. Might want to get line of sight back to the house, maybe they might answer with something? After a quick walk gave him a view back down the valley, Eric launched the first green flare into the sky and reloaded. He watched the skies after launching the last, half expecting some sort of reply. Seconds ticked by. He started to turn back to the bunker when a streak of green arced up into night sky a good distance away. Eric nodded and plodded back to the bunker. He came up short on entering the makeshift living space.
Most of the trash had been swept to the outer corners. The campfire had been relit. A woman with disheveled hair sat wrapped in a blanket on one side of the fire, Hadrian and his shotgun on the other. Neither prisoner was visible. Warning them of his return, Eric coughed as he powered off and flipped up his monocle. While Hadrian continued to warm his hands on the fire like nothing happened, the woman startled at the sound. Despite being partially concealed in flickering shadows, Eric felt both anger and fear in her gaze.
Leah.
“Flares out?” Hadrian asked.
Eric grunted an affirmative, looking about for the prisoners.
“Answer?” Hadrian asked.
“One green,” Eric said. The woman visibly relaxed at the sound of his voice.
“Good. Oh, Eric, this is Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Eric.”
“Ma’am,” Eric said, nodding to her. A shadow of a smile flickered across her face before she turned to look at the fire again.
Groaning, Hadrian lurched to his feet.
“Got a few things I want to check out. Keep an eye on her. Prisoners are over in the corner over there. They shouldn’t bother you; they’re a bit tied up at the moment,” the commando commented with a wan grin.
“You feeling okay?” Eric asked.
Hadrian gave him a short stare and walked off. Right. Not in front of the prisoners. What was I thinking?
Eric sighed, and eased himself to the floor where Hadrian had been. That’s why he was sitting here. Both prisoners were tucked around the row’s edge, just barely inside the light and outside line of sight of anyone coming from the entryway.
“Wonder where he found the rope?” Eric mumbled to himself as he peeled off his gloves.
“He didn’t,” the woman replied. “I knew where it was.”
Eric peered over the fire and saw her whole face for the first time as she locked gazes with him. She had been beautiful. Probably still was under the bruises and cuts. The ruddy splotches covering her face made his ache sympathetically.
“Elizabeth--”
“Liz. You don’t have to apologize. I can see it on your lips. I don’t want your pity.”
Eric sighed. “Not pity, Liz. Empathy.”
“Empathy, pity, what’s the difference?” Elizabeth asked pointedly.
“The difference is I’ve been where you’re sitting. It hurts.”
“Been where I’m sitting?” Elizabeth spat. “What do you know about rape? What does any guy know about rape other than being the one doing it?”
Eric clenched his jaw. Play nice.
“Liz, I spent more than a few months in a prison cell on a provost cruiser. Before I got there, one of my cell mates had made it a habit to rape the woman in the cell. He didn’t appreciate me objecting to his hobby. Put me in the infirmary for the better part of a month,” Eric said. He breathed deeply before adding, “He raped me.”
Elizabeth stared at him for several seconds before asking, “What happened to him?”
“He’s not troubling anyone else anymore.”
Elizabeth squinted at the fire. A few moments later she quietly asked, “How’d you do it?”
“I strangled him with his coveralls. Only weapon I had. No, I don’t pity you, Liz. I know how it feels,” Eric replied flatly. He picked one of the canteens sitting near the fire up and unscrewed the lid.
“And your cellmate?”
“Maybe you’ll be able to ask her, if she’s willing to talk about it,” Eric said and sniffed the contents. “Might do her some good to have another woman around who understands. I saved her, Liz, and as far as I can tell, she’s afraid of me.”
Elizabeth waited until he’d finished drinking before asking, “Afraid of you, in specific? Are you sure she’s not jumpy around any man at this point?”
“That might be,” Eric shrugged. He offered her the canteen.
Elizabeth sipped the canteen as she looked thoughtfully at the small fire.
“So, Eric. Who are you? What do you do?”
“What do I do?” Eric said with a small laugh. “What did I do before getting here might be a better question.”
“Well?”
“I was an idiot. Still am, but I’m getting better.”
Elizabeth grinned. “Oh? I hear admitting you have a problem is the first step to fixing it. Good on you. Any particular type of idiocy?”
“I was a pirate.”
“Oh,” she said solemnly.
“They rescued me from a wreck as a kid. I grew up on the ship. If it helps, the provost interrogator commented we were almost civilized by their standards.”
Elizabeth rolled her eyes and half-heartedly asked, “Just a little raping, not a lot?”
“None. Rapists were executed. Murderers, too.”
“How do you avoid murder as a pirate? Isn’t that part of the job description?” she asked with a nervous laugh.
“You know what I meant,” he said. Seeing continued confusion on her face, he added, “We avoided civilian casualties, as much as we could anyway.
Armed folks were fair game, but shooting innocents, no. We were after stuff, not lives.”
“You make piracy sound almost respectable.”
He told her with a grin, “Well, evidently ninety-nine percent of pirates give the other one percent a bad name.”
She returned his grin with more heart than her last laugh. Handing back the canteen she commented, “Still better than being one of those pommie bastards, I’ll give you that. What’d you do on your ship?” Elizabeth looked over her shoulder, tracing Eric’s stare to the prisoners. “Oh, right, OPSEC.”
Eric blinked, remembering a field of stars and a drifting ice comet. “Sorry, I’ve never heard someone use that phrase before.”
“Operational security. Don’t say or do something that could endanger the mission.”
“Were you military?” he asked her.
“When I was younger, yeah. Now? I’ve been off active duty for three years. Four?”
“Younger? You look my age?”
Elizabeth gave a surprised laugh. “Thanks, but I’m thirty-four. Former Lieutenant Commander Elizabeth Grace, Pershing Navy. Master pilot, journeyman navigator. At your service.”
“Master pilot? What hulls?”
“Oh, Pershing doesn’t use standard Confederate hull designations. I’m certified for most small craft, corvettes, all the way up to cruiser sizes as the Confederacy would deem them. Some days I wish I would have stuck around to see the Sherman from her berth.”
“Standard designations? Must be nice living where you can afford standards. We used what we had and cobbled together the rest.”
“I bet that resulted in interesting designs.”
“You have no idea. What about the Sherman? For you to go all starry eyed as a pilot she sounds like one hell of a ship.”
“Well, the provost already knew about her, so no point in keeping quiet about it. She’s the largest ship in the Confederate Navy, or she will be when she leaves the yards. She’d probably handle like a pig to be honest. At that size anyway. Officially, we’ve told the rest of the Confederacy she’s a heavy cruiser. That might be understating things a bit.”
“Largest ship I’ve ever seen was a Haspian class freighter converted to a warship. How’s the Sherman stack up to that?”
“No shit, a Haspian-based warship? Well, the Sherman’s a bit smaller, I’ll grant you that. Mass-wise though, the Sherman would outclass that I’m willing to bet, since cargo ships aren’t designed with armor and weapons in mind. The holds on a Haspian make her bigger without adding a lot of mass, when she’s empty anyway. Where did you see a Haspian? And how--no what, what did they convert it to?”
“I think the term they used was mothership. They added basic point defense systems, installed new hold hatches, armored what needed hardening, and changed out the power plants. I think they fit eight corvettes in the bays by time they were done.”
Elizabeth looked at him with obvious disbelief. “You’re shitting me.”
“Seriously. I remember Captain Fox saying anyone doing a sweep would see the engine noise of a Haspian and figure things were good. They’d miss the corvettes in the scatter until it was too late.”
“I--wow. That’s, that’s so many things. Brilliant, I’ll give you. Maybe--”
“Blasphemous?”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“That was her name. The Blasphemy. Targeted Protectorate military convoys when they could.”
“How’d they deal with return fire?”
Eric shrugged. “I asked the same question. All Fox said is that most of the ship was empty space. Evidently punching holes in paneling doesn’t do you much good if you’re not hitting something vital.”
“No, no it doesn’t. I’d imagine the fragmentation was more annoying than dangerous,” She chortled. After they passed the canteen around again, Elizabeth gave Eric a serious look and asked, “How did they capture you?”
“We had a bad run. Got popped a few times, fried our life support. Spent a bit in deadspace patching it up. Well, patch failed on the way back. We were out of parts to fix it right, so we improvised. Pirate engineering, if you would. It leaked pretty bad, inside and outside. We stopped to harvest some ice comets in the outer reaches of this one system. That’s where the Provost caught us. My ship tried to run for it, ditched everyone outside the ship, including myself.”
“Wow, abandoned. That sucks. How’d it end?”
“Watched the Fortune take a slug straight to engineering. Now I’m no engineer but I know a dewar failure when I see it.”
“Ouch.”
Eric shrugged at her and emptied the rest of the canteen. “It is what it is, Liz. Nothing I can do to change it.”
“Well, you grew up on her, right? The Fortune? Everyone you knew was on that ship.”
Eric stared into the fire for a few moments fighting back ghosts of his past. “Yeah. Hurts, sometimes. Nothing I can do about that either but accept it and move on.”
“No spacer likes to hear a story that goes like that. I’m sorry, Eric.”
Eric shrugged again, chewing his lip as he stared into the fire. Changing the subject, he asked, “What about you?”
“Well, they got me on shore leave. Jenkin’s Station.”
Eric frowned. “How’s that work?”
“Ship I was on ported at Jenkin’s. I got off the boat to do some shopping and get real food. I was walking down a set of stairs then there was a flash of light and I woke up in a med bay. No clue how long I was out. It felt like forever, just questions and more questions. Then one day they handed me a bag with my clothes in it and shuffled me off to another ship and they dropped me here. That was two days ago? Maybe three? I don’t know.”
“What’d they ask about?”
“What didn’t they ask about? They bounced around so many different topics. What did I know about current fleet strengths for the Confederacy as a whole and for pretty much every member state? Had I ever been to Caledon? What had I heard about pirate activity on the British border with the Reach? What about the Dead Stars border with the Confederacy? They spent days grilling me forever on Pershing, specifically orbital positions and hazards. Weeks probably.”
“Why weeks?”
Elizabeth commented, “You’ve never been to Pershing, I take it.”
“No, I’ve never been to any of Confed space for any length of time. Passing through the edge of a system, maybe a handful of times, but off the boat? Nope.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Where to begin? Everything I know about pirates says a balanced education isn’t a very high priority for you guys. I don’t know how much history you were taught, but you know most of the Confed member states were at war with the Protectorate at one point, yes?”
“Kinda?” Eric said with a weak smile. “History never really interested me that much. Not until the last few months anyway.”
“Well, unlike every other Confed state, we didn’t need to kick the Protectorate off our world. They never took us. Every boot that they put on Pershing got rolled into a pile and burned like the trash they were,” Elizabeth told him and accentuated her words by spitting into the fire. When Eric did not comment, she continued, “We mauled them. Badly. Still lost the naval engagement eventually, but so did they.”
“Wait, you both lost? How’s that work?”
Elizabeth flashed a fierce grin. “They disabled the last of our fleet. Left our boys adrift and made for Pershing without attempting to recover survivors. Orbital bombardment began almost immediately while their troop ships came in from the outer system. I guess they expected an easy, straight forward surface campaign. Their troop ships laid at low anchor to drop their cargo while the rest of the fleet joined in the fun.
“First phase was to take the capital region, so the bulk of the fleet was clustered in an arc about,” Elizabeth stopped short. “Well, you probably can’t translate arcs to distances in your head, but suffice it to say, they were all nice and densely packed.
“Pershing was doing orbita
l mining, pulling in larger asteroids from the middle belt at that point, and aside from a few scouting passes by small craft, the poms ignored the mining operations. The miners listened to pleas for help, pleas for mercy coming off the radios for hours. Most went mad listening to family and friends die before the last of the satellites and comm stations were destroyed.
“Well, one of the crews decided to do something about it. This crew had been up there prepping to adjust orbits for a handful of moonlets. They adjusted those orbits, all right. Using a solution from one of their eggheads, they used every rig they had and set off a chain of collisions while the bulk of the fleet was on the far side. Rocks of any size take a good long while to get pulled back down, even when you dump that kind of delta-V at them. Still, the funny thing is that the fools never looked up long enough to see what was coming until those moonlets were breaking apart under G and too close to dodge. Was like a giant interplanetary shotgun, tore their flock of buzzards to shit and back.
“All in all, those brave men destroyed dozens of capital ships. Counting escorts and small craft, that number rises to hundreds, if not thousands. Granted, we paid by not being able to make orbit for almost three hundred years, but that’s not a bad trade if you ask me. No one else can claim to have stopped a numbered Protectorate fleet cold like that.”
“The field has been our bigger, meaner brother ever since. Sherman’s Field ain’t as big as he used to be, but he’s still there, ready and willing to end careless pilots.”
“Wow,” Eric coughed. “That had to have been impressive to see.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Probably. It’s a shame none of the video survived what followed.”
“What? Why?”
“Between the Protectorate information warfare programs and the civil unrest that followed, we set ourselves back a few hundred years’ worth of progress. We’re stronger for it, though. Changed our culture,” Elizabeth said with a smirk. “Most of the Confeds think we’re backwards and paranoid because of that.”
“Most of the Confeds are fools then. Though, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure anyone else in the rest of the galaxy is much better.”
Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. “No, I can’t say they are.”
By Dawn's Early Light Page 27
