Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Lore, Fan Media & Fiction => Topic started by: Histidine on September 30, 2014, 07:08:55 PM

Title: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on September 30, 2014, 07:08:55 PM
Hi, and welcome to the thread for my second Starsector fanfic!

This is a loose sequel to A Battle's Lesson (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8223.0), but you don't actually need to read it to follow this story. This will be a more serious work - no feghoot in this one!

Feedback, pointing out mistakes, etc. welcome! (in particular, I'd like to know if anyone finds it disconcerting that the narrative sometimes refer to characters by their surname and sometimes by their given name)

Boilerplate legal disclaimer
Spoiler
Starsector is the property of Fractal Softworks; its content is reproduced here under fair use laws. All other rights are reserved to the author.
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Content warning
Spoiler
Swearing, graphic depictions of violence, narrative references to sexual assault
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Bonus: Missions (for Starsector 0.7.2)
Spoiler
(http://i.imgur.com/0w9qF8s.png)
Awesome (old) flag of the Persean League by David, found in Starsector/graphics/factions

The Marenos Crisis - Missions
a.k.a. "Gameplay and Story Segregation: A Case Study"
Download (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0t5r3xdi71ffz8/Marenos_missions_1.1.zip?dl=0)

Four missions based on the events of this fanfic, plus one about the prequel A Battle's Lesson (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8223.0). See if you can do better than the original characters did.

It is strongly recommended that you read this fic before playing any of its four missions!
If you really want to know how far you have to read before playing, the chapters are:
Spoiler
Politics the Womb: prequel (but you can actually play it without having read that story at all)
First Encounter: Ch. 2
Enemy Mine: Ch. 5
Counterinvasion: Ch. 15
Last Resort: Ch. 18
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Thanks go to Tartiflette for the wormhole "planet" (taken from Scy (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8010.0) under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license) and Dark.Revenant whose arcade mission provided a handy guide for understanding ship spawning functionality!
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Bonus: recommended music (spoilers!)
Spoiler
Chapter 2
Spoiler
Epic Soul Factory - Intruders (https://www.jamendo.com/en/track/895015/intruders)
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Chapter 5
Spoiler
Epic Soul Factory - TITAN (https://www.jamendo.com/en/track/732501/titan)
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Chapter 9
Spoiler
Arnaud Condé - Sui Generis (start at 0:27) (https://www.jamendo.com/en/track/898546/sui-generis)
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Chapter 15
Spoiler
Epic Soul Factory - Powerful (https://www.jamendo.com/en/track/1096201/powerful)
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Chapter 18
Spoiler
Epic Soul Factory - Overpowered (https://www.jamendo.com/en/track/1096216/overpowered)
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Epilogue
Spoiler
Epic Soul Factory - Limitless (https://www.jamendo.com/en/track/895027/limitless)
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Bonus content: Character renders (test)
Spoiler
Adela Sybitz
(http://i.imgur.com/9DozT0G.png)

Artemis Archer
(http://i.imgur.com/JZ2gDpA.png)

(Their hairstyles aren't what exactly I had in mind, but they're close enough)

Assembled and rendered with DAZ 3D (http://www.daz3d.com/), modified images with GIMP
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And now, without further ado, I present:

The Marenos Crisis
PDF format (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mz8fwb5hzavzg43/The%20Marenos%20Crisis.pdf?dl=0)
ODT format (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7pbywkyeu7qxv6y/The%20Marenos%20Crisis.odt?dl=0)
EPUB format (https://www.dropbox.com/s/q7okrk9a8fjfc3v/The%20Marenos%20Crisis%20-%20Histidine%20%28L.J.%20Lim%29.epub?dl=0) by Scuttlebutt (out of date, not recommended)
Part 1 (prologue, chapters 1-11) - Google Docs (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bkEa4_fnDlNOkO1P9XA3WAs7ChM1JjEZcEXUG9PdyYY/edit?usp=sharing)
Part 2 (chapters 12-18, epilogue) - Google Docs (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NPDmTmj4hv13fANAIt2gE8hpaMo9LFITJUgQ0F0ET6w/edit?usp=sharing)

Blurb
Spoiler
Over two centuries before, the region of space now known to its inhabitants only as the Sector was cut off from the all-encompassing Domain of Man. Thrown back on their own meager resources, the people here have been fighting an uphill struggle with tooth and claw to retain their way of life, or what’s left of it. The great star nations and megacorporations of the Sector vie for supremacy, whether through feat of arms or economic dominance, while pocket-vest empires rise and fall in the depths of independent space. Free planets look constantly over their shoulders, wary of the depredations of pirates and avaricious neighbors, and for many of the common people, the mere fact of survival is a daily miracle.

When the Marenos Subsector is beset by a sudden surge in pirate activity, one of its system governments beseeches the Persean League for aid. Preoccupied with its immediate interests, the League spares but a single cruiser under a newly promoted captain, to do what little it can to stem the tide. But there’s more to these “pirates” than meets the eye, and the threat may well be beyond the ability of one ship to handle.

But no-one told Captain Artemis Archer of the Persean League Navy that. She finds an unlikely ally in the pirate Adela Sybitz, and together they’ll unravel the conspiracy and stop the looming disaster… or die trying.
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Prologue
Spoiler
(http://i.imgur.com/F7FV3NQ.png)

(http://i.imgur.com/0ZWPisB.png)
ISS Armed & Reckless
Lasher-class
Rondel variant

(http://i.imgur.com/Atynr1u.png)
PLS Valiant
Eagle-class
Guardian variant

The hulk of the Tarsus drifted in the darkness two light-hours from the F3 glow of Algre, lying cold, dead and alone. Though the footsteps and other noises of the impromptu recovery team faintly echoed through the sterile grey decks and bulkheads, there was no longer any air to carry them to the ears of others. The raiders had seen to that, just before they departed.

Despite all she’d seen in her career, it was all Adela Sybitz could do not to shudder as she surveyed the bodies littered about her. Three of them were arranged in an arc around the depressurized cargo hold, their corpses caked with desiccated blood where the mag-bolts had taken savage bites out of their internal organs. They were among the lucky ones, the ones who’d died resisting the boarding attempt. The ones who hadn’t… no, best not to dwell on that.

She walked over to a nearby bulkhead, the slender dark-haired man with the gauss rifle following her quietly. A girl - no more than sixteen - was lying in the corner, a slightly younger boy propped up against the partition nearby, their bodies covered in brown-red splotches and essentially nothing else. Kneeling down, she tilted his chin up, examining his blood-splattered face. His dead eyes looked up, as if gazing at her own teak-colored features, and she soon found herself looking away.

Exhaling sharply, she stood up again, wiping her hands on her skinsuit. “What’d you pull from the logs?” she asked the man behind her.

“Enough to make you sick,” Loz Sequeira muttered. “They hid behind a moon, then jumped the Marigold as she came in through the local hyper point. She surrendered almost immediately, but that didn’t stop them from gutting her with their big guns as they approached. When they found out they’d caused the tanks to rupture and blow out their prize’s engines, well, I guess that’s when they got really mad.”

He looked distastefully at the remains of the crew again. “Good god,” he said, grinding his teeth. “You rob people, fine, you need the credits, fine, but you show some respect. This is just plain barbaric.”

“Swine,” a third person hissed on the comm. That was Valentina Dragunova, now standing up from where she’d been examining the first officer’s body. “It’s pigs like this who give the rest of us pirates a bad name.”

“Welcome to the profession, ladies and gentlemen,”  Sybitz said evenly, even as her mouth worked into a frown. “No accountability beyond that of the gun means that ‘round these parts, every two-bit thug with wet dreams of holding power over others lines up to join up some pirate group or other. And let’s not pretend you or I wouldn’t end up just like them after a year or two surrounded by that kind of pervasive attitude.”

Sequeira looked away glumly, while Dragunova just glared at nothing in particular, jade eyes glittering angrily. Despite herself, Adela felt her lips twitching in amusement.

Before he’d joined her crew, Loz had been a smuggler couriering light, high-value cargo across the Sector. He’d been quite astonished one day to find himself suddenly face-to-face with a pirate Lasher while on a run, and even more so when he found himself flying the damn thing two days later. Not that he had much of a choice, given that in robbing him Sybitz had ruined him financially, and asking (begging, really, although these days Adela only brought that up to rib him in social situations) to be allowed to work for his captors gave him the only chance of evading his last client, his creditors, and starvation (in that order).

Dragunova, on the other hand, had been a career pirate even longer than Sybitz. She’d been awfully reticent about her past when she’d been applying for the open position of weapons officer on the Armed & Reckless, although her rap sheet - she was wanted in at least seven different interstellar polities - was certainly impressive enough. Other than that, the only thing Adela really knew about the red-headed woman was that she liked to shoot things, and that she was really good at it. Which, as it turned out, was just fine with one Captain Adela Sybitz.

“Actually, I’m more concerned about the pirate ships,” Sequeira said after a while. “This tub’s sensors were basically unmaintained to begin with, and whoever did this had some pretty good ECM, so I couldn’t get much from them. The physical evidence on the hull, though...”

“What do you mean?”

He tapped his wristcomp as the women approached him, and the space between them glowed with the volumetric projection of the ISS Marigold. Sybitz’s eyes narrowed as she studied the numerous gaping breaches visible on the schematic, created when someone had repeatedly fired a high-power ship weapon into the Marigold’s defenseless hull, and she wondered what had provoked the pirates into doing something they knew would only cost them.

“The external scans show hits from high-end weapons atypical for pirates,” the ex-smuggler went on, “including several energy weapons. I’m not talking cheap PD lasers, either; there’s a part,” he highlighted a section of hull near the stern, “which shows shearing consistent with a graviton beam. And here, outside the cargo bay, we have…”

“... a direct hit by a heavy blaster,” Valentina put in. “It appears to be what set off the hydrogen.”

“So the pirates are operating late epoch ships,” Sybitz said. “That’s not exactly unheard of.”

“Yes, but the maintenance budget will eat into your profit margins pretty heavily,” Loz pointed out. “You can make up for it by going after higher-value cargos, but we’ve barely seen anything like that in this backwoods subsector, especially given how crowded the competition is getting lately; they ought to be moving to greener pastures by now. For that matter,” he waved an arm at the upturned cargo hold, “pirates with the connections to get ships and weapons like that usually manage to not screw up a simple hijacking like this one.”

“So what are you saying? That they may not be the face-value pirates we’re taking them to be?”

“I don’t know, not yet. But anyone running high-tech ships in this part of the Sector is something to look out for.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I’m going to analyse the comm signal and voiceprint. If we ever happen to talk to them, we’ll be able to identify them. Maybe someone will find some value in that information down the road.”

“If we’re lucky, someone has a nice, big bounty on them,” Dragunova said gruffly. “I need an excuse to shoot something right now.”

“There’ll be time for that, Tina.” Sybitz looked briefly at her two most trusted subordinates and companions, then nodded. “Very well, if there’s nothing else, let’s wrap up here and leave. We need to be finding some prey of our own.”
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Chapter 1
Spoiler
The first thing Commander Ashok Jaitley, League Navy took note of as he entered the brightly lit room was the nanofiber-bodied arrow slicing through the air with a hiss, followed by a sharp thud as the blunt iron practice head buried itself in the old-fashioned wooden target.

This was normally the recreation deck for the flag officer and his staff on an Eagle-class cruiser, but there wasn’t one right now, the PLS Valiant having been detached on a solo operation. Under the letter of the Regs, that still didn’t mean the woman here was entitled to appropriate it as she’d just done, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to bring that up just this moment.

He watched in silence as she shook her head slightly, the reddish orange ponytail swaying in the air, before drawing the replica composite bow and firing again. The last arrow had struck the edge of the seven ring; this one landed squarely in the eight. None of the shafts sticking from the increasingly pincushion-y board were further out than that, and two had actually hit the nine, but the much-coveted X ring remained unmarked.

It was only after the third arrow was nocked that she turned to face him, and he stiffened slightly at the glare in her cyan eyes. The bow wasn’t - quite - pointed at him, but it was rather closer then he felt comfortable with when it came to sharp objects flying at a hundred meters per second.

“One pun out of your mouth, Jaitley,” Captain Artemis Archer said in a cold soprano, “and this arrow goes right through your sternum.”

He raised his hands in a gesture of peace. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She glared at him for a few more moments, then gave a vaguely apologetic half-shrug and started cleaning up. The arrow went back in the carrying case, along with the three still unfired on the table before her. She walked over to the target, retrieving the ones there as well, before putting the bow in the case and sealing it. “So, what did you wish to see me about?”

“Just wanted to take a few minutes to go over the newest data packet with you before the staff meeting,” he said, assuming a parade rest. “I would’ve commed you first, but you left it in your cabin again.”

“And now I know why I did.” She started to groan, but let it out as a small sigh instead. “I suppose it’s too much to hope it includes a message that we’re finally getting those screening elements?”

Jaitley shook his head. “Sorry, Captain. Tensions with the Hegemony are still at elevated levels, and every ship they can spare is being sent to Hancock. Rear Admiral Slater sends his regrets, but also expresses his confidence that you will achieve results despite your lack of resources.”

“Wonderful.” This time she didn’t even have the energy to sigh. Thanks for the vote of confidence, Uncle Bernard, but I’d rather you’d sent me a destroyer squadron instead.

This whole operation was screwed from the beginning, she thought sourly. As far as she was concerned, it was the brainchild of a bunch of paper-shufflers back home who were presented with a problem and wanted to look like they were Doing Something about it without any concern as to whether the problem actually got solved or not.

The premise was simple enough. The Marenos Subsector, never the most secure region of space at the best of times, had recently seen a sudden, unexplained upswing in pirate attacks by new and existing groups, with all the usual economic and social disruptions that entailed. Worse yet, there were even reports of some of the pirates becoming daring enough to even attack the assets of system governments, and demand tribute from them.

A request for assistance had been put in by Carda, an independent system in the subsector currently applying for associate membership in the Persean League (and by a whole lot of corporations based in the League). So, while some poor overworked agent at NavInt got working on figuring out just why there was so much banditry going on all of a sudden to begin with, the Powers That Be had sent a naval force to show the flag and hopefully kill some pirates in the process. A force consisting of exactly one Eagle-class cruiser, Captain Archer commanding.

“What do they expect us to do, fercripesake?!” she half-snarled, even as she cringed inwardly at sounding so petulant. “If they wanted us to cover more than half a system at once, they should have sent a couple of light flotillas. If they wanted us to actually go after the bad guys on their turf, they should have shaken loose a proper task force, or at least a Conquest. Instead, we’re sitting here in our shiny new cruiser, looking all impressive as we swat down a raiding party here and there, while the rest of the pirates just go pick on whoever is unlucky enough to be somewhere we’re not! Ugh.”

He started to say something, but twelve years of naval service - and eight years of married life - had taught him one vital lesson: sometimes, it’s better to avoid arguing with the other person and simply let them burn themselves out. So he just stood there, still at parade rest, until she stopped looking like she wanted to hit something and took a deep breath.

“Sorry, Ash,” she half-mumbled, looking away. “I shouldn’t be taking my frustrations out on you.”

“That’s what XOs are for, ma’am.” He smiled, and she returned it. “Now, if we’ll head to the briefing room?”



“Alright, everyone, listen up,” Archer said, leaning over the table with her palms flat on the surface. “If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the news, you’ll know that the security situation in the Marenos subsector has only degraded in the month since our arrival.”

“As we know all too well, we’re just one ship. We can’t possibly begin to cover every merchant buzzing about in the subsector, and we can’t just fly straight to Vaas and wipe out the pirates in their nest. That said, our duty to the League and the people of Marenos remains, and we will fulfill it to the best of our ability. We will not allow a single more civilian vessel to be robbed, looted or destroyed than is within our power. Are we clear?”

“Yes, ma’am!” the chorus came around the room, and she smiled thinly.

“Good. Now since we can’t chase the pirates all over the place, and we can’t go knocking on their front door, we need to get them to come to us.”

Ashok Jaitley tapped his pad, and the holo-display at the centre of the table lit up with a schematic of the Valiant. She was an imposing figure, loaded for bear yet fully displaying the graceful lethality of her breed, and it was hard not to feel a surge of pride at the sight.

“We’ll configure our ECM to disguise us as an overloaded Phaeton-class tanker,” here a translucent render of the fat, ungainly utility vessel was superimposed onto the cruiser’s, “and we’ll tow a decoy drone behind us to make it look like we have a frigate escort.”

The plot then switched to a starmap, a number of planets highlighted with interconnecting lines. “Of the systems this side of Vaas, Algre is the hardest hit with twelve merchies and two patrol ships lost in just two weeks, so that’s where we headed. We’ll flip our transponder and deploy the decoy just before leaving Carda, then hit Yunan, Secile, Masaila and Ibers on our way. Any pirate gets close enough to see we’re not actually a big, slow tanker with a small escort, we’ll run them down and seize them. I want a few of them captured alive if at all possible, but a dead pirate is infinitely better than one that gets away to terrorize the merchants somewhere else. Any questions?”

Archer sat down and looked around at her officers, surreptitiously observing their behavior. All the ship’s top-level people were here, except comms officer Lieutenant Belle Gray, who had the watch, and Surgeon Commander Harvey Lister, down in sickbay treating a crewmember with second-degree steam burns.

Jaitley was calm as always to her right, idly rubbing his bushy mustache as he studied the plot, and if he was in anyway inclined to point out that she had been just a tad hypocritical with that opening speech, he showed no sign of it. Lieutenant Commander Ross Diamond, was also running his fingers through something - in this case, his messy blond hair - but it wasn’t at all clear that he was paying attention to much of anything. Commander Hanna Battuta, Valiant’s headscarved astrogator, just looked back evenly at her, her forearms resting on the table.

To Archer’s left, Marine Major Janusz Koniecpolski (he was really only a captain, but the courtesy promotion removed any potential ambiguity over the title “Captain”) studied his tablet intently, undoubtedly considering a number of potential tactical scenarios. And finally there was the senior engineer, Lieutenant Commander Rollyn Bracket, nervously tugging at her chestnut brown locks.

“You have something on your mind, Rolls?” Artemis asked gently.

“Ahh,” the engineer startled. “Well, um, it’s the augmented engine system, ma’am. I’m worried about pushing her too hard, if… well, we’re going to be chasing pirates who are trying to run from us.”

“What’s wrong with the engine?” Jaitley cut in, eyebrows raised.

“Well, you see,” Bracket fidgeted, “with all the electronic hardware they were putting in at the same time, they couldn’t get the high-power thrusters to quite fit. So they took off a bit of armor, rerouted some of the hydrogen feeds, and removed two of the four coolant pipes. Which means it could go offline much more easily if it takes a bad hit. But it should be fine if we don’t get shot!” she hastily added as more than one person stared at her. “Um, I think it’d be better if I found a way to make it safer, though. If I set up an emergency vent, add a backup flow system, and-”

“Rolls!” Archer waved her arms. “Look, we don’t need to know the details. Just let us know what you’ve done and what it can do when you’ve finished, alright?”

The junior officer flushed, mumbling an “okay,” and Artemis turned back to the rest of her officers. “Any other comments?”

“I’ve been looking at the local equipment,” Koniecpolski said, setting down the tablet, “and it occurs to me that there are some additional items we could procure to improve the platoon’s odds in a boarding operation. Specifically...”
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Chapter 2
Spoiler
“ISS Sous-vide, your ship is now mine!” the angry voice snarled on the audio-only comm. “Surrender or be blown into dust!”

“As threats go, I’ve heard better,” Archer idly commented as the PLS Valiant did its best to look like a helpless tanker fleeing for its life. “How long till unmask?”

“Twenty-four minutes, Captain,” Commander Battuta said from her astrogation console. “Assuming our ECM holds, that is.”

“Of course it’ll hold,” Ross Diamond snapped. “You think I’m gonna let a bunch of two-bit pirates outsmart me?”

“Easy, Ross,” Archer said. “Alright, go to general quarters, then let’s let them chase us for a bit. I want them too irritated to think straight for as long as possible.”

The “Sous-vide” and its imaginary escort continued running on travel drive at 225,000 kilometers an hour, ignoring the barrage of increasingly sulfurous threats. The pursuing fleet was gaining slowly but surely, and she watched the plot with steady eyes as the hostile fleet - two Hounds, a Buffalo Mk.II and an Enforcer - crept closer and closer to the critical 10,000 km range at which they would see through the masquerade.

“Coming up on Waypoint Alpha… now.

The Valiant flipped end-over-end, disengaging her towed decoy drone and her ECM disguise, and bored down on her predators-turned-prey at a quarter again her previous speed.

The effect wasn’t truly instantaneous - relativity saw to that - but it may as well have been. Upon seeing that the pitifully outgunned tanker was in fact a naval warship more powerful than all of them put together, they began braking with a thoroughly amazing haste.

“Travel drive inhibitor active,” Battuta reported.

“Begin transmission, Belle,” Archer said, leaning forward and activating the pickup. “Pirate ships, this is Captain Artemis Archer, League Navy. By interstellar admiralty law, I am placing you and your crew under arrest. Stand down your vessels and prepare to be boarded. Resistance will be met with lethal and overwhelming force. If you attempt to flee, or your ships are not powered down within sixty seconds of receiving this message, I will destroy each and every one of you. Clear.”

One of the Hound skippers, perhaps quicker of mind or heel than the others, immediately broke off and ran in a different direction, quickly outpacing the angry shots fired at his traitorous back. The remaining three ships fled together, no doubt cursing even more violently than they had been before the mask dropped.

“That’s right, you scumbags,” Diamond hissed at the tactical plot as the blood red icons of the hostile vessels crept inexorably closer. “Run away; the big bad wolf is coming to get you.”

“Don’t get overconfident, Commander,” Archer said, not taking her eyes off her own screen. Something’s very wrong here. This makes no tactical sense. Pirates have never been known for any great loyalty to each other when things go wrong - the Hound that bolted is proof enough of that! - and yet they’re staying in perfect formation. Even supposing the leader is just holding his assets close, this isn’t the optimal course of action. For starters…

“Why aren’t they scattering?” Ashok Jaitley put her thoughts into words. “For that matter, why isn’t the Buffalo shedding missiles to slow us down?”

“I don’t know,” the tac officer admitted. “Panic reaction, perhaps? They’re not thinking straight?”

“Then they should be breaking and running all over,” Archer pointed out. “These guys look like they’re trying to get away, but they’re not doing a bunch of obvious things towards that goal.”

“It’s a trap,” Jaitley said flatly, and the captain nodded. “Ross,” she looked at him, “I want you to be ready for aggressive action on their part.”

“Okay, but I don't...” Diamond started to answer, then suddenly jerked upright in his seat. “Multiple missile launches! Bandits closing fast!”

“Shields up! Activate point defense!” Archer barked. It wouldn’t be quick enough to stop the first launch if they weren’t already up before she gave the order, but it would deal with the second - if they got far enough for that. “Evasive maneuvers!”

To his credit, Lieutenant Commander Ross Diamond had reacted to the sudden emergence of the threat almost fast enough. Almost.

Nine Harpoons and five Sabots came boring in on a collision course. The PD lasers were still tracking when the first MRM came in, but the shield got up just in time, and the microfusion warhead detonated in a brilliant blue flash barely thirty meters from the Valiant’s hull.

The lasers knocked out three more of the Harpoons, but only one of the Sabots. One more of each missile missed outright as the cruiser’s maneuvering jets kicked in, spinning like a ship half her size in a quick evasive maneuver, and only about two-thirds of the penetrators flung by the remaining SRMs actually contacted the shield. But that was enough, and flux capacitors lit up through the ship like a Christmas tree. Only a quick shutdown prevented the impending overload, and one of the Harpoons actually got through, tearing a nasty chunk out of the Eagle’s bow armor.

And that left the Valiant exposed to the Enforcer’s heavy maulers. Antimatter-doped 140mm shells burst violently against the light grey plating, shattering and fusing the advanced composites, and damage warning alarms wailed on the bridge. And then the Hound was there, spewing hundreds of iron flechettes from its heavy needler, slashing through unprotected bulkheads in a cutting hail.

But now it was her turn.

“Hard to port!” Archer snapped, gripping the armrests of her command chair. “Drivers, target Bandit Three, salvo fire! Beams, engage at will!”

The Valiant banked with the last burst of her emergency maneuvering thrusters, catching the Hound in her sights as it tried to target the weak point in her hull. Four hypervelocity drivers fired as one, their charged tungsten rounds cleaving through the frigate’s thin armor like so much paper, and the ship broke in half as one of its fuel tanks burst.

More Harpoons streaked in, but the tracking systems were ready this time, and the PD turrets stopped them well short of their target. The Eagle reversed course, neatly sidestepping an antimatter bolt from the Buffalo, and rewarded the hapless converted freighter for its efforts with a phase beam carving a gash through its entire starboard.

The Valiant took a moment to shed the excess flux, then charged forward, her shield raised. The HVDs spat fire again, and unlike its newer brethren, an Enforcer’s shield was never made to take such kinetic punishment. It hastily gave way, leaving the armor to absorb the hits, and while the old-style destroyer’s plating was sturdy enough to take the worst of it, it wasn’t quite enough to stop the heavy penetrators and high-energy beams completely. Nor did it do anything against the EM disruption that dazzled the ship’s sensors and fire control systems.

They tried to run now, to scatter as they should have, but this eagle was not about to let her prey escape so easily. She bore down on the Enforcer, melting and hammering its starboard flak cannons to slag before repaying the missile salvo that started the battle with a Harpoon volley of her own. Just four missiles, but with no shields and a half-blind half-maimed point defense to stop them, they struck its bow with a burning fury. Stored missiles and high-explosive ammunition detonated, and the front half of the ship erupted in flame, the crippled wreck spinning away into space.

The Buffalo Mk.II didn’t even merit any missiles. Diamond simply trained his beams on it and burned through the hull until it went up in a bright orange fireball.

A collective sigh went up around the bridge as the Valiant found herself alone in the depths of space again. Archer inhaled sharply, waiting till her fluttering pulse slowed down before she unfastened the restraints on her seat, removed her skinsuit’s helmet and placed it in its harness.

“Damage report,” she said into her comm, trying not to stare at the blood red areas marked on her ship schematic.

“Cargo Bay One is open to space,” the petty officer on the other end stated grimly. “We’ve lost power to the port mainframe, and two of the capacitor banks are a total wipe.” He paused for a moment. “My teams report seven injured, three of them badly, but no-one’s dead, thankfully.”

“Good. I’ll leave you to your work, then. Transmit to my personal if anything serious comes up.”

She cut the connection, then stood up. “Commander Diamond, I’d like a word with you in private,” she said, and the room suddenly took on a distinct chill.

“Um, yes, ma’am,” he said uneasily after only the briefest hesitation, and she turned to her XO. “Ash, you have the watch. Get some S&R on the wreckage.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Jaitley answered crisply, and she walked out, her tactical officer - and more than a few stares - following behind.



He shuffled nervously after her as she entered the briefing room, spinning to face him as soon as the door closed behind them. She was gazing right into his dark brown eyes, and he stood perfectly still, trying to stop the sweat trickling down his neck.

“Commander,” her tone was all the scarier for its complete evenness, “what do you think we did wrong today?”

“Captain,” he started, then swallowed. “I… I suppose we underestimated their skill and discipline, ma’am. We got overconfident, and, well…”

She cocked her head. “What you mean to say, Lieutenant Commander, is that we thought we were smarter than them. We got so dazzled by our own brilliance in suckering them into our trap, it never occurred to us that they might not be similarly overawed by it, or that they might be planning the same thing. And because of that, Valiant now has seven crew casualties and a large gash in her port bow that will cost several hundred credits of taxpayer money to repair. Am I correct?”

“Um,” he mumbled weakly. “Yes, ma’am.”

“To be fair to you,” Archer went on, “it’s not entirely your fault. Neither Jaitley nor I spotted the threat much sooner than you did, and we’re both more experienced than you. And as the captain, responsibility ultimately falls on my shoulders. That said, Commander Diamond,” she contemplated his carefully neutral face, “you’re my tactical officer. I need you to be the one to anticipate the threats to my ship, to neutralize them before they do the same to us. And you can’t do that for me if you don’t take the job seriously.”

She paused for a moment, her light blue irises still boring into his soul. She hadn’t asked him a question, so he decided it would be best for him to say nothing.

“Ross,” she said, her face softening, “you’re good at what you do. But so are lots of people out there, and they have a lot of incentive to stay that way, or get even better. Especially in a place like this. Fall into the trap of taking them lightly just because they don’t have shiny ships or fancy uniforms like we do, and you could get yourself and a lot of people - people who are counting on you - killed. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Captain,” he answered, more crisply this time, and she permitted herself a small, brief smile.

“Go down to Engineering and assist Commander Bracket with the repairs. That will be all for today, Commander. Dismissed.”

Diamond saluted smartly, and Archer watched as he turned and left the room, his shoulders drooping with visible relief.
[close]

Chapter 3 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg141608#msg141608)
Chapter 4 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg141701#msg141701)
Chapter 5 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg142224#msg142224)
Chapter 6 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg142415#msg142415)
Chapter 7 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg143882#msg143882)
Chapter 8 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg145070#msg145070)
Chapter 9 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg147037#msg147037)
Chapter 10 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg148351#msg148351)
Chapter 11 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg148351#msg148351)
Chapter 12 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg149845#msg149845)
Chapter 13 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg149845#msg149845)
Chapter 14 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg150739#msg150739)
Chapter 15 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg150740#msg150740)
Chapter 16 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg151746#msg151746)
Chapter 17 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg152178#msg152178)
Chapter 18 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg152616#msg152616)
Epilogue (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg152616#msg152616)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis
Post by: MShadowy on September 30, 2014, 07:53:38 PM
Oh, this is nice.  I'm not exactly the best at lengthy commentary, sorry, but please, do continue.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis
Post by: SafariJohn on October 01, 2014, 04:40:25 AM
Can't wait to see a certain Lasher and Eagle team up.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis
Post by: Histidine on October 04, 2014, 02:29:53 AM
Glad at least some people like it :)

Chapter 3
Spoiler
The alarms were wailing in the bridge - and all over the ship - but she didn’t have time to pay attention to them any more.

Her vessel was a battered wreck, streaming air from a dozen gaping wounds in her hull, and the Hegemony Onslaught was advancing relentlessly towards it. The broadside Hellbores went to maximum rate of fire, unleashing a cyclone of destruction that would have turned any lesser foe into a shattered wreck, yet not even that terrifying force could stop the juggernaut bearing down on them.

Her hands were shaking, sweat matting her hair to her forehead, as she tried desperately to find the magic bullet that would stop the beast. They were counting on her to save them, to save the ship.

But she just couldn’t do it.

White-hot plasma seared the battlecruiser’s flanks, and then the Onslaught launched four Reaper torpedoes at once straight at it. She stared ashen-faced at the plot, knowing that she could never stop them all. But she had to try. She had to try.

The two burst PD lasers still active were brought to bear, blowing one out of space, then another. Then the third was through her defense coverage, and she had nothing left to parry it with except her shield.

She brought it up, and the weapon’s infernium warhead ignited with a sun’s fury against the barrier. It didn’t so much as scratch the armor… but it did send the ship into overload, abused flux capacitors crackling and sparking violently with barely contained energy.

And it left the PLS Dauntlesscompletely defenseless against the fourth Reaper.

The torpedo’s explosion rocked the ship like a child’s toy, gouged a huge crater in the hull, and sent a hail of lethal fragments larger than a man’s arm through cargo holds, maintenance shafts… and the bridge. One of them speared her console, shattering it and sending sparks flying everywhere, but she herself was miraculously unharmed.

The same could not be said of her colleagues.

The bridge was a smoke-filled abattoir, illuminated only by the dull red emergency lights, the air blowing out in a gust through the breach in the bulkhead. Lieutenant Bell was pinned to the wall by a giant splinter through his sternum, blood caking around the breach in his skinsuit; Commander Harmon had been decapitated outright. Two ratings had been flung across the bridge like rag dolls, and the helm’s seat had been torn in half.

She fell out of her seat, crawling across the bloody deck towards the captain’s chair. Everyone else was dead, but Captain Slater - Uncle Bernard - had to be alive. He had to be!

Pulling herself upright, she gripped his limp body and shook, silently begging him to wake up, to take charge of the situation falling apart around them. But he just laid there, unmoving, heedless of her soundless screams, her eyes fogging with tears.

Then the bulkhead exploded again, and this time it did not miss her.



Artemis Archer awoke with a sudden gasp, shooting bolt upright in her bed. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she barely even registered the fact that her nightgown and the pillow were both soaked in sweat.

She closed her eyes, willing the nightmares away, trying to get her breathing under control. It seemed to take an eternity, but eventually the visions faded, her hands relaxing their grip on the bedsheets.

It’s alright, AA. They’re not here any more. They can’t hurt you now.

Inhaling sharply, she pulled her knees up and rested her head in her hands. She thought she’d reined in her demons, but being in battle again - even in a relatively “clean” engagement like that one - had brought them surging back to the fore.

One cruiser, out all on its own, commanded by a psychologically damaged captain. They should never have sent the Valiant here, she thought sullenly. They should never have sent me here.

But they had, because they didn’t know. They didn’t know, because one Artemis Archer had done her best to make sure they never found out.

She’d been terrified. Terrified that the Navy would let her go, that she’d be written off as damaged goods. And so, she’d concealed the early warning signs as soon as she recognized them, and somehow managed to keep them from the psych types who’d interviewed her after the battle. By the time it’d reached this level, she’d become a master at hiding the wounds within.

Did anyone suspect? She prayed desperately that none of the Valiant’s crew did. Uncle Bernard might have, but he’d avoided pressing her, and he had his own injuries to cope with at any rate. There were a few others, perhaps, but none of them were here right now.

Which meant she was safe, for now.

She picked up her wristcomp from the nightstand and checked the clock - 3:17 AM, shipboard time - and sighed. No point trying to go back to bed now; she might as well clean up and go relieve Jaitley. Standing up, she shed the now-stained nightie and headed for the shower.



“Captain on the bridge,” Ashok Jaitley announced smoothly as Artemis walked in. “You’re up early today,” he added in a lower voice.

“As you were, everyone,” she said, studying the watch crew. The deck was as clean and brightly lit as ever, and she nodded in approval at the lack of people quietly putting away their book readers or closing computer game windows. “Anything to report, Ash?”

“Absolutely nothing, ma’am. No-one’s even coming near us - or any other tanker, for that matter. I think they’ve caught on to our trick.”

“It was going to happen eventually,” she said. “Especially after that one Hound got away from us.” Her shoulders rose in a slight shrug. “We’ll figure something new out. How long till Masaila?”

“Three days.”

“Alright, we’ll let the crew have some rest then. In the meantime, schedule another staff meeting for tomorrow; we’ll let Hanna have the watch for this one.” She turned to the tac officer’s workstation. “Ross, you finished with those sims?”

“Yeah,” Diamond said, switching his display as the captain walked over. “Some of them were a little too easy compared to what we’ve been facing, so,” he grinned,” I tweaked them a bit. Here, have a look.”

She looked over the scenario details, and let out a low whistle. “Two Dagger wings. The middies and Lieutenant Fong are going to hate you so much.”

“It’ll be good for them, ma’am.” His smile was lopsided now. “And for me, too.”

“Good work, Ross.” She nodded approvingly at him, meeting his smile with one of her own, then turned back to the display. “Though, to keep things fair, I think you should…”



Adela Sybitz sighed, running a hand through her unkempt shoulder-length black hair as she stared at the ridiculous figures on her screen. “Two weeks? Seriously?”

“Two weeks,” Sequeira affirmed. “And with the inflation going on all over the place, there’s no way we can afford to buy any more supplies.” A brief pause, as he glanced at the door. “Ah, I’d avoid talking about that in public if I were you. The crew even get a whiff of the notion that we’re insolvent, they’re gonna desert. Or mutiny.”

I’m gonna mutiny,” Dragunova said grumpily, looking over from her workbench. “I’ve just about run out of 6.72mm ammo, and the holo sight on my K7 is still broken.”

Sybitz placed her hand on her forehead. They’d been running pretty tight as it was when that Eonavia Defence Force’s Monitor had suddenly appeared from behind the Buffalo they were trying to catch. The Armed & Reckless had gotten away, but so had its intended prey, and the repairs to the armor had emptied more of their funds than they’d anticipated. Now they were practically out of credits and supplies alike, and if they couldn’t fix the problem soon...

“Any contract work we could take?” she asked. It was a long shot, but…

Loz shook his head. “Nothing that would pay us enough in time. I’ve been looking, but… the only one that’ll cover our costs is this bounty here. ‘Assassinate League Captain.’ Apparently she’s managed to *** off several of the big pirate bands around here.” He grimaced. “Only problem for us is, she flies around in an Eagle-class cruiser.”

“That does sound like it’s out of our league,” Adela commented, pointedly ignoring Sequeira’s exaggerated groan.

“She has to step off that ship sometime,” Valentina growled. “Give me an SR-X and a good vantage point and I’ll deal with her, clean and efficient.”

Sybitz shook her head. “We don’t even know where she is right now, and we’d have to find out where she’ll be in advance. We don’t have time.” She thought for a while, then glanced again at her gunnery officer. “What about privateering?”

“The only government offering letters of marque around here is the Sekos system,” Dragunova answered. Gruffly: “And I’d rather swallow ground glass than have to deal with those jackbooted thugs.”

“Hey, there’s a wanted ad here by a business called Satin Companion,” Sequeira said, looking up from his tablet. “They’re looking for some young-ish ladies to work temporarily at some event they’re having at the station in Masaila. Maybe we could-”

No.” The sharp response came from both women at once. Unkindly, Sybitz added: “Why don’t you offer yourself up instead? It’s not like there’s any shortage of demand for male sex workers around here.”

“Geez, alright,” the ex-smuggler said defensively, raising his hands. “I’m sorry I even brought it up.”

They glared at him for a while, then Adela sighed again. “Nothing to it. We’ll just have to raise our permitted risk levels. Grab the first convoy we can feasibly take, even if it means our ship gets half beaten into scrap from it.”

“Aye, Skip. I’ll go plot a sweep route now.”

Sybitz leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes. Even “safe” piracy could be a dicey business at the best of times. If they didn’t try her plan, or they tried and came up empty, she could find herself out on the street - or garbage out the airlock. Then again, finding a convoy might be even worse - she might end up pressed into an unwinnable fight and blown unceremoniously out of space. Sometimes it just didn’t pay to be a small-time pirate.

She sat up, distracting herself by going through the ship’s maintenance logs, and tried very hard not to think about Satin Companion.



Under normal circumstances,  a Venture-class cruiser was an impressive thing. Solid as a rock, rugged, well-armed, dependable, especially with a fighter wing or two to back it up. Often, a convoy with one could be trusted to stay safe from the depredations of the pirates so common in the Sector.

But these weren’t normal circumstances, and this particular Venture was no match for the Dominator standing it off, quad Hellbore cannons pounding it into so much scrap metal. Shell after shell slammed into the dying wreck, the hull breaking up into smaller and smaller chunks, and those of its companions who were still trying to put up a fight were swiftly torn apart by the accompanying frigates and destroyers.

“One of the freighters is escaping, my lord,” Rodrigo Blanco y Marcos stated quietly, standing next to the captain’s chair. “Shall we pursue?”

“No need,” the man seated beside him said. He was a tall, slightly tanned figure, with slick black hair, his face marked by a sharp jaw and a scar down the right cheek. Unlike everyone else on the bridge, he was dressed in white tie rather than a skinsuit, an unambiguous statement of his superiority to the mere mortals about him.

“Fear is one of the deadliest weapons in our arsenal, Rigo,” Manza Holk went on. “But it does not spread amongst the dead.” He produced a cigar from his breast pocket, letting the other man light it, and began smoking. “Collect the other ships and dispose of their crew. It’s time we left this system.”

“Yes, my lord. Are we returning to the Cavern?”

“Wait.” Holk removed the cigar from between his lips, tapping on the keyboard of his console with his free hand. “What is the news from our friend Orlov?”

“The last set of weapons was sent out three weeks ago and should arrive by the time we return. The ships… the smaller ones should turn up a few days after, but the cruisers will be delayed another fortnight.”

“Good enough. It’s his account incurring the late fees anyway.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling thinly. “In the meantime, we may as well drop by Algre to discuss the recent delays in their security payments.”

The Doomfist soon turned and left with its escorts and the seized merchantmen, leaving the still-hot wreckage and the bodies of spaced human beings behind in the lonely grave.
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.4 2014-10-06)
Post by: Histidine on October 05, 2014, 09:48:35 PM
(Too heavy-handed with the depictions of violence, or the villainy? Let me know!)

Chapter 4
Spoiler
Seventeen-year-old Enrique Arrastía edged towards the front of the crowd, careful not to drop his placard as he was jostled from side to side. Not because he had any particular wish to draw attention to his own sign, which was rather crude compared to some of the others - just “Robber Barons Go Home” squiggled in red paint on white cardboard  - but because he had a youth’s natural curiosity to see what was going on in front of them.

The striking workers had been demonstrating outside the Presidential Palace in Pynchet, the capital city of the planet Duval, by themselves for two days. They were joined by various other groups on the third day, and even the students at the local polytechnic came in within the week. Their grievances were wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory, but most had something to do with Quasar Industries.

Quasar, whose tentacles enveloped the system’s economy. Quasar, whose space station hung in Duval orbit like an all-seeing eye of doom. Quasar, who colluded with the ruling junta of the Sekos system to commit environmental and human rights abuses that would not be tolerated for a second on a Hegemony or League planet. The large, reputable corporations of the core worlds - Tri-Tachyon, Fabrique Orbitale, Neutrino, SHI, and the like - at the very least tried to maintain a veneer of respectability. Here in Marenos, Quasar didn’t even bother with the pretense.

Enrique knew his father would be furious if he knew his son was out here at the front of the protest. Not because he had any love for the planet’s despots - Felipe Arrastía utterly detested them - but because he feared for his family’s well-being. Even with all the simmering resentment boiling under Sekos’s orderly surface, a public demonstration on the streets was unheard of, underscoring just how much anger the junta and its corporate ally had managed to induce. This was the most outspoken the people could get short of a full-scale riot, and the military was unlikely to take the challenge lying down.

But Enrique didn’t care. He was filled with the brashness and righteousness of youth, and squirming his way to the leading edge of the crowd, he waved his placard and chanted the slogans with the people standing shoulder-to-shoulder alongside him.



Thirty meters away, Colonel Christos Zorbas frowned as he watched the protest from the 13th floor of the Cloudmist Hotel. Not because he disapproved of the protesters - although he felt nothing but unmitigated contempt for them - but because he felt his current task was completely, utterly pointless.

We should just shoot the uppity pigs and be done with it, he thought. This rigmarole for foreign consumption is a complete waste of time. It’s not like anyone pays attention to what happens out here in this middle-of-nowhere star system anyway!

But General Naseer had given him his orders, and so it was up to him to carry them out. He raised his old-fashioned optical binoculars to his eyes, and watched the crowd wash up against the curtain of riot police like a wave against the cliffs. Some of the cops were already swinging their batons, knocking back the people in front of them, and a few of the demonstrators were retaliating with fists, stones, makeshift clubs and other assorted implements. Good. That much was going to plan.

He swiveled to the south, safe in the knowledge that the sun was too high for him to accidentally glimpse it at this angle. His team should have been on the balcony of the Parliament Tower around now… there.

“Alpha in position,” the voice came in on his earpiece.

“Acknowledged,” he picked up his comm and spoke, keeping his eyes on the black-clad Special Intervention Unit personnel setting up. “Stand by for other teams.”

“Beta in position.”

“Gamma in position.”

“Affirmative.” A thin smile formed on Zorbas’s face for just a moment, then it was gone. “All teams, execute.”



The three snipers fired in a staggered pattern, with half a second between one shot and the next. Each custom-built rifle threw a four-millimeter uranium capsule downrange with a muzzle velocity of over five kilometers a second, and the projectiles’ density and speed ensured that wind and gravity would have minimal effects on their placement.

It wouldn’t really have mattered even if they’d missed their chosen targets. The people down there were packed tightly enough that someone was bound to get hit and go down in a very bloody fashion, and any kind of bloodshed would suffice for the purpose.

But in any case, they didn’t miss.

Three shots zipped along the Presidential Boulevard, leaving loud supersonic cracks in their wake, and punched through the helmets, skulls and brains of three Duval Planetary Police officers like so much tissue paper.



The “reaction” came instantly.

A score of high-powered mag-rifles opened up, spraying indiscriminately into the gathered crowd. Even with the standard ferrous alloy rounds they were using, these weapons could punch through a marine’s power armor at close range if they hit the right spots. What they did to the unarmored protesters gathered here today was unspeakable.

Bullets cleaved through bodies in twos and threes, most of those hit dying before they could even scream. But enough of them did, as did the ones splattered by the fountains of blood, and for a moment the crowd went silent, stunned as an ox struck between the eyes. Then the ones at the front turned, shrieking, trying to run, but blocked by those behind them. In those few seconds, more rows of demonstrators went down like wheat cut down by a giant, invisible sickle, the streets running red with the slaughter.

The crowd as a whole was starting to flee now, a collective wail of terror filling the air. Too many of them slipped and fell, trampled under by their fellows, crushed into a paste of bone and flesh. Few of the ones still upright gave a thought for them; they were too busy trying to save themselves, fleeing from the sudden horror that had swept over them.

It was then that the plasma lance fired, enveloping fifty people at once in a scorching burst of fusion-powered heat.

By the time the dust settled, Enrique Arrastía was just one of four hundred and seventy-two mangled, charred bodies on the asphalt of Pynchet’s largest thoroughfare.



“...I trust the matter has been resolved to your satisfaction.” the message read.

Kenneth Skilleton turned off the recording and leaned back in his expensive office chair, and only the various portraits and statues adorning his luxuriously furnished office saw his immensely satisfied expression. Indeed it has, Jenna, indeed it has.

General Manager Lain had followed her instructions to the letter (however distasteful she might or might not have found them personally), and the rulers of Sekos had in turn followed theirs in exchange for the small inducement of some new small arms and surveillance gear. The strike before the last had gone on for three months, and had ultimately been broken up with “only” three fatalities; this one lasted for only a week, and the decisive manner in which it had been crushed was certain to give the rabble pause before they even thought of second-guessing their masters again, much less rebelling in this manner.

The only drawback was that operations would be briefly disrupted while they found new workers to replace all the dead ones, but that wasn’t any kind of long-term problem. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty more where they came from, after all.

To be sure, if the Board (especially that sanctimonious prick Swanson) found out about this, they might get all upset about it, even demand an official investigation. But he saw no reason to bother them with the details, which weren’t part of the corporation’s official records anyway. As long as he kept the profits coming in, they didn’t much care about what went on in the day-to-day operations. That was what they had a CEO for, after all.

And even if they were to look into it, who could possibly contradict his version of events? It wasn’t as if Sekos had a free press or anything of the sort.

Of course, they might care more about that other project he had going on in Marenos, if only because it involved a more direct, large-scale use of company funds. But he’d cooked the books quite carefully, so the chance of detection was remote, and the same risk-mitigating factors applied to this one. As long as he could keep everything nice and clean for the board, he could keep on doing this forever and continue persuading them to increment his own salary in the process.

Speaking of that project, he had a few messages to write. But first, his last success probably merited a little time off. He extended an arm towards the comm on his fine hardwood desk and pressed the talk button.

“Carla, could you come in here for a moment?”
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.4 2014-10-06)
Post by: Chaos Farseer on October 05, 2014, 10:10:18 PM
I like the incorporation (pun!) of certain mod factions. Keep going! This is a great and, most significantly, a human perspective in the sector we all play in.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.4 2014-10-06)
Post by: neptix on October 06, 2014, 10:58:56 PM
 Some of the characterization reminds me of Elizabeth Moon's work.  Keep it coming :)

neptix
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: Histidine on October 15, 2014, 09:18:52 AM
I like the incorporation (pun!) of certain mod factions. Keep going! This is a great and, most significantly, a human perspective in the sector we all play in.
Some of the characterization reminds me of Elizabeth Moon's work.  Keep it coming :)
Heh, thanks!

Never actually read any Moon myself, in fact I can't name a single one of her titles >_< Only "modern" SFF authors I have any particular familiarity with are Weber (my primary inspiration for this story) and Flint.
(I really ought to stop being lazy and go look for more stuff)

Anyway:

Chapter 5
Spoiler
“This is a ridiculous exercise,” Archer muttered.

The PLS Valiant was in the Ibers system, doing her best to imitate one of the captured asteroids that made up part of the ring around the gas giant Calpe. Which was no mean feat, seeing as how a large warship with a running reactor and maintained at room temperature for the benefit of her crew emitted much, much more heat than an asteroid sitting in space 1.5 AUs from its K3 primary.

To circumvent the problem, the cruiser had found a suitably large real asteroid to hide behind while she deployed remote sensors to keep an eye on what was happening on the other side of it (not much, at the moment). The asteroid also doubled as a convenient heat sink. Of course, it’d only work for so long before someone noticed why this particular space rock was noticeably warmer than the others around it, so the Valiant would have to shift to another one every several hours. And if someone happened to be looking in that direction while she did this…

Grumble grumble awful idea grumble grumble how did I let myself get talked into this grumble grumble.

“Oh, quit fidgeting, will you, Captain?” Rollyn Bracket said. Which was rather more undiplomatic - insubordinate, even - than what Archer had expected from the usually meek junior officer, but Bracket was clearly one of those engineers who got their hackles up when some mere “shooter” (or anyone else, really) dared criticize their elaborate designs. “Nothing’s gonna happen! Relax.”

“Exactly!” Artemis jabbed a finger at the main display. “Nothing’s happening. We’re sitting here in the middle of nowhere, twiddling our thumbs while waiting for the pirates to come to us. And even if something did happen, we wouldn’t see it anyway. Our dinky little sensors would be lucky to spot a nuke going off a hundred meters in front of them.”

“Don’t call them ‘dinky little sensors,’” Bracket said peevishly. “You’ll hurt their feelings.”

Archer stared at the younger woman, but could detect no trace of irony in her expression. Then she exhaled, shaking her head. “Sorry, Rolls. I’m just tired. Tired and frustrated.” Easing her expression back to neutrality, she turned back to the plot. “Very well, Commander. You have the watch. Hopefully we’ll come across something interesting today.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” the engineer said formally. “I have the-”

“Drive signature!” Lieutenant Fong barked from the assistant tac officer’s workstation. “Range 130,000 klicks, bearing zero-zero-three by zero-five-one!”



As it turned out, another ship had also been hiding in the asteroid ring. This one had a much easier time of it, seeing how much smaller it was.

“A Mule,” Loz Sequeira said in a low voice. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Captain?”

“We don’t have much of a choice.” A grim-faced Adela Sybitz eyed the 3D display of the ISS Carronade. “We’ve only got a week left of supplies, and there’s no guarantee we’ll come across another ship in that time.” Smiling thinly: “Besides, we’ve got a good team here. I think we shouldn’t have a problem taking on one lone Mule.”

“Just let me at ‘er,” Valentina Dragunova growled. “I’ll send his cheap hull to the breakers in ten seconds flat.”

“Not yet. Merchant skippers are always jittery coming into a place like this, because they know someone is likely to ambush them. Lots of rocks to hide behind, and the gas giant’s radiation screwing up their sensors.” Sybitz drummed her fingers on the armrest. “On the flip side, once he knows it’s safe, he’ll let his guard down and we’ll rush him then.”

“And we want to make it as hard as possible for him to duck under the cover of the hydrogen station’s guns,” Sequeira added thoughtfully.

Dragunova scowled. “Fine, but he better not take too long. I hate waiting.”



It took only thirty minutes, in the event. The Carronade docked and got filled up, and its skipper took a moment to do some quick trading with the station’s proprietor. Soon enough, it was pulling away from the station, ambling at a leisurely 200,000 kilometers per hour.

“Coming up at ambush point in three...” Sequeira counted off, “two… one…”

The moment came, and the Lasher-class frigate shot out of Calpe’s ring like a bat out of hell. She bore down on the Mule at maximum speed, guns primed and hot, and targeting radar and lidar locked up the freighter with deadly precision.

“ISS Carronade, this is the Armed & Reckless,” Sybitz spoke into the audio pickup. “Halt your ship relative to Calpe and prepare to be boarded. Cooperate, and you will not be harmed.”

The freighter’s response to the challenge was simple, and largely expected: it bolted straight for the nearby hyper point, not even bothering to send a reply. “He’s not making it easy for us, is he?” Loz muttered to no-one in particular.

“No matter,” Adela said, leaning forward in her seat. “He can’t avoid action no matter what he does, and he knows it. We’ll just run him down and… persuade him to see things our way.”

“And if he thinks he can beat us in a fight,” Dragunova bared her teeth, “we show him the error of his ways.”

At such a close starting range and with the Reckless’s huge speed advantage, it took no more than three minutes to bring the armed freighter into weapons range. Two more orders to the Carronade to come to a halt and accept boarding had been met with stony silence, and Sybitz waited with a cold detachment for her prey to give up the futile attempt to run and start fighting back.

The Mule came banking hard to starboard, its maneuvering jets lighting up as it brought its main weapons to bear. But where the PLS Valiant had been taken by surprise with a similar maneuver, the ISS Armed & Reckless had long anticipated her target’s movements, and reacted accordingly.

The frigate’s shield came up, and Sequeira took the small vessel charging through the four Salamander missiles the larger ship had thrown at her. One went down to a short, sharp burst from the chin-mounted dual LMG, and two more were similarly swept out of space with remarkably accurate Vulcan fire. The fourth one swept around to the rear and came burning in for the disabling engine hit, but the Lasher sidestepped it with grace and punched it out with another quick volley.

She turned around again and closed in swiftly, the shield stopping the pulse laser bolts she could not evade, further missile throws handled with the same efficient combination of fleet-footed maneuvering and lethally accurate point defense. Her machine gun pelted the Mule’s own shield, straining its flux capacitors, and the moment the barrier went down the armor beneath it was pocked and cratered with a series of HE shells from the light assault guns.

“Surrender, damn you,” Sybitz muttered. “I don’t want to have to rip a huge gash out your side with a rocket volley.”

Now under five kilometers from her target, the frigate maneuvered straight for the freighter’s rear, away from the pulse lasers and towards the vulnerable engines, ready to incapacitate her prey…

“Hyper footprint!” Dragunova’s head snapped up from her console. “Range one point three hundred thousand kilometers!”

“Uh oh,” Sybitz said simply, bringing up the newcomers on her own plot. “Looks like two frigates and a destroyer. Still getting jump distortion.” The comm console started chirping, and she hit the receive button.

The image that appeared on the main display was concealed in shadow by artful use of CGI. It did look vaguely male, but that too could have been the work of the masking software. “Frigate skipper, this is Adze One of the Black Hatchet,” a deep, distorted baritone came through the speaker. “This freighter is ours. Leave or be destroyed.”

The Hatchet? Holk’s group?

Adela Sybitz leaned forward, keeping her suddenly clenched fists out of view, and looked straight into the visual pickup. “Your freighter, you say? Sorry, I don’t see your name on it anywhere.”

“We do not have time for your games,” the voice came again in liquid helium. “We will deal with the Carronade. Your continued interference will not be tolerated. There will be no further warnings.”

The screen went blank.

Sybitz gritted her teeth. Pirates, as a rule, weren’t a group known for their trustworthiness, but they did have their own codes of honor - and poaching someone else’s kill went against every single one of them. Did Holk think he could throw the rules out the airlock, just because his was the biggest pirate fleet in the subsector?

“Skipper,” Loz suddenly said sharply, looking back over his shoulder at her. “The comm profile - it matches the people who attacked the Marigold.

“Damn.” She looked over at Dragunova. “Tina, can we identify the new ships yet?”

“Analyzing now,” the gunner replied, fingers pounding the keyboard. “Looks like a Hammerhead, a Cerberus, and… a Tempest?! Are you freakin’ *** me?!”

“We’ve got to withdraw,” Sequeira hissed. “We can’t take on them.”

“And then what?” Dragunova said testily. “If we don’t get that cargo, we lose the ship. And probably our lives, too. I’d rather go out with a bang, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Wait.” Sybitz held up a hand, as two pairs of eyes swiveled to stare at her. “I… I might have an idea.”

She brought up the comm system, and after several seconds of pinging, another face appeared on the display. This one was of a thick-jowled, heavily bearded merchant captain, the sweat on his forehead belying his efforts to appear stoic and stalwart in the face of a mortal threat. “What do you want?!” he asked testily.

“Listen, buddy,” Sybitz said, looking him straight in the eye. “You see those other pirates up there, by the hyper point?”

“Yeah…?”

“Well, it turns out I know these people.” Her lips drew back in what only a shark would have considered a smile. “If they get their hands on you, they’ll *** you and all your crew - they aren’t picky about gender, by the way - then they’ll mutilate you for kicks, shoot you in the head, and dump your bodies into space when they’re done. Me, I’ll just take your ship and your cargo; I’ll even drop you off at the nearest station with enough credits to get home.”

“W-Why are you telling me all this?”

“Here’s the deal. Neither of us can fight them alone, but if we work together we might be able to force them to back off at least. I get your ship and everything it’s carrying, you get to live to see your families again.” She smiled again, somewhat less menacingly this time. Somewhat. “How about it?”

He stared at her, wiping a raised brow. “And why should I trust you?”

“You shouldn’t. But if you don’t, I’m out of here - and my ship runs lots faster than yours. Which is also what I’ll do if you try to double-cross me, just so you know.” She glanced briefly at the tactical display. “You’re in a pit here, captain. You’ve got nothing to lose - except, in two minutes, your life. I suggest you decide quickly.”

“Alright, alright,” he said unhappily. “But if this is some sort of trick-”

“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” Sybitz snapped. “Just hurry up and get back into the ring; we need the asteroids for cover.”

This, at least, was accomplished quickly, the Mule turning with remarkable alacrity back towards where it had come from. Its unexpected escort followed it into the dense rock cover, the Black Hatchet hot on their heels.

“You’re nuts, Skipper,” Sequeira muttered as he guided the Reckless in a weaving path around a particularly dense clump of asteroids.

“Sometimes you gotta be nuts to survive,” Sybitz answered. “Got a read on their weapons, Tina?”

“Looks like a graviton beam, heavy blaster and Harpoons on the Tempest,” Dragunova said, studying her display intently. “Mauler, railgun and LMGs on the Cerberus. Hammerhead’s carrying sabots, PD lasers and a pair of assault chainguns.” She paused. “Looks like they’re fanning out. Trying to hem us in with the frigates while their destroyer moves in for the kill.”

Adela nodded. “Clever. But it also opens them to a defeat in detail.” She studied her plot for a few seconds, finger tracing a path through the rocks to her chosen foe. “Loz, flank the Cerberus and get us into knife range. When that happens, Tina, I want it mission-killed on the spot. Understood?”

“Roger,” the two pirates answered as one, and Adela Sybitz smiled. In a moment like this, they were not the three heads of a motley, ragtag crew, often disagreeable, seemingly always bickering over something or other. They were one, a finely honed blade with a singular purpose, ready to slide deep between the enemy’s ribs.

Two vectors converged, and the Reckless lunged forward as the Cerberus turned to confront her, opening fire with its deadly bow guns. A mauler round shattered a meteoroid not twenty meters away from the Lasher, and the railgun’s iron-tungsten shells crackled as they struck her shield, but the agile frigate was now zipping in and out of the rocks, declining to present a clear target to her larger foe.

The Hatchet vessel tried to do the same, maneuvering amidst the clutter while continuing to track its target. But it was slower, less agile, and its helmsman was nowhere near as good as Loz Sequeira was. Few people in the Sector were… which was cold comfort when the Reckless made a final turn and came to within a hundred and thirteen meters, seven o’clock low from her target.

In open space, and with a sufficiently alert helm, the Cerberus could have simply run. A single burn drive, taking it swiftly far away from the foe flanking it, giving it room to turn around and engage from a position of parity once more. But this was no open space - it was the ring of a gas giant, and a particularly rocky one to boot. There was nowhere to run… and nowhere to hide.

Dragunova squeezed the trigger, and a volley of Annihilators surged forward in a blaze of fury as the light assault guns went to maximum rate of fire. With no shield to interdict them, the low-caliber shells battered and pummelled the heavy frigate’s armor, and then the rockets struck home.

The chain of explosions, and the rain of HE shells that followed it, gutted the Cerberus. Crewmen dead and alive alike spilled from ruptured compartments belching atmosphere into space, while power circuits flickered and died. The ship was still alive - technically - but it was no longer in any condition to fight, and Sybitz’s grey eyes gleamed as the broken hulk spun away from her.

“One down, two to go,” she said. “Now where’s our friend Mr. Tempest?”

“There-”

The shield came up just in time - barely - and the energetic bolt from the heavy blaster vanished in a brilliant sparkle of light. The Reckless dove for the cover of another asteroid, the blue stream of a graviton beam slashing at her… and found her port aft Vulcan cannon suddenly blown out by a few energy hits from the awaiting Terminator drone. Hissing, Dragunova brought the other point defense turret around, spitting fire at the diminutive attacker… and cursed as the 20mm shells sailed harmlessly through their target, the drone slipping smoothly into p-space where no weapon could reach it.

More blaster bolts hammered at their makeshift ablative armor, fragments of rock pelting the Lasher’s hull, as her foe’s automated companion chipped her plating further. She dove deeper into the ring, zig-zagging wildly to avoid presenting her vulnerable aft to her foe, the hunter and his falcon continuing to nip at her heels.

“No good,” Sequeira said. “He’s too quick for us to sneak up on him like we did to the other guy, and if he lands just one or two good hits on us with that blaster we’re dead meat. And if we don’t close, he’ll just catch us between himself and his little friend and give us the fatal thousand cuts.”

“Regroup with the Carronade,” Sybitz ordered. “Let’s see how much he much he likes the other guy having a friend of her own.” And ours is bigger than his.

Pursuer and pursuee took off, both ships pushing their thrusters to the limit. As they turned an arc through a clearing in the rocks, the Mule appeared from behind the particularly large asteroid - practically a tiny moon - where it had taken cover. Its gunners were decent for a freighter’s crew, if not particularly adept, and the Tempest suddenly found itself forced to jink wildly as pulse bolts flashed on its shield.

The pirate crew were competent enough, but they were also in many ways analogous to bullies, unused to fighting with odds that favoured their opponent rather than them, and it showed. Distracted once by their new opponent, they were caught off guard a second time when the Reckless wheeled around and charged, guns blazing.

A hastily fired blaster bolt went clear of the Lasher, serving only to strain the high-tech ship’s flux capacitors, and even as it got off another shot (hitting the shield this time), a burst of machine gun fire pushed it into overload. Behind the bullets came the explosive shells, carving wounds into the thin armor, as the panicked pirate skipper turned his ship frantically away in an effort to evade. The Reckless gave chase, sprinting after the fleeing Tempest even as its drone moved to cover its escape, fresh lasers from behind knocking one of the  low-tech frigate’s verniers into emergency shutdown.

Of course, because Adela Sybitz had spent a decade plying her trade in the sector, she was only mildly surprised (in hindsight, at least) when the other shoe chose that moment to drop.

The Hammerhead abruptly made its own appearance, having finally closed into attack range, heralding its entry with a volley of Sabot SRMs. The Carronade’s defense officer, inexperienced in the ways of ship-to-ship combat, instinctively raised the shield before he realized what exactly was coming at them, and before he could lower it again the shotgun-like hail of uranium penetrators had sent a powerful surge through the Mule’s flux conduits, shorting out most of its systems… and leaving it defenseless against the 25mm explosive rounds shredding its armor.

“Get us behind that destroyer,” Sybitz said grimly. “We need to take some of the heat off the Carronade.”

“Negative,” Sequeira said. “If we do that, we open our six to that Tempest and his heavy blaster.” He grimaced. “It’s all we can do to keep track of his movements as it is.”

“Ugh.” She felt her fingers curling up into fists again, staring at the tactical display with hard eyes. And here he comes again...

The console beeped loudly, and she jerked upright in her chair, her back ramrod-straight as another contact suddenly appeared on her screen. My god! That’s a cruiser-

None of the combatants had spotted the newcomer approaching. They were too preoccupied with their own battle, and there was too much clutter to see very well anyway, especially with their sensors half-blinded by the charged particles swirling in Calpe’s magnetosphere. The cruiser, too, found its vision clouded, but its more powerful detectors could pick up the telltale indicators of ships at max thrust and firing high-energy weapons easily enough, and it only needed to follow these signs.

Now it was here, and it took decisive advantage of the element of surprise it enjoyed.

Four penetrator rods smashed into the Tempest’s belly from below and aft, cleaving everything in their path - fuel feeds, shield emitters, power conduits - and shorting out just about anything that wasn’t. Its flight controls disabled, the crippled frigate careened past the Armed & Reckless and crashed at full speed into an iron-nickel asteroid. The slender bow caved in as the ship buried itself halfway into the surface, crushing countless critical systems; the mangled wreck was now basically useless to anyone except a spare parts dealer.

At the same time the kinetic projectiles had left their barrels, six Harpoon missiles shot out from wingtip racks, headed straight for the Hammerhead’s exposed aft. The point defense lasers stopped two; the other four all struck a circle no more than a meter wide on the destroyer’s spine, blasting a deep cavity in hull and armor alike. Into this gap shone a phase beam, searing straight into the ship’s fusion chamber, and Adze One exploded with the fury of a miniature sun as its reactor went up.

On the compact bridge of the Armed & Reckless, three people stared at their displays in deathly silence. The cruiser - the computers had identified it positively as an Eagle, now - hadn’t killed them yet, but the lidar locking them up and the beam turrets trained on them made it clear that it could do so very quickly if it wanted to.

“It’s the PLS Valiant,” Dragunova said in an uncharacteristic near-whisper, “... and it’s hailing us.”

“There’s always a bigger fish,” Sybitz murmured.

“Why is this always happening to me?” Sequeira whined.
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on October 15, 2014, 07:20:52 PM
GODDESS DAMN I love your work! Felt like I was on the bridge of the ships or watching it from an invisible "observer" ship! *** Awesome!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: MShadowy on October 15, 2014, 08:21:38 PM
Ah, that made me smile.  Very nice work!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: ArkAngel on October 15, 2014, 09:14:37 PM
I'll admit, the moment I read “There’s always a bigger fish,” I cracked up. Great new chapter to the story! I can't wait for the next one. :D
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: CrazyDave on October 16, 2014, 01:11:01 AM
it's entertaining and the characters are believable and relatable. It's impressive work, and you've certainly got me wanting more!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: c plus one on October 16, 2014, 03:19:33 PM
Such immersive writing is commendable; esp. given the state of typical fanfic (regardless of whatever game it's based upon). I can hardly wait for chapter 6! You've got my attention.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: SafariJohn on October 17, 2014, 06:45:19 AM
Awesome battle! Keep it up!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: Tartiflette on October 17, 2014, 05:29:10 PM
The hulk of the Tarsus drifted in the darkness half a light minute from the F3 glow of Algre, lying cold, dead and alone.
I don't want to look nit-picky, but "half a light minute" is a very very short distance from a star! It's roughly 9 millions kilometers, when Mercury orbit in an infernal heat 60 millions kilometers from the sun, and the Earth is a whole 8 light minutes away. So close, the ship would quickly have become a ball of molten metal...

Your writing remind me of "Honor among enemies"  ;D
Keep up the good work!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.5 2014-10-15)
Post by: Histidine on October 17, 2014, 06:33:13 PM
The hulk of the Tarsus drifted in the darkness half a light minute from the F3 glow of Algre, lying cold, dead and alone.
I don't want to look nit-picky, but "half a light minute" is a very very short distance from a star! It's roughly 9 millions kilometers, when Mercury orbit in an infernal heat 60 millions kilometers from the sun, and the Earth is a whole 8 light minutes away. So close, the ship would quickly have become a ball of molten metal...

Your writing remind me of "Honor among enemies"  ;D
Keep up the good work!
1) Oops. It was originally half a light minute from a Saturn or Uranus analogue gas giant, but then I moved it to open space relative to the stellar primary and forgot to change the distance. Fixed; it's two light-hours now. Thanks for pointing this out!

2) aaaaaah my plagiarism inspiration has been found out
(Don't panic, citizens! While there are/will be a number of similarities, the characters and overall plot will be notably different. We'll see this very clearly soon-ish.)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.6 2014-10-18)
Post by: Histidine on October 18, 2014, 02:58:26 AM
Okay, I bet all the positive feedback I've been getting lately dries up like a prune with this chapter given how contrived this scenario is. But I don't care, I find it funny.

(but if people really do find it ridiculous enough, I'll write it out and figure out something else)

Chapter 6
Spoiler
Adela Sybitz had always been good at improvising. Most of her associates didn’t see in that way, but few actually argued with the results. She’d already pulled it off once today, and while that had led directly to her current situation, there was nothing that said she couldn’t improvise her way out of it again, as she often did. So, as the Eagle came to dock with her little frigate, she quickly devised her plan.

“Everyone, this is the captain,” her crisp, confident voice came through the ship’s PA system. “We’re about to be boarded by the League Navy. Play nice and don’t start any violence. Don’t worry, I’ll get us out of here soon.”

That done, she opened a compartment under her chair and took a small pendant out. It looked rather silly when she wore it over her skinsuit, and Sequeira and Dragunova both eyed her suspiciously, but they were too busy taking care of their own matters to comment on it.

The Marines coming onto the ship’s cramped bridge didn’t mention it either. Many of them had seen pirates, smugglers, traders and even the occasional naval regular wearing assorted charms and trinkets, and they figured this was just more of the same. Besides, with their prisoners being so cooperative for a change, there was no reason to make a big fuss.

Sybitz and her two officers were quickly cuffed, and escorted quietly across the docking tube into the PLS Valiant.



Captain Artemis Archer was waiting for them in the bay on the other side, flanked by two more marines in power armor. She’d taken off her helmet, revealing her sharp face clearly, and Adela carefully if unobtrusively studied her appearance as the party came to a halt. The League captain had the same basic body profile as her own - medium build, fairly curved - but was several centimeters taller, and her skin was several shades lighter. From her apparent age, Sybitz speculated she was a new-mint promotion, although it didn’t really matter for her purposes.

“Pleased to meet you, Captain,” she said, her voice pleasant as she nodded politely. “I’m Adela Sybitz, skipper of the Armed & Reckless.

Archer didn’t seem particularly impressed by the niceties. “Captain Pham told me everything,” she said firmly. “If you’d done it out of the goodness of your heart, I’d actually have been inclined to offer you amnesty. As it is, I’m afraid I’ll have to try you and your crew as pirates.”

“Actually, I’m a madwoman who kidnaps people for my personal entertainment,” Sybitz said. “The fact that I let my victims go after taking their ships and cargo is entirely incidental.”

“Very funny.” Her glittering eyes were hard now. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t space you right this instant.”

“Because,” Adela reached up to clasp her pendant, “I’m holding a thermal detonator.”

Five rifles snapped up in an instant, as both Loz and Valentina took a step back from their suddenly nutty captain. Artemis didn’t - quite - do the same, but for a moment there was no hiding the stunned surprise in her expression. “What’s the meaning of this?” she said harshly, anger tinged with a hint of surprise and fear.

“Oh, nothing.” Sybitz shrugged. “Just a twenty-kilogram infernium shaped charge in the spine of my ship, with a remote detonator. If it goes off, it’ll tear a huge hole in your hull that’ll take weeks to repair - and kill all of us here in this docking bay. Oh, and it’s got tamper protection and a dead man’s switch, so there’s no point trying to find and defuse it,” she glanced at the marines aiming at her head and torso, “or shooting me.”

She looked at her companions, then at Archer, and sighed dramatically. “Oh, quit looking at me like that, will you? I don’t actually want to blow myself or anyone else up. I just wanted to get you to listen to me.”

“Explain yourself, then,” Archer snapped, glaring.

“I know what you’re doing here in the Marenos subsector,” Sybitz said calmly. “Lots of pirates terrorizing this part of the sticks lately, so you came here to whack some of them and keep the spacelanes safe in the name of truth, justice and the League way. But you’re having some trouble with it.”

Glare.

“You’re just one ship, and not a very fast or exceptionally powerful one at that. You can only be in one place at a time, leaving the rats free to play in the rest of the subsector. And you’re not strong enough to follow them back to their nests and whack those.

Glare.

“And even when you do catch the bad guys, you’ve still got problems. With one ship, you can only chase one fleeing pirate at a time, and if it’s fast enough you can’t catch it at all. And that’s if they decide to run; some of the bandits around here could give even an Eagle-class trouble.”

“Make your point already,” Archer grated.

“It’s simple,” Adela smiled. “You ought to hire us - me and the Reckless.” A suddenly wide-eyed Archer started to speak, but the pirate drove right over her. “Think about it. You get a local guide who knows the place, and a fast mover that can run down the speedier raiders around here and help you with lots of fancy tactics that require two ships. If nothing else, you have one less pirate in the local circulation. Your Navy writes me a nice big cheque, and I get to feed my people instead of seeing them shoved unceremoniously out the cargo lock.” She cocked her head. “It’s win-win, Captain. What do you say?”

The League officer just stared incredulously at her for a while. “...How much?”

“Three thousand credits up front, two thousand a month plus expenses. Fees for specific tasks to be negotiated separately.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Oh, and of course: immunity to prosecution for all actions up to the end of the contract, retroactive.”

“That’s piracy!”

Sybitz just grinned.

Artemis Archer clenched her jaw as her mind raced, trying to come up with a way out of having to make a deal with this… this smug, smooth-talking criminal who was making a fool out of her. But loath as she was to admit it, absolutely nothing came to mind. It was only after counting to twenty that she sighed inwardly and shook herself, resigned to salvaging the best she could out of the situation.

“One thousand, and seven-fifty. And only combat expenses count.”

“Two thousand, and fifteen hundred. My crew have families too, you know.”

“Fifteen hundred, and a thousand, and no drinking on the job.”

“Deal!”

In reality, it took another hour before they came up with a written contract that was agreeable to both parties. But that went smoothly enough as well, and Sybitz enjoyed the way the captain had to pretend not to notice when she started idly fingering her pendant during particularly tense parts of the negotiation. When it was all done, she even offered her hand, and Archer - very reluctantly - took it.



A few weeks from now, everyone would agree that the deal had been good and fair to all parties involved. But in the minutes immediately after it was signed, the only one pleased with it was Adela Sybitz.

“Next time, warn us if you’re going to do something like that,” Loz Sequeira hissed as soon as they were back on the Reckless.

“Oh, relax, will you?” Sybitz waved a hand at a random bulkhead. “You know I didn’t actually load an infernium bomb on the ship.”

“That’s even worse!” Valentina Dragunova screeched. “You know you’re not supposed to make a threat you can’t actually execute!”

“And what’s this about working for the League?” Sequeira scowled. “Forgive me, Skipper, but I didn’t sign up with you to become a tool of the establishment.”

“Whine, whine, whine,” Sybitz said exasperatedly, throwing her arms up in the air. “Look, we went from teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, to nearly being executed for piracy, to having a steady job with good pay. I’d say we came out way ahead in the end. We just have to go along with Captain Archer’s game for a while, help her play whack-a-mole with the competition around here, then everyone parts ways and goes home happy. I’m sure you can put up with that for a few weeks or months.”

The two pirate officers stared resentfully at their captain and senior partner for several fulminating seconds. Finally, Tina said “Fine, you’re the captain,” and left it that - but also refused to speak with her at all beyond the tersest shop talk for two days. Loz was a more naturally easygoing sort, so his sulking only lasted eighteen hours.



The other party wasn’t too happy about it either.

“I can’t believe I fell for that,” Archer moaned, slumped over a table in the officer’s mess.

“It’s not so bad,” Jaitley said in his most reassuring voice. “None of us anticipated Sybitz would pull such a trick, and you handled yourself remarkably well under the circumstances. Besides, she’s right about what we stand to gain from this.”

“Fleet Command is going to bust me down to ensign for this,” she went on, seemingly not hearing a word he said. “They’ll dock my pay for a decade, too. I’ll never command anything bigger than a tug again.”

“I won’t put it in my report if you don’t,” was all Koniecpolski said.

“Mom’s gonna disown me,” Archer whimpered. “Little kids will laugh at me when they pass by on the street. I won’t be able to show my face anywhere with a population over five ever again. I’ll...”
[close]

edit 2014-10-14: minor word substitution
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.6 2014-10-18)
Post by: ArkAngel on October 18, 2014, 09:31:06 AM
 I'm not sure what you were worried about. It didn't seem too contrived, just the Sybitz being sneaky. I do love Archers feelings afterwards though. Hilarious!  :D
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.6 2014-10-18)
Post by: MShadowy on October 19, 2014, 03:52:33 PM
Don't seel yourself short, that had me grinning madly, madly I say!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.6 2014-10-18)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on October 19, 2014, 07:51:11 PM
Don't sell yourself short, that had me grinning madly, madly I say!
Ditto! It was a smart move on her part
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.7 2014-10-26)
Post by: Histidine on October 25, 2014, 10:23:12 PM
Cameo appearance!

Chapter 7
Spoiler
The rather run-down docking bay was quiet, plastic pallets scattered about, a Harpoon missile still left on a holding rack with the warhead cover open. The dockworkers were gone, having being bribed or threatened into vacating the premises for a few hours. Such things were quite routine on this particular station given the nature of its clientele, and the staff as a rule weren’t particularly inclined to object to taking a break from the daily grind, so none of them had really complained about the eviction. Now there were just three people here with the frigate - no, six now; the guests had just arrived.

Tomás Ibarra shifted on his feet, trying his best not to look jittery as his new customers walked through the loading door. He brushed some imaginary lint off the front of his shirt and dusted off his slacks, more to calm his nerves than anything else. It wouldn’t do to be seen rubbing his palms together in front of the clients.

Adela Sybitz was looking good as always, he thought wistfully, even in that dull red jumpsuit she was wearing. They’d done business several times before, and he rather regretted the fact that business was all she seemed to be interested in. Or maybe it was because he kept flubbing his pickup lines. Still, she was always a pleasure to have around, and he looked forward to interacting with her again.

Valentina Dragunova, on the other hand… Ibarra suppressed a shudder, and carefully avoided eye contact as she approached. He was convinced that she was just waiting for an opportunity to kill him in as brutal a fashion as possible, especially after the time he lost three hundred credits to her in a pub blackjack game and snuck off without paying. Though he couldn’t tell for sure, he was certain she was currently carrying at least two guns under that pseudoleather jacket of hers, and he was suddenly acutely grateful for the two bodyguards beside him that the Hatchet had provided.

White-coated Loz Sequeira he paid no attention to at all. They had little reason to interact beyond the occasional discussion of some technical aspect of a ship being traded.

“It’s good to see you, Adela,” Ibarra said as she approached, putting on his most winsome smile.

“Good to see you too, Tommy,” she said, shaking his hand. “I suppose this is the Vigilance you wanted to sell?”

“Yep. I took the liberty of adding shielded cargo pods, a capacitor bank attachment, and an expanded missile chamber. With a good crew, this bad boy will outfight any government frigate in half the subsector, and carry all your loot around afterwards.” He beamed. “If you’d like to take a look at the internals?”

She nodded, flashing a quick grin. “Be glad to.”



“...so, as you can see, the reaction wheels more than make up for the sticky maneuvering thrusters,” Ibarra said on the bridge thirty minutes later. “Of course, a fine skipper like yourself would have no trouble even without it, yes?”

“Perhaps.” Sybitz gave him a carefully metered smile, which almost became too big when she saw it have the desired effect on him. “Still, I’d feel better if you showed us some trials against a fighter wing or two.”

“Of course. I just…” he started, when his communicator started buzzing. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, then lifted the device to his head. “What is it, Doug… boarders? Power armor?! You can’t be-”

Even through the comm with its noise dampening system, the flashbang on the other end of the line came as a sharp jab to his ears. He jerked his hand away, flinching, and in his distraction failed to realize his prospective clients were already drawing weapons. His bodyguards were doing the same, but unlike Sybitz and her team, they’d been caught by surprise, and it cost them a valuable split second.

In that split second, Sequeira and Dragunova leveled and fired their electrolasers, sending a few hundred volts arcing through the air into Ibarra’s goons. One went down with ventricular fibrillation, although he would end up staying alive thanks to prompt medical attention. The other was simply paralysed temporarily, but more than long enough for the red-haired pirate gunner to drive the butt of her weapon into his solar plexus and send him slumping to the deck.

By the time he realised anything was even amiss, Tomás’s bodyguards were already down and out, falling without so much as a groan. He started to say something, only to be presented with the muzzle of Sybitz’s mag-pistol, and found himself completely, utterly speechless for the first time in his life.

“Sorry, Tommy,” she said genially, “but you’ve been hanging out with some really bad people. They’ve made my new friends very, very angry, and if you don’t tell them everything you know, they’re not going to protect you from Tina here.”

His eyes darted to Dragunova, who had just finished cuffing her guard, and swallowed at her piercing green gaze. “Good day, Mr. Ibarra,” she said coldly. “Remember that blackjack game?”



Dios, please, I don’t know who’s funding them,” Ibarra whimpered. “I’m just a middleman. I get guns and ships for Holk and the others, they give me credits. I don’t ask where the money comes from.”

They’d moved him to the Vigilance’s cargo hold and put him in a hard plastic chair with his hands cuffed behind the backrest. All the lights had been turned off except for the one directly above him, leaving his interrogators shrouded in shadow - except for Dragunova, whose intimidating visage loomed visibly over him like a mask of death.

“What kind of ships and guns?” Loz Sequeira’s voice was cold behind him.

“Frigates of various kinds,” Ibarra said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. “Some destroyers too… stolen or military surplus. A couple of Buffalo Twos, a Sunder, and one of the Condors I had in inventory. Their weapons too, of course. Plus small arms for boarding teams.” He hung his head. “I don’t deal with any of the really large stuff. They have other people for that.”

“Right. How many vessels are we talking about here?”

“Seven frigates, in the past three months. Three destroyers.”

“And you’re one of the small-time dealers,” Artemis Archer put in, leaning on a crate of spare flux capacitors.

“Y-Yes,” he said, nodding frantically. “They’ve been buying up ships like potatoes. The orders came in faster than I could stock them.”

There was silence for a while, and Tomás Ibarra became acutely aware of the cold sweat trickling down his neck and the pounding of his heart in his ears. Then Dragunova seized his jowls, lifting his face to meet hers.

“Listen carefully, Mr. Ibarra,” she whispered. “Those guys back there are the only thing standing between me and a very extensive rearrangement of your internal organs. If you like your body as it is, you better tell them something - anything - you know about your clients’ mysterious sponsors. Do you understand?”

“I swear, I have no idea,” he choked. “I mean, I overheard this guy talking once about some big interstellar corporation paying them off and even sending them some ships, but he was drunk at the time, so-”

“Hold up,” Major Janusz Koniecpolski cut in. “This guy you ‘overheard,’ he wouldn’t happen to have a name, would he?”

The arms dealer exhaled sharply after a few seconds. “Krešimirovic. Dmitar Krešimirovic. He runs the Claws of Adria from out of Thrace, I think. I sold him a Lasher and a couple of autocannons once.” His eyes drifted pleadingly to the source of the voice. “That’s all I know about him, really. Can I go now?”

“Depends,” the Marine answered. “Maybe if you tell us a good way to find him, we’ll ask your girlfriend nicely to leave you alone.”

Ibarra found himself caught in her green eyes again, like a deer in headlights, and tried his best not to wet himself.



“Does Ms. Dragunova always act like that?” Archer asked later in the hallway outside.

“Nah, Tina’s really mellow once you get to know her,” Sybitz said, leaning back against a bulkhead. “She never even really cared about that blackjack game all that much, honestly. That act was just because the job called for screwing with Tommy’s head.”

“I’m surprised. I didn’t expect her to help us so well.”

Adela shrugged. “She wouldn’t, normally as a rule, she doesn’t have the time of day for governments. But she also believes in doing a job well even if she doesn’t like it. That’s one of the reasons I keep her around.” She glanced at the cargo bay they’d just left. “What are we going to do with the prisoners?”

“Well, they aren’t actually guilty of piracy themselves, so we can’t just toss them out the airlock.” Artemis folded her arms. “That said, we’ve talked to the local authorities, and it seems some of them have been really naughty boys. They’re all going to spend some quality penitentiary time, at any rate.”

“What about Tommy? He’s been very helpful to us, and it would be a shame to just toss a nice kid like that in prison.”

Archer tilted her head. “You think we should just let him go?” It was a question, not a barb, but it could have easily been interpreted otherwise.

“Not quite.” Sybitz handed her a piece of paper  - old-fashioned cellulose, not the synthetic substitutes that just about everyone had used pre-Collapse.

“What’s this?”

“Drop him off at this address.” The pirate skipper smiled thinly. “I guarantee you that what his mother will do to him will be worse than any punishment we can think of.”



“It is still not fully resolved, then?”

“I… I am sorry, Your Excellency,” the engineer in the observation room stammered. “We have repaired the fire control as best as we can, but I cannot promise it will not fail again under the stresses of battle.” He bowed. “I will accept whatever punishment you deem fit, on behalf of my men.”

“Hmph,” Manza Holk snorted. “Just take a day or two more to try again, but I have other ships that require attending to as well. I expect that they will be done on schedule.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” the other man said with audible relief. He walked away, his eyes still on the deck.

Beside Holk, Blanco y Marcos looked down through the thick viewport at the mammoth form of the Doomfist in its docking cradle, skinsuited technicians and their bots scattered around it like so many ants. Repair drones scurried about on the brown hull, as a heavy lifter carefully attached a new missile pod to the upper middle bow. From up this close, few things were as impressive or terrifying as a fully armed Dominator-class cruiser like it, and he could only imagine what mind-numbing terror its victims must have felt staring down the barrels of its guns.

Holk was turning away now, and Blanco followed him. The pirate chieftain took just a moment to dust off his immaculately tailored suit jacket before exiting into the corridor outside, and they walked some distance before stopping at another viewport.

This one offered the sight, close up, of a Gemini freighter/carrier that had just received a repainting. Emblazoned on the side was a black-on-red flag, based on a familiar logo with a twist. The central element was one he had seen many times before: a hatchet, a snake curled around its long, solid handle; but the fourteen five-pointed stars arranged in a ring around it were new. And if he thought  it was pretentious to have all of them there so soon, before their plan had even really kicked off, he made no mention of it.

Further in the distance was a small group of ships, barely more than silhouettes against the blackness of space - several frigates and a destroyer, conducting a training exercise - and all of them had received the same symbol. This was just one of many squadrons they had… and when the time came, all of them would bear a common banner as they executed the will of their master and commander.

“You see, Rigo?” Holk said, an unlit cigar in his hand as he motioned at the scene. “I have often said that opportunities are principally a matter of the strength and will to seize them.” He smiled thinly. “Out there is our strength, and in here we have the will, the likes of which the Sector will learn to respect and fear.”

“It is as you say, my lord,” Blanco answered simply, and their eyes returned to the view of the stars beyond. As he contemplated all their plans, the glorious future that awaited them, he recalled something else he had once heard his master say.

Terrorize the galaxy with one ship, and they will call you a pirate. Terrorize it with a hundred, and they will call you an emperor.



“Please. You’ve got to help me.”

The heavyset mercenary petty officer in the bar examined the back of his hand, paying no obvious attention to the nervous youth at the same table. His corner of the place was quiet, an island of isolation from the bustling conversation, loud music and strobing lights in the middle of the floor… or at least it was until two minutes ago, when this scrawny boy who barely even looked like he was of drinking age had approached him, unsolicited. “And just why would I do that, kid?”

“The government killed hundreds of civilian protesters here on Duval two weeks ago,” the lad whispered, eyes darting about in search for eavesdroppers. The generally omnipresent secret police tended to patrol the areas frequented by foreigners - such as this entertainment venue - more lightly, but it would take only one informant for him to be disappeared permanently. “They say the demonstrators fired first, but it was a put-up job. None of us were even armed with modern weapons - not in Sekos - and they’re inflating the cop deaths while playing down the civilian ones. I’ve got evidence - video footage, photos, eyewitness accounts, a doctor’s report - and I have a journalist friend in Carda. If you can get it to her-”

“I got that part, kid,” the grizzled sailor interrupted, dropping his beer down with a thump. “What I wanted to know is, why should we care?”

The young man flushed with moral outrage for a moment, but bit his tongue and shook himself. The mercenary was his only hope of accomplishing his task, and calling him callous or a sociopath would do nothing to persuade him to lend his assistance. Reluctantly he dipped into the pouch hanging from his belt, pulling out a fistful of credit chits, and dumped them on the plastic surface along with a small data card. “Eight hundred. That’s all I have.”

“Mm.” Eight hundred wasn’t a lot - it’d barely cover the cost of the detour from their planned route - and wouldn’t be worth squat if he got accosted by the Security Directorate on the way out. On the other hand, the Skipper had a bit of a humanitarian streak, and could probably be persuaded to take on this job. Besides, the crew had little more love for the despots of Sekos than the locals did.

He took a gulp while he considered his options, then set the half-empty stein down on the table. “Alright, I’ll talk to the captain. If the answer is no, I’ll come back tomorrow and return your money and the chip. Else, you’ll probably hear about it on the news in two weeks’ time. Good enough enough?”

“Yes.” He nodded jerkily. “Thank you. That’s all I ask.”

“Alright.” The larger man surreptitiously scooped up the hard polymer wafers on the table, putting them in his pocket. “I’m leaving now. Wait at least five minutes before you make your own exit. And...” he gave the closest thing to a smile he could, “watch yourself, kid.”

As he watched the mercenary stand up and walk casually towards the door, the youth made another silent prayer for his lost friend Enrique.



Two days later, the ISS Black Star left Duval orbit and headed outsystem, taking half a gigabyte of various files with it.
[close]



Bonus content: Character renders (test)
Spoiler
Adela Sybitz
(http://i.imgur.com/9DozT0G.png)

Artemis Archer
(http://i.imgur.com/JZ2gDpA.png)

(Their hairstyles aren't what exactly I had in mind, but they're close enough)

Assembled and rendered with DAZ 3D (http://www.daz3d.com/), modified images with GIMP
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.7 2014-10-26)
Post by: ArkAngel on October 28, 2014, 12:58:18 PM
Mothers are truly scary. Also nice cameo, I enjoyed it. I sort of had a similar image in mind of archer compared to the character rendering. Regardless I liked the chapter!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: Histidine on November 01, 2014, 08:20:02 PM
Chapter 8
Spoiler
In the days of the Domain, Mazic Station in the Algre system had been established as a starport with supporting facilities for the planet of the same name below. The original was a standard prefab, modular design routinely deployed on young colony worlds: a broad, stout hexagonal tube, with docking facilities on either end, linked by a space elevator to the surface below. The sides could be fitted with various attachments, or linked to another tube of its kind for a straightforward expansion of the station. Where a less technologically sophisticated civilization might have used a rotating ring or spinning tube to simulate gravity via centripetal force, the Domain’s engineers had incorporated directional gravity projectors in the “lowest” decks along the station’s length.

The station was still there, but it bore increasingly little resemblance to what its designers had in mind, or indeed to any pre-Collapse installation. Numbering in the tens of thousands by the best estimates, the station population was well over the habitat’s listed capacity - for that matter, it was significantly exceeding the ability of the planetary administration to adequately manage - and people were spilling out of the designated residential areas into crude shanties without proper power or sanitation. The gravity generators were increasingly failing, and with little ability to repair or replace them save jury-rigged systems cannibalized from starships or other parts of the station, ever-larger “columns” of the station were deemed unsuitable for the terrestrial-style human residences. These were relegated to serving as storage areas, impromptu youth recreation parks or the occasional gang hideout.

New modules sprung from the station’s surface like blisters, fashioned from local resources to store people and cargo. They were not the tight-fitting autofactory prefabs envisioned by the Domain architects, but crude, ungainly, underfurnished, unsafe blocks manually assembled from smaller pieces. Workers in old-fashioned vac suits swarmed over the new construction projects, moving loads around largely by hand. They were a testament to the resourcefulness of the local citizens, even if any core world building inspector would have condemned them in a heartbeat, and they helped relieved some of the pressure building up in Mazic… but they weren’t quite enough. Nothing was ever quite enough in a place like this.

Still, it wasn’t all doom and gloom, ruin and decay. Some critical parts of the infrastructure were kept well-maintained, like the rail service that ran along the axis of the station. The train which Artemis Archer had just stepped off was packed like a prespace sardine can, but it was also reasonably clean, well-lit, and had only creaked slightly on its high-speed run from the docks. It’d arrived on time, too, which was more than could be said for the metro back home on several occasions.

She sidestepped the people still streaming in and out of the cars, straightened out her skirt, then glanced over her shoulder at the tall, solidly built man following her. He kept a neutral expression, brown eyes carefully avoiding hers, and she felt the corners of her mouth twitch in amusement.

Koniecpolski had pitched three different kinds of fit when he’d found out she wanted to spend some of their shore leave catching some “alone time” on the station. Cabin fever or no cabin fever, there was a price on her head, damn it, and that meant she wasn’t going anywhere off the ship without a fireteam of his Marines watching her back. Which would have defeated the entire purpose, of course. It wasn’t until the major - whose permanent rank was junior to hers by three whole grades - threatened to brig her on her own ship for the duration of their port call that she gave in and let him assign her one bodyguard.

So now Sergeant David Kauffman of Second Squad was following her around all over the place in clothes that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a prespace biker, carefully yet unobtrusively playing the role of watchdog. He hadn’t complained or even said a word when he got assigned to this duty, but it was clear to her that he shared the opinion of his CO, who thought (entirely respectfully, of course) that she was a typical Navy puke who would wander into traffic if he let her.

Stifling a chuckle at the thought, she turned forward again, ready to walk out of the train station… and startled as she came face-to-face with Adela Sybitz. Who, for her part, was just as surprised to see her.

“Fancy meeting you here,” was all Archer could think of to say.

Sybitz didn’t reply immediately, instead looking the older woman up and down. They were both dressed in their civvies, but where her own jumpsuit was strictly utilitarian, Archer wore an elegant yellow cardigan over a white shirt that contrasted nicely with the blue skirt ending just above the knee, slit part way up the middle to allow a greater freedom of movement.

“What?” Artemis asked after a few uncomfortable seconds.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just… you look good. Really good.” Sybitz grinned. “I’m envious, honestly.”

“Let’s keep our conversations to business, please,” Archer said uneasily, holding up a hand.

“Sure, sure. Say, I don’t suppose you’ve eaten yet?” She motioned with her head towards the station entrance behind her. “I know a good place. My treat.”

Unexpected generosity, met with a suspicious glare. “And why would I agree to follow you? Without a bomb pressed against my ship, that is.”

“Harsh, sister, harsh. But to answer your question: because if I don’t help you, you’ll just wind up falling into one of the tourist traps the Mazics keep around here. Or worse,” she shuddered, “the Interstellar House of Gruel.” Arms spread wide now: “Come on, I’m trying to be a nice person. Throw me a bone here.”

“If this is another of your tricks…”

“If it was, and something happened to you, your Marines would tear my ship apart by the molecule. And your XO would take that big, shiny cruiser of yours and slag anyone who even looked like he was running from the station. Besides, you haven’t paid me yet.” Adela tilted her head. “Come on, it’ll be fun and perfectly safe. You can even bring that babysitter of yours; I can tell because he looks like he’s ready to shoot me.” She suppressed a smile at the momentary flash of anger on the man’s face, then met Archer’s eyes again. “What do you say?”

The captain glanced back at Kauffman. He didn’t look very happy about it, but he eventually nodded slowly, and she turned back to the other woman. “Fine. But we’re sticking to the main thoroughfares. I don’t care what you say, I’m not going into a deserted back alley where your goons can jump me.”

“You know,” Sybitz said serenely, turning to walk out of the crowded station, “you’d have more friends if you weren’t such a suspicious sort. Now, let’s go before it gets really crowded.”



The “street” outside (it was really a corridor, but it served the same purpose) was filled with the usual midday throng of people. The shouts of roadside vendors hawking food, drink, clothes and various trinkets, haggling with forever penny-pinching customers, rose distinctly above the din of the bustling crowd.

Sybitz guided Archer and her silent companion through the human thicket, tracing a path down the right-angled roads further into the station’s periphery. The orange-haired officer had seen parts of the station before, but only the more heavily-travelled areas, and as they went along she noted how the thinning crowds seemed more shabbily dressed, how the walkways got dirtier and less well-maintained, with paint actually flaking off in some areas, how the stalls became sparser and less well-stocked… and how there were ever more beggars.

Intellectually, Artemis knew that such poverty was the rule, not the exception, in most of the Sector. But that was a file she had stored in the back of her mind, not something she truly understood, and she was taken aback by the number of people living on what little charity they could obtain others. There’d been no vagrants at all outside the rail station; there was one or two every hundred meters a few blocks away… and this one street had no less than seven.

“Is this normal on Mazic?” she asked. “The beggars, I mean.”

“Of course it is,” Sybitz answered, turning to look at her companion. She hadn’t intended the tinge of bitterness in her voice, but now that it was there she hoped Archer heard it. “What, you think everyone lives like on one of your League’s Five Worlds? With your schools and career opportunities and social safety nets?”

“No,” Archer said in a low voice, shaking her head. “It’s just…”

“Miss, miss,” a young boy’s voice came from below, and the two women turned to look down at a scruffy youth, no older than eight, holding his hands out. “A few credits, please? I need something to eat.”

Sybitz saw his face - and froze, feeling a sharp stab of pain as a sudden series of old, half-forgotten memories flashed through her mind. The boy’s dirty brown face bore only a superficial overall resemblance to that of anyone in her family, but the chestnut-tinted eyes, the timidly hopeful expression, even the ragged T-shirt and worn jeans he wore... they all reminded her of a younger brother. One she’d lost so many cycles ago.

She blinked the mist from her eyes, then shook her head, embarrassingly glad that Archer hadn’t noticed her reaction. The League officer was still looking at him, having pulled her purse out and transferring a couple of credit chits to his cupped hands. “Here you go, kid,” she said, putting on a slight smile. “Don’t spend it all at once.”

“Thanks, miss!” he beamed, clutching the plastic wafers to his chest. Then Sergeant Kauffman tossed him a large silver coin, and he squealed as he caught it in midair with half-full hands.

Archer turned forward again to see the other beggars looking expectantly at her. Taking a deep breath, she produced more credits and and dropped them into their hands as she walked past. With each chit she passed out, she could see the joy on their faces at the tiny act of kindness, the inordinate gratitude in their eyes as they thanked her eagerly, and though she tried her best not to show any outward sign of it, the experience filled her with a deep sense of shame.

“You can’t solve Mazic’s problems by doling out credits on a street corner, you know,” Sybitz whispered in her ear as they continued walking.

“I know. What they need is the tools and the education to build something decent for themselves, and the assurance that someone won’t just come along and take the fruits of their labor away.” She shot her pirate companion a dirty look. “That includes you, by the way.”

A soft sigh, now. “But all the same, I can’t just leave them be, you know? I can’t just turn my back on them without doing something, however small, to ease their troubles a bit. Maybe someday, if I could come back here...”

They exchanged silent looks for a few fleeting moments before Sybitz looked ahead again, pursing her lips. “If you like, we can talk about this at a more comfortable time. Come on, the restaurant’s just around the corner.”
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: SafariJohn on November 01, 2014, 09:04:49 PM
They come back by that corner and there's twice as many beggars there. :P
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: MShadowy on November 01, 2014, 09:46:59 PM
My, but this is coming together really nicely.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on November 02, 2014, 01:31:24 AM
Hehe Someone has been playing Tyrian!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: ArkAngel on November 03, 2014, 06:26:16 AM
I agree with Mshadowy, it is coming together nicely. I suspect there going to be an assasination attempt in archers future soon.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: Histidine on November 04, 2014, 05:34:05 AM
I just realized my current plan has too many different scenes stuffed into the last leg of the story, so I went back and added a new scene to Chapter 7 (it's just before the one in the bar).

Hehe Someone has been playing Tyrian!
I'm vaguely tempted to reprint the gnome gruel commercial somewhere in the fic now...
(just kidding, I would never do such a thing to my readers)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on November 04, 2014, 07:12:51 AM
Hehe Someone has been playing Tyrian!
I'm vaguely tempted to reprint the gnome gruel commercial somewhere in the fic now...
(just kidding, I would never do such a thing to my readers)
DO IT!!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.8 2014-11-02)
Post by: c plus one on November 09, 2014, 05:02:35 PM
I just realized my current plan has too many different scenes stuffed into the last leg of the story, so I went back and added a new scene to Chapter 7 (it's just before the one in the bar).

The additional scene was enjoyable & interesting despite being quite sinister. Bad Stuff™ is coming, and there's gonna be a heavy price to be paid. I look forward to seeing how this transpires.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.9 2014-11-14)
Post by: Histidine on November 14, 2014, 07:20:52 AM
Chapter 9
Spoiler
The restaurant turned out to be a small family establishment named The Olive Tree, sitting unobtrusively between a florist and a grocery store. It was small and rather crowded, with several tables and chairs spilling out of the main dining area into the walkways outside, but it was also bright, inviting and not totally unhygienic, the light orange paint of the walls and the hardwood grain of the tables catching the eye.

Sybitz started to step inside, when Kauffman shoved past her and walked in, methodically surveying the customers and staff alike. He even took a moment to look inside the bathroom before motioning for his captain to come in, satisfied that no-one in the place was obviously a lurking assassin.

They were fortunate enough to find two vacant tables in the back, spaced some distance apart. Archer and Sybitz took one off to the side, the League officer settling on a cushioned seat against the wall with her companion opposite her, while Kauffman took a place where he could watch the pirate skipper and the entrance at the same time.

Lunch for the two women was the chef’s special - pasta with chunks of the algal vegetable substitute (this one was carrots and lettuce) and soy-and-yeast-based pseudomeat that had become ubiquitous in the less prosperous areas of Domain space even before the Collapse. Artemis’s bodyguard ordered something vaguely resembling what the denizens of Old Earth would have recognized as a kebab, eating with his right hand while leaving the left free to grab the gun under his jacket at a moment’s notice.

Conversation was the kind of semi-awkward small talk that two people make when they know just enough about each other to realize how little they have in common, but it was there nevertheless. Archer spoke of experiences as a child with a single mother in a modestly well-off neighbourhood; Sybitz made passing references to being bounced around foster homes, avoiding mention of any siblings. They briefly discussed Archer’s naval service, from her Academy courses to her most recent promotion to Captain; by tacit agreement, they stayed away from the topic of Sybitz’s own career, and Artemis saw no reason to bring up the events of Saghalien. The pirate skipper did talk about her travels across the Sector, visiting all manner of strange and interesting worlds; Archer, who had rarely been stationed outside the League’s core or its most forward bases, listened with rapt interest to rich depictions of the giant trees of Krig and the Hundred Valleys of Harappa.

They were halfway through the meal, Sybitz wondering if she should mention the time she fled the Corvus system one step ahead of the Hegemony system defense fleet, when she noticed the three men walking in, subtle bulges visible under their jackets. They were looking left and right, clearly scanning the crowd like Sergeant Kauffman had - and were doing it nowhere as subtly. Though she carefully avoided looking directly at any of them for more than a couple of seconds, there was no missing the way the one on the right elbowed his companion, the corners of his mouth curling at the moment he saw the orange-haired woman sharing a table with her.

She glanced over her shoulder at the League NCO. His eyes went to the men settling down at their own table, then to her, and they nodded briefly at each other. Good. He’d seen the threat too… and it was obvious from their mannerisms that they hadn’t realized just who he was. If they had, they would never have positioned themselves so that two of them had their backs facing his way.

Unfortunately, the fact that they weren’t acting immediately suggested they were waiting on backup. Indeed, one of them was already apparently texting on his phone, and she had no idea how many more people might be coming. And the rear exit was on the other side of the room.

Damn, damn, damn.

She turned back to her lunch companion, and her eyes were hard. “Artemis,” she said in a low voice, using her given name for the first time. “Don’t look now, but I think those three goons are here for you.”

“What?” Her eyes nearly darted over to where they were seated, and it was only at the last moment that she stopped. “I…”

“Listen.” Sybitz leaned forward, placing a hand on Archer’s. “I’m going to go over to the counter and pay. When I’m done, walk casually towards the service door and go out the rear exit. If they try to jump you then, me and your bodyguard should be able to take them out - else, apologize to the staff and leave for the station’s central areas as soon as possible. He’ll probably follow you; either way, I’m leaving out the front door. If I make it, we’ll meet up again at the dock. Got that?”

The captain nodded after only a brief hesitation, and Sybitz eased her chair back, glancing as idly as she could seem at the front of the restaurant. Alright, take it easy, she thought, trying to keep her diaphragm stable as she stood up slowly and started walking. It’s just nine and a half meters to the counter. We’ll stick to the script, get out of here without incident, and before we know it we’ll be back on the…

She suddenly found herself diving into a crouch, barely registering the shriek of the teenage girl whose lunch she’d knocked over, as the closest of the men swiveled in his chair and drew his gun. Damn it!, a part of her cursed as she hit the tiled floor, taking cover behind the round hardwood table. I didn’t expect them to be ready so quickly - I expected to have time to get out of here without a firefight in a public area -

But the rest of her was focused solely on the pistol grip in her palm and the targets before her.



The first would-be assassin had already brought his heavy pistol halfway around when Sergeant David Kauffman blew his cerebellum out with a three-round burst. The Marine quickly took aim and fired again, two more beads cleaving the target’s throat, and then Sybitz put a single shot cleanly through the third pirate’s skull.

Through the din of the wailing patrons, she could hear the angry shouts of more men outside, and stifled a curse. She shot a quick glance at Archer, who was on the ground herself, drawing her own handgun from its thigh holster. Their eyes met for a moment, but anything either of them might have said was cut off by a sharp burst of fire and the shattering of glass at the front of the restaurant.

The killers didn’t seem to much care if they piled up the bodies of bystanders, and several diners fell over in screaming, bloody messes as carbines sprayed indiscriminately into the crowd. The survivors dove to the ground, more than a few of them whimpering in terror under the sharp cracks of the hypersonic rounds, and the gunmen charged with the fury of a wounded beast as the paths to their target cleared.

Unfortunately, it had also cleared the lines of fire for the defenders.

The first three pirates to clear the perimeter died within two seconds of doing so. Sybitz took the first one out with a double-tap that struck him dead center in chest and forehead; Kauffman fired five shots, hit four times and brought down two more hostiles;. A fourth assailant actually managed to get a round off, and she let out a sharp hiss of pain as the hit drove splinters from the table into her exposed cheek, but for that she was much better off than he ended up; the Marine spat a curse in Yiddish, and another burst from his gun shredded his foe’s chest. Archer still hadn’t pulled the trigger even once.

Enraged howls came from the remaining street thugs outside, as what should have been an easy hit job turned into a bloodbath - for them. Unwilling to be lured into the jaws of the trap as their hastier comrades had been, they stayed outside, taking cover of their own, and poured a hail of fire into the ruined dining area of The Olive Tree.

Now I know why Tina always carries at least two automatics with her everywhere, Sybitz muttered mentally as she went flat on the deck. There must be at least half a dozen of them still out there, and who knows how many more still coming. And we don’t even have enough ammo for our own light weapons to pull off anything resembling suppressive fire, which would at least let us make a break for it. It’s probably too much to hope for the cavalry to reach us in time, too. Then again...

Two red-ringed grey spherules came sailing in through the broken window, and she saw just enough of them for her blood to run cold. If they went off in this confined space -

But Kauffman was already bolting out of cover, emptying his gun at the sheltered opponents as he dove for the closer grenade. With remarkable dexterity he picked it up and threw it back at its senders in a single smooth motion; it might still kill any civilians out there who hadn’t dispersed, but it wouldn’t be the massacre that would inevitably result if it detonated indoors, and it’d also clear some of the perpetrators in a fitting show of irony.

There was no time to do the same for the other grenade. Even as a pair of railgun rounds carved through his thigh and kidney, he jumped on it, landing just as it went off.

Sybitz felt herself go deaf with the ear-rupturing explosions that painted the walls crimson with the blood and entrails of what had just moments ago been live human beings. Despite the now-deceased sergeant’s best efforts, three civilians (and one of the pirates) had been killed in the blasts, and almost everyone else in and around the now-ruined restaurant was dazed at best. She shook her dusty head, trying to clear the ringing from her ears, and picked herself up from the ground.

“Come on, let’s go,” she shouted at Archer, loud enough to hear herself. “We’ll die if we stay here.”

The older woman just stared tremblingly up at her with dazed eyes, either not hearing or not comprehending, and Adela snarled. “Now, damn it!” She ran over and grabbed her wrist, yanked her sharply to her feet, and dragged her towards the rear exit. Fortunately Artemis had enough presence of mind to start moving on her own by the time they reached the service door, and they burst out into the alley running. More shouts came to her right, and Sybitz stifled a curse as three more gunmen came into view. Well, that decided which way to run, at least.

They took off, the pirate skipper turned bodyguard squeezing off a shot back down the alley every now and then to slow their pursuers down, and emerged onto a larger street. Passersby yelled and swore as they were shoved roughly aside, at least one man landing face-first in a plate of stall falafels, and several heads of cabbage ended up rolling all over the deck when a flatbed trolley swerved just in time to avoid the fleeing duo.

At the end of the road was a dilapidated swivelling double door, and Sybitz barreled through it - only to find herself losing her footing and tumbling through the air as the gravity let go. Only Archer quickly grabbing her ankle with one hand, holding on to the doorframe with the other, kept her from sailing uncontrollably through the high-ceilinged chamber that had once been a park.

She grimaced. The killers were gaining fast, and trying to air-swim forty meters across the room would leave them sitting ducks for rifle fire. Even if it didn’t, she couldn’t really justify endangering the youths gliding about the chamber, engaged in one of the few recreational activities available on Mazic.

“Over here!” a boy’s voice called out, and her head snapped around to see the child beggar from earlier, peeking out from a door to a nearby maintenance tunnel. Unexpected as his appearance was, she hesitated for only a moment, then kicked off from the nearest bulkhead and flew straight in, Archer closed behind.

Zero-G freerunning had been one of her favourite pastimes in her youth, and she felt the familiar rush of adrenaline as she followed their unexpected ally along the passageway. In the narrow confines of the tunnel with its sharp twists and turns, the three of them were able to rebound off walls with ease, speeding down the path in great leaps.The only surprise was another of the pirates somehow appearing in front of them, opening the door at the end. But in doing so he stumbled just as Sybitz had, and before he could recover she had brought her legs forward and kicked him hard in the face. Three of his teeth were knocked out as he slammed back against the bulkhead, slumping like a rag doll.

She landed cleanly on the deck with its refreshingly functional gravity, clearing the way just in time for the kid and then Archer behind her to similarly land without ending up in a tangled pile of limbs. “You can still run?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Archer panted. “For now, at least.”

Which would be great if we had some way of knowing we weren’t just running around in circles. Or headlong towards their hideout. If the cops don’t get here fast…

But the footfalls of their pursuers were already echoing down the corridor behind them, so there was nothing to it except to run some more.

They exited the utility tunnel into a presently deserted loading dock near one of the station’s rail lines, crates stacked in little tarp-covered clusters around the deck. Shots zipped past them as they sprinted across the cavernous chamber, skipping along the floor and punching little holes in plastic boxes, and Sybitz fervently hoped none of them would connect before they cleared the exit. Just twenty meters more… fifteen… ten!

A horrible scream rang in her ears as the kid fell to the deck, blood gushing from his lower leg where the bullet had ricocheted off the deck and hit it. Behind her, Archer was already braking abruptly, and Sybitz screeched to a halt as well even as more iron beads pinged against the carbide ceramic tiles.



Though she was no doctor, it was clear to Artemis that the boy - she regretted never having asked his name - was hurt, and badly. White fragments of bone glistened amidst the morass of torn muscle and sinew, soaked in blood, and she knew that without prompt medical attention - possibly better than anything Mazic could offer - he would die sooner or later.

She also knew that if she stayed to cover him, she would probably accomplish nothing except to perish herself. That even if she somehow held them off long enough for help to arrive, there was no guarantee that he would survive. That the only sensible thing to do now was to run, and mourn for him later.

“Captain…” Sybitz began.

Archer flung herself against the cover of a crate, pistol at the ready.

“What are you doing?!” the pirate said screechingly, but even to herself it sounded hollow. The first pursuers were in sight now, and she ducked into safety herself, resisting the temptation to let out a long string of curses. “You owe me big time for this,” she muttered instead to no-one in particular.

One of the attackers popped out from behind a hoverlifter, ready to lay down suppression while his companions flanked their prey, but Artemis Archer was already leaning out from her own cover, pistol levelled in a two-handed grip. Her hands were perfectly steady, her aim was true as the goddess of her namesake, and her shot went straight between his eyes.

Even as her previous target fell to the deck, she sighted another target, this one sprinting to the side, dashing to cover. He was fast, but not fast enough, and his left temple burst in a spray of bone and soft tissue.

She aimed again, fired again. And again. And again…

The incoming rifle round struck her just below the right shoulder, her yellow cardigan splotched bright red with arterial blood, and she fell mutely backwards, hitting the deck with a thud. The pistol slipped out of her slender fingers, and her arm refused to move properly to pick it up again.

The sharp noises of the continued gunfire and the yells and snarls of the surviving combatants rang in her ears, combining into an indistinguishable cacophony. She tried to roll over, to grab the gun with her good hand, but each motion seemed more difficult than the last. Through her blurry vision she could see the last of the killers gaining, closing in for the coup de grâce, and she felt so very weak…

It was then that she heard the loud burst of a rifle from behind her, and saw the torso of the closest pirate explode. The heavy footfalls of armored infantry approached as she slumped back down, and then Janusz Koniecpolski was standing over her, assault weapon blazing away. Another Marine bent down to face her, saying something she could no longer make out, and the last thing she felt was the hypospray against her neck before the sedative-induced darkness overtook her.
[close]



Author's notes
Spoiler
Yep, ArkAngel called it :D
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.9 2014-11-14)
Post by: ArkAngel on November 14, 2014, 10:07:03 PM
I like the chapter. It was put together rather well. Also, the poor kid.  :( Would be kind of neat if he made a repearance later considering archer attempted to save him.
Chapter 9

Author's notes
Spoiler
Yep, ArkAngel called it :D
[close]
I knew it!  8)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.10 & 11: 2014-11-30)
Post by: Histidine on November 29, 2014, 09:24:22 AM
These two new chapters are rather related, so I'm putting them both up at once. Some sentimental stuff in this one; critique is welcome as always.

Chapter 10
Spoiler
The first thing Archer saw when she opened her eyes again was the pale green ceiling of the Valiant’s sick bay, the brilliant overhead lamps stinging her eyes. She blinked briefly before trying to prop herself up on her hands, only to wince as the pain bloomed in her right shoulder. A glance down gave her the sight of her right arm secured in a sling, the upper half immobilized against her body. Her left arm was fine, aside from the IV going into her wrist.

“Easy there, skipper,” a voice in an accent which an Old Earth linguist might have identified as tracing to England’s Home Counties, and she turned to see a dark figure shrouded in a white lab coat, tablet in hand as he walked over.

“How’s the kid?” she asked.

“Better than he looks. That bullet shattered a good chunk of his tibia, and it was remarkably challenging to stitch the pieces back together, but it’s ultimately nothing a little medipaste can’t handle. We were able to fashion a pair of crutches from the ship’s stores, too. His name is Mir, by the way.” He looked at her as she sat up awkwardly. “You, on the other hand… your pectoral muscle took it badly, and shoulder joint is pretty much ruined. I did what I could, but we’ll have to get to a proper hospital before you’ll be able to use your arm again.”

“I see.” She looked crestfallenly at her arm, flexing the fingers. “Do I at least get to move around, or are you making me stay in your bed?”

“You should be able to go about your duties as usual; just don’t overexert yourself. I’d prefer for you to get some rest for a few days at least, however. Commander Jaitley can hold down the fort for you for a bit.”

“Okay. How long was I out, anyway?”

“Eleven hours and,” he glanced at his tablet, “twenty-three minutes. That reminds me; I’ll want you to stay for a few hours after this, but right now I suppose you shouldn’t keep your visitors waiting.”



“Captain,” Ashok Jaitley said as he entered the room with Janusz Koniecpolski and came to her bedside.

“Commander.” She nodded in greeting, sitting up, then glanced uneasily at the Marine. “Major…”

“Thank Commander Battuta,” Koniecpolski said. “She’s the one who spotted the spinal maintenance artery on the station schematics that let us preposition the squad and let it move at forty klicks an hour when the shooting started.” He frowned slightly. “As for the I-told-you-sos, we’ll save those for later.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, exhaling sharply. “Alright. Report.”

“First, the what: an orchestrated attempt to kill you, the captain of the League cruiser PLS Valiant, that went very, very wrong for all involved. We count at least fifteen perpetrators dead, along with nine innocent bystanders. Another four were injured, and the word is that at least one of them won’t make it. As for the who, most of the attempted assassins were killed, but we did manage to get confirmation from the two survivors we caught that they were from the Black Hatchet. The one who planned this little charlie foxtrot is already dead, but the orders came from high up. How high, we don’t know yet.” He cleared his throat. “The why seems obvious enough.”

“And the how?”

“That’s the difficult part. No-one except you knew where you were going ahead of time, and that was before Ms. Sybitz apparently detained you and took you elsewhere. Which was a rather interesting incident in itself, by the way.”

She straightened. “You suspect her, then?”

Jaitley shook his head. “We did, initially. So far as we’ve been able to determine, however, she had no foreknowledge whatsoever of the assassination attempt and simply got caught up in the incident. In fact, the way she tells it, she’s one of the reasons you’re alive right now. We’re keeping an eye on her all the same, but it’s mostly a formality.”

“For them to find you and move in so promptly,” Koniecpolski said, “suggests they were able to track you part of the way from the station to the Olive Tree, but lost you before the end and had to do an old-fashioned sweep. This would require posting lookouts at every metro station, in sufficient numbers to deal with the crowds,” his face hardened, “and/or access to the station’s surveillance system.”

“In other words,” Jaitley said, “it’s possible that the pirates have either suborned Mazic’s computer systems - or its authorities. Neither is a pleasing thought.”

“I still say we should go down to the Administration Office and demand some answers,” Koniecpolski growled, facing the other man.

“And I’ve already said that we can’t do that without hard evidence,” the exec shot back. “And even if we did, let’s not assume they’re willingly collaborating with pirates. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but these people don’t have much in the way of refusing any offers some group like the Hatchet may make.”

“Now that you mention it, how did the Mazic authorities respond to the shootout?” Archer asked.

He gave a small, almost imperceptible shrug. “By the time their police arrived, we were just about ready to evacuate you back to the Valiant. They weren’t particularly hostile or anything; Janusz here feels they were just upset that someone else had to clean up their mess for them. As for official statements… they said that they’re really, really, really sorry about it... and everyone would be much happier if we’d leave as soon as possible.”

She sighed. “I can agree with that.” She rubbed her wounded right shoulder for a bit, then straightened. “Alright, schedule an e-conference before we leave the station. I think we should get underway on our patrol route as soon as possible.”

“One more thing,” Koniecpolski said, his expression grim. “There’ll be a ceremony for Kauffman at 1500 today. We’ve made no statement beyond the fact that he’s KIA, but the rumor mill has already done its work.”

Artemis tensed, a distinct chill running down her spine as he continued. “I won’t tell you what to do, but as one CO to another, I think you should be the one to explained how he died.”



After they’d left, Archer remained sitting on the bed, breathing heavily. Her mind was busy working out what to say at the address - flailing about trying to do that, rather - when the door opened and she looked up… and scowled. “Who let you on my ship?” she demanded.

“Is this how you treat someone who comes to visit you in the hospital?” Adela Sybitz said. “Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about not bringing you flowers.” She gave the captain an infuriating smirk, then shrugged as she sat down in the nearest chair. “Actually, I never left. Your Marine major hauled me abroad the same time they brought you in. Luckily I was able to convince him I wasn’t really behind the whole “try to kill you” plot.” Smiling: “Nice ship, by the way. It even has running showers and everything!”

Artemis glared at her for a moment, then slumped back down on the hospital bed. “...I suppose if it weren’t for you, I’d be dead,” she said after a while. “So, um… thanks.”

“Ah, don’t mention it,” Sybitz said, waving a hand. “For all you know, I just did it because I wanted a high-ranking League officer to owe me some really big favors. How’s the arm?”

“A little sore, but it’s alright. Well, except for the part where I can’t move the upper part at all. Harvey - Surgeon Commander Lister - tells me they can fix my shoulder back home, at least.” She looked away sadly. “Can’t say the same for Sergeant Kauffman.”

“Yeah,” the pirate said slowly. “He died a hero and all, but that never really makes it any better.” Archer looked at her, and she gave a thin smile. “Trust me, I know from experience.”

The other woman started to speak, but then just shook her head. “You’re going back to your ship, then?” she asked after a while.

“Hopefully soon, yeah. I’ve got to get back and get the Reckless ready for our next jaunt. We’re still headed to Memphis, then Thrace, right?”

“Indeed.” She sighed. “Hopefully we’ll find Ibarra’s man and get to the bottom of this before even more people get killed.”

“Sorry, Captain,” Adela said. “But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years in the Sector, it’s never that easy.”



The dimly lit briefing hall was already full when Archer entered, the Valiant’s Marine platoon and a number of others seated on row after row of folding chairs. Several dozen pairs of eyes tracked her as she walked unsteadily to the podium, and if none of their gazes were outright hostile, few were filled with anything other than wariness, even mistrust.

She looked over the audience once before gripping the old-fashioned mic with her good hand, trying her best to hide the tremor in her hands. “Good… afternoon, everyone,” she started, each word coming out sounding stiff and unnatural even to her. “It is my regretful duty to announce today that twenty-seven hours ago, on 13 June 207, Sergeant David Kauffman of Second Squad was killed in the line of duty.”

The room went deathly silent, and she swallowed before continuing.

“I’m sure you know of the circulating rumors concerning the circumstances of his death… but now I will tell you what really happened. Kauffman was escorting me to a local restaurant, on the orders of Major Koniecpolski. We were accompanied by… our associate, Adela Sybitz. While there, we were attacked by a group of gunmen identified as members of the Black Hatchet. The sergeant engaged the assailants, killing several of them, and then jumped on a grenade they had thrown into the building. His sacrifice saved the lives of several civilians and bought us valuable time to escape.”

“Some of you may have heard that the major had originally insisted that I be accompanied by a Marine fireteam at all times while off the ship, and that it was only because of my insistence that I be allowed to take liberty alone that he agreed to reduce this to a single man. It’s true,” she said softly, her voice quavering with guilt. “I bear responsibility for David Kauffman’s death, not only as the captain of this ship, but on a personal level as well.”

“I’m sorry, everyone. I…”

Under the harsh glare of the spotlight above, their uneasy stares were like stakes pinning her to the bulkhead, and her face was ashen. What do I say to them? That a good man is dead because I put my personal enjoyment ahead of my duty? Because I disregarded Janusz’s advice out of pure selfishness? That I’ve just proven myself totally unfit for command? That if I say I’m really, really sorry, I’m sure Kauffman will come back to life?

“It’s not your fault,” a small voice called out.

All other heads in the room snapped around to the source - Mir, the street urchin, hobbling down the aisle with his crutches. “It’s not your fault,” he repeated. “You didn’t ask for those bad men to try to kill you. They did it because you were stopping them from hurting other people. Besides, you shouldn’t have to be stuck on your ship. You should be able to go out and have fun like everyone else.”

Everyone else was staring at him, as well, and no-one said so much as a single word for a quarter of a minute. “Ah, hell,” one of the Marines finally muttered. “Kid’s got a point.”

Artemis and the boy gazed at each other, oak and cyan connecting, and she found herself lifting her hand to wipe a stray, solitary tear from her cheek. “...Thank you, Mir,” she said softly.
[close]



Chapter 11
Spoiler
“So, how do you like it?” Ashok Jaitley asked.

He was seated across a table draped in white linen from his captain in his day cabin, cleaning their plates of the parboiled biryani. The meat was a synthetic substitute as usual, but the pepper, cinnamon, onions and cabbage were all real, practically the same varieties that had once been grown on Earth.

“It’s pretty good,” Archer said, setting down her spoon and dipping a chapati into a tub of ghee before nibbling on it. “You really cooked all this yourself?”

“Indeed.” He looked just a little prideful for a moment. “If you’re curious, I bought up the vegetables at Mazic, and took the rice and meat from the ship’s stocks. As for the spices, let’s just say I bring a stash along with me on deployment just for occasions like this.”

“Nice.” She studied him briefly, and the corners of her mouth twitched in amusement. “Does Kiranjeet know you’re cooking a private dinner for another woman?”

“She trusts me completely,” he responded gently. “And I’ve never given her a reason to do otherwise.”

“I see.”

She rested her chin on her hand, looking a little wistfully at his dusky features when his eyes were turned elsewhere. It was too bad that he was already taken, really… he was a kindly sort, and not bad looking. An efficient and conscientious worker, too. Perhaps if…

Down, girl, she told herself sharply. The last thing you need at this time is to be completely undermining the crew’s discipline - and ruining a marriage - by having an affair with your exec. And you didn’t sign up for the Navy to meet all the charming hunks - or babes, for that matter - in uniform. Sure, it’s too bad that the only person outside your chain of command around here that you know well enough to have a relationship with is Adela Sybitz, but…

Shuddering, she squelched that thought even faster than she had the first one.

“So, why did you invite me over, anyway?”

“Several reasons. First, it just feels better to share a meal with someone.” He motioned at the table between them. “Food has been a way to bond people since time immemorial, even before our forebears left the soil of Old Earth. Don’t you agree, Captain?”

“I can see that, alright. But I don’t suppose you chose to have your bonding with me, one-on-one, on a whim.”

“True.” He smiled a little. “The second reason is simply as a treat for you after you caught up in what happened on Mazic. Consider it a consolation for your injuries, a saying of thanks that you’re still with us, and a get-well-soon wish, all in one.”

She returned his smile. “Thanks.”

They looked at each other for a few more moments, then he sobered, resting his palms on the table. “Lastly, I… I suppose I just wanted to give you a chance to talk. See if there’s anything you need to get off your shoulders.”

“I…” She paused. “I, um, appreciate the concern, but what makes you think I have a problem?”

“That shootout down in the station. I don’t think you’ve ever been in a situation like that before.” Jaitley shook his head. “It was brutal enough, seeing the photos afterwards. I can’t say I can imagine what it was like to actually be in the thick of it.”

Archer looked down at her empty plate. “Yeah, it was pretty awful. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, the gunfire, the screams, the explosions… I can still hear them.” And this isn’t the first time, either, she considered saying, but decided against it. She liked and trusted her exec, but she still wasn’t ready to tell him just yet. She still wasn’t ready to tell anyone.

“How’s the ship taking Kauffman’s death?” she asked instead.

“It could be worse.” He looked her squarely in the eye. “All of us knew the risks when we signed up, of course, but it isn’t until someone actually doesn’t make it that the point is truly made. But we’ll pull through, Captain. Especially after the kid - Mir - spoke on your behalf.” His expression was genial, even fatherly, now. “He practically became the crew's best friend as soon as he woke up.”

“Good to hear.”

She set down the half-eaten bread, sighing softly. “You know, I’ve been thinking. Just yesterday, I was freaking out over how to explain what happened to the sergeant, while almost a dozen innocent civilians who never signed up to be shot at were also killed in that incident. All because of me. And I don’t even know any of their names.” Her eyes drifted to the bulkhead to the side. “For that matter, we’ve been killing lots of people ourselves with each pirate ship we’ve blown up. Sure, we’re entirely in the legal right to punch them out, and a lot of them are really awful people, but does that mean they deserve summary execution?”

“The pirates in Marenos have killed thousands of innocents in the past few cycles themselves,” Jaitley reminded her. “And then there are all the livelihoods their actions have ruined. For that matter, you’ve given most of them the chance to surrender and face a fair trial, and they refused. Consider that as well.”

“Yeah, but still…” Archer sighed again, long and drawn out. “It was so much easier, back when I was just one of the junior officers. Then, I needed only worry about doing my own job, and could let all the moral responsibility fall on someone else’s shoulders. Now I’m the captain, and it all comes down to my decisions now. Every life and death around here is on my head, whether directly or otherwise.”

She slumped on the table, resting her head on her arm. “Look at me. Hundreds of people are dying every single day here in Marenos, and here I am moping about how guilty I feel.”

“That’s part of what makes you a good person,” he told her gently. “The other part is making an effort to change it. And that’s what you’re doing - what we’re doing together.”

Despite herself, she smiled at him. “Thanks, Ash. I knew there’s a reason I keep you around.”

He actually chuckled a little at that. “Always glad to be of service. Now, why don’t you tell me...”



After dinner, Artemis headed for the observation deck. Nominally intended for taking visual observations by eye in the event of battle damage to the ship’s optical sensors, it saw far more use as a hangout for off-duty crew, enjoying a chat and a drink while enjoying the view.

She wasn’t surprised when the door slid open to reveal someone else was already there - it was rather more unusual that there was only one person present. What was unexpected was the identity of the guest seated on the couch, his crutches propped up nearby. The transfixing sight of Mazic half-lit by its sun hung in the distance, an orb blue, green, yellow and white, and he took no notice of her entry or her walking over.

“Hi, Mir,” she said, leaning on the armrest, and he looked up at her in surprise. “Like the view from up here?”

“Yeah,” he said after a while, before turning back to the sights. “I’ve never seen a planet from space before. It’s... beautiful.”

“It's gorgeous. Dreamy, even. Sometimes I like to come here and just stare out the window and feel my troubles drifting away to the stars.” She smiled. “Mind if I sit here?”

“Sure,” he answered simply, and she settled next to him, the two of them gazing out contentedly at the stars beyond.

“Thanks again for sticking up for me,” she said after a while. “I really appreciate it.”

He shrugged slightly. “You risked your life to save mine. I wanted to repay you somehow.”

“You wouldn’t have been shot at all if it weren’t for me, you know.”

“I chose to help you,” he said seriously, looking up at her again. “Just like you chose to help me.”

“Mm, I suppose you could put it that way.” She leaned back, putting a hand on his shoulder. “So, what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” he sighed, looking away. “I don’t want to go back to Mazic.”

“It’s your home. Don’t you want to stay here instead of moving someplace you don’t know at all?”

He shook his head. “No. Home is somewhere you can have a bed to sleep in and people don’t try to beat you every day.” His eyes met hers again. “I want to go to the League. Maybe there I can have a good meal every day and go to school and do something good for people. Like you.”

It’s not that simple, Mir, not even in the League, Archer wanted to say, but couldn’t bear to step on his dreams. “Alright, when this is over, we’ll take you there and see about finding a home for you,” she said instead. “But after that, we’ll come back together to Mazic and fix it up. Make it a place worth living in. What do you say?”

“I…” he stared at her. “Really? You mean it?”

“Better than that. I promise.”

He bowed his head for a few moments, then reached into his pocket. “Here,” he said, taking her hand and placing something in it. “I think you should have this.”

She opened her hand, and her eyes went wide as the silver commemorative coin David Kauffman had given him sat shimmering in her palm. “With this,” he whispered, “you’ll always remember your promise. Won’t you?“

For several more seconds Artemis Archer stared at the small, shiny disc in her hand, her teal eyes glistening. Then she closed her fingers and smiled at him. “Yes,” she said softly. “I will.”



When Sybitz returned to the bridge of her ship, Dragunova was waiting for her. “So!” the redheaded pirate said sharply, jabbing an accusing finger at her senior partner. “As if selling our services to the highest bidder wasn’t enough backstabbing for you. I hear you’ve started cozying up to that League hussy.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” Adela told her serenely as she settled into her chair, leaned back and crossed her legs.

“You don’t love me any more. You haven’t even bought me a new gun in cycles.”

“Tina, I bought you a gun once, and that was for your fifth anniversary on the crew.”

“Exactly!” Dragunova turned to glare at the third person in the room. “What, no smartass comments, Lozzy?”

“Huh?” He looked up from his console. “Oh, sorry. I was busy going over some data me and the Valiant’s tac officer collated on the pirate attacks around here. I think I’m seeing an interesting trend.”

“Indeed?” Sybitz sat up. “What did you find?”

Sequeira rubbed his chin. “Just this. By the best estimates I could find, Quasar Industries accounts for twenty-seven percent of the commercial traffic in the Marenos subsector. Yet of the hundred and thirty-two ships lost to pirates here in the past three months, only seven were registered to QI.”

“Mm. So they have better escorts,” she said. “Or, for that matter, they could be making up so much of the commerce simply because the pirates are pushing everyone else out.”

He shook his head. “I thought of that too. So we filtered out all the attacks that weren’t on a convoy with an escort-freighter tonnage ratio of at least 0.4.” His brow furrowed. “Even so, Quasar accounts for less than a sixth of the losses. Of course, there are still confounders we haven’t controlled for, and our sample size is under fifteen, but…”

“...still, it’s interesting,” she commented. “Alright, have your friend buck it up to Captain Archer and see what she thinks. Maybe you’re on to something after all.”



The entire Board of Directors of Quasar Industries Limited stared at Kenneth Skilleton from across the conference table, and he stared back at them.

Worthless hypocrites, he thought sullenly, trying (and failing, badly) to keep the resentment out of his expression. They don’t give a damn about all the things going on in the company which they don’t want people knowing about, as long as they can pretend that they don’t know a thing about it either. But one leak into the public news channels, and they’re falling all over themselves trying to string up a scapegoat!

Not that he had any basis for throwing stones, he might have admitted to himself in one of his more honest moments. After all, that was his fallback plan now that things that gotten blown into the open, with someone further down the line - say, General Manager Lain - as his sacrificial goat. Unfortunately, Jennifer was dozens of light-years away on Duval, and he was right here in the boardroom where these two-faced piranhas who styled themselves corporate directors could get at him.

He squelched the urge - again - to snarl at the wallscreen that had displayed the footage they’d just seen. The grisly details of what had happened in the streets of Pynchet had been displayed in gut-wrenching high definition, and virtually all of the people present here had verbally expressed their shock at the bloody violence the reporter had seen fit to show in all its uncensored glory. With two or three of them, it had even been out of genuine horror and revulsion at the slaughter, rather than the fact that it was being associated with them.

“Now, Mr. Skilleton,” Chairman Gideon de Fortier said grimly, “perhaps you’d like to explain what happened here.”

The CEO leaned forward on the table, taking a couple of seconds to compose himself before he began speaking. “At first glance,” he said, carefully keeping his tone even, “the footage shows civilian protesters, including striking Quasar employees, being gunned down in the street by Sekos security forces. However, the report is one-sided and omits several pertinent facts. For one,” a neutral observer might have marvelled - or express repugnance - at the way he got it out with a straight face, “it fails to mention that the demonstrators were acting unlawfully in holding their disorganized, uncontrolled rally in front of the Presidential Palace. Further, it is amply documented that the so-called peaceful demonstrators were armed, and it was they who initiated violence against the city police monitoring the event. Clearly –”

“That’s well and all,” Rhee Tae-yeon interrupted, “but the fact remains that their version of the story is out there, and ours isn’t.” She scowled at her fellows around the table. “Have you heard what they’re calling it? ‘The Sekos Incident’ is the mildest of it; the more sensationalist newsies -” by which she meant the ones who weren’t on the corporate payroll or otherwise inclined towards apologia on behalf of the Sector’s megacorporations and their state allies, though none of them were going to mention that, “are using names like ‘Black Thursday’ and ‘May Massacre.’ This is an unprecedented PR disaster, and somehow I doubt,” she shot a sour look at Skilleton, “that saying ‘but they were breaking the law!’ is going to cut the mustard with the general public.”

“I don’t mean to sound callous,” he began, “but –”

“A plasma cannon!” Lamar Swanson barked, dropping his hard fists on the table. “They used a plasma cannon on civilians, Ken!”

Skilleton started to retort hotly, but Fortier cut in. “People, please!” he said, raising both hands. “We can bicker all day about what has happened, but it’s happened all the same, and a shouting match isn’t going to change that. What we need to worry about now his how to fix it. Clear?”

The other three people calmed down, though only Swanson had the decency to look abashed, and Fortier nodded. “Better. Now, I wish we could say the disapproval of the man in the street was all we had to deal with, but unfortunately what happened in Sekos has attracted the attention of the major powers. Lamar?

“The League Assembly has put the incident on its official debate agenda for this week,” Swanson said. “And while ordinarily nobody takes League resolutions seriously for a moment,” no-one dared laugh, “we believe there is significant support for formal economic sanctions against Quasar. The Westernese and Madeira senior delegates are already pushing to table such a motion; word on the grapevine is that Yesod will soon be joining them, in which case” he looked at the frightened faces around him, “we could be looking at triple tariffs on all our traffic into their space.”

“And that’s not all,” Rhee added. “I’ve received word that the Hegemon Administratum is looking at cancelling half of our supply contracts as a “reprimand” for our “disgraceful conduct.” With no payment of penalty fees either, needless to say. Even disregarding the direct revenue loss, I shan’t describe how unlikely any further business with the Hegemony is in such an event.”

“In short, we need to be seen publicly taking remedial action, however meaningless it may be in the long run,” the chairman said. “This is your mess, Kenneth. How do you propose we fix it?”

Skilleton forced himself not to scowl at the other man. “Your mess”, indeed. Gideon was normally in his corner against Swanson and his holier-than-thou faction (such as it was) on the Board, but it was clear that he had no qualms about throwing his CEO to the wolves if they got hungry enough. *** rolls downhill, after all, and it was just too bad that this time around even his lofty position wasn’t quite close enough to the top.

“Very well,” he said after a while. “While we can’t control what the legitimate government of Sekos does, it would certainly appear that a formal investigation into any involvement we had with the incident is warranted. None of us want it to be said that we were in any way complicit with a massacre of civilians, especially of our own employees.” He paused, taking a gulp from the carafe of water in front of him as he considered his next words.

“It is possible, though unlikely, that there was indeed participation by the local company branch office in this unlawful act, without our knowledge here at headquarters. Given the gravity of the situation, I think it would be best if I personally travelled to Duval to oversee an inquiry into this matter. I would like to assure the board,” he held his hands out, palms facing each other, “that no expense will be spared in dealing with any wrongdoing within our company.”

Alright, they’re taking the bait, he thought with the closest thing to relief he’d been able to feel for the past day as murmurs went around the conference table. They have to, it’s their only out. Now all he needed to do was high-tail it over to the Sekos system, letting the others bear the public relations fallout in his few months of absence, and do whatever on-site damage control was called for. Including letting Lain take the fall for him, if de Fortier decided that an example had to be made of someone. Serves her right for *** up and letting this be exposed, anyway!

And there was that other thing that needed dealing with too. Even as he continued talking, his face as smooth as ever, he scowled inwardly. Why couldn’t the universe cooperate with him, just this once?
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.10 & 11: 2014-11-30)
Post by: Chaos Farseer on November 29, 2014, 11:06:11 AM
“Ah, hell,” one of the Marines finally muttered. “Kid’s got a point.”
:)
Thank you Mir, for cheering everyone up a bit.

“we could be looking at triple tariffs on all our traffic into their space.”
JEEZ. 90% Tariffs? That's harsh!

Everything looks like it's coming together. I'd really like to see where this goes.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.12 & 13: 2014-12-14)
Post by: Histidine on December 14, 2014, 12:09:20 AM
Another double chapter. Let's get the last bits of exposition out of the way!

Chapter 12
Spoiler
“...so get off your worthless, overpaid ass and get this convoy moving already! I don’t want to hear any more of your excuses!”

Security Commander Suren Matayev bit his tongue and slowly, forcefully throttled his anger. It would be incredibly satisfying to tell the pompous, self-important, pig-ignorant ass of a CEO just where to stick his attempts to micromanage the people who actually knew how to do their jobs and whose only lowly purpose in life was to keep his useless, polished skin intact. Unfortunately, it would also scarcely qualify as a career-enhancing move.

“Yes, sir,” he said instead, in as deferential and self-deprecatory a tone as he could convince his own dignity to permit him. “I’m sorry, sir. With your leave, I’ll get to expediting our departure immediately.”

“See that you do, for your own sake, Commander,” the man on the comm display said huffily. “Goodbye.”

The holo-image vanished, and Matayev exhaled sharply, running a hand through his shoulder-length black hair. Even now that his boss was out of sight and out of earshot, it wouldn’t do for him as a starship CO to launch promptly into a rant about the various failings of his superiors. Or even to fantasize about using his six-foot, ninety-kilogram build to slowly crush the life out of that ***’s windpipe. Appearances had to be maintained, after all.

Fortunately for them, his subordinates were less so constrained.

“Jeez, what peed in his breakfast cereal before crawling up his ass to die?!” Geraldine Cheah, his first officer, snapped. “He makes it sound like it’s our fault the media is kicking his ass over this incident in Sekos and making this trip necessary in the first place!”

“Eh.” The skipper shrugged noncommittally, as if trying to cast himself as the voice of the glass-half-full faction. “Beats sitting on station twiddling our thumbs, at least. Think of it as a working vacation.”

She snorted. “Sure. And then we get there and he finds some excuse to keep us all cooped up in our ships without shore leave, under the guise of maintaining security patrols. While he, of course, gets to enjoy every Potemkin village tourist resort they keep in the system. See if he doesn’t.”

“You should be grateful, you know,” Matayev told her mildly. “At least you’ll be cooped up on a Falcon-class light cruiser, unlike those poor sods in the frigates we’re taking along.”

“Perhaps. But that just proves my point, doesn’t it? If there was any justice in this universe, Mr. Bigshot Chief Executive would be on a lowly frigate himself instead of that ultra-opulent yacht he’s got.” She was scowling, now. “Waste of a perfectly good ship, if you ask me.”

He chuckled a little, then sighed as he brought up the optical view of the ship in question on his display. The QIS Overseer was an Apogee-class cruiser turned armed super-yacht, the drone bay and survey equipment removed to make room for upgraded engines and a accommodation and recreation suite that would turn some posh core world hotels green with envy. Of course, Quasar could have gotten the same thing for cheaper with an off-the-shelf luxury liner from somewhere, but it would have lacked the intimidation factor of the heavy plasma cannon mounted on the front.

Well, that’s a bit unfair, he conceded. In this post-Domain world, having a big gun to… discourage people who might do you harm comes in very handy indeed. And as for speed, it won’t help when you have to let your escorts keep up with you, anyway.

He looked wistfully at the display again. The Skylark was his pride and joy, and he wouldn’t have traded her for a hundred Expansion Epoch cruisers, yet it was nice to look at that firepower and know it was on your side. It was a shame about the Most Important passenger on board was soiling it with his presence, but such was life.

I wonder how Tess’s putting up with him?, he thought wryly, then gave himself a small shake. “Alright, that’s enough chatter,” he said. “Gerry, get ready to move as soon as the missiles are loaded. We don’t want to keep His Highness waiting any longer.”



The back alleys of Pynchet’s East Quarter were shrouded in darkness, grim and foreboding as always. Even the main streets were punctuated only occasionally by flickering white streetlights, aged well beyond their intended lifespan. People walking by would sometimes gaze resentfully at the buildings in the city that did have fully working, brand-new lights, like the Quasar rare metals processor just half a kilometer away.

Hard-soled boots crunched on gravel behind the rundown stores, as a man walked past the stench from the urine-stained drains and the rat-infested piles of garbage. He kept his head bowed, the brim of his tattered hat masking his face; while it was unlikely that even the panopticonic network of security cameras reached into every twist and turn of the sprawling alleyways, this was a habit he’d long cultivated. Not that his pose here was particularly noteworthy in itself; it didn’t take long living in Sekos for a man’s desire to look upwards to be beaten out of him.

He rounded a corner and came to a beige plastic door, standing uncomfortably under a harsh yellow spotlight. His raised fist rapped twice against the hard surface, and several seconds later a man’s muffled voice came from inside.

“Felipe? Is that you?”

The door opened, and a greying, heavyset man in a dirty smock looked at him. “Didn’t expect to see you here,” the proprietor said. “You want to come in?”

“No, not now.” His visitor stared grimly. “I’m calling in Jacquerie.”

The other man’s jaw went slack. “Felipe… I don’t think that’s…”

“Don’t you dare cut me off on this, Takashi,” Felipe snarled under his breath, anger trumping furtiveness. “ Not after that day. Half of our group lost at least one direct family member. My son is in an unmarked grave somewhere, because he did what I was too afraid to do.” In a jagged voice, now: “Well, no more. I’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough. And if you don’t give me what we need on this now, if you still insist on sitting on your hands until the fancy media attention dies away and everyone forgets how he died... we’ll just stake it out on our own. We’ll be heard one way or another, so help us God.”

“Whoa, easy,” Takashi said, holding up his hands. “Look, I know you’re all *** off as hell, but…” Seeing the murderous expression of his visitor, he hurriedly went on: “Okay, okay! Just… just give me a few days, alright? We still haven’t gotten the last cleaning kit here yet, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you,” the other man said, in a more normal tone. “That’s all I ask.”

“Alright. Truth is... I know none of us can really understand how you must be feeling, but we understand what you gotta do. And when the time comes, we’ll back you on this” He reached out, putting a large hand on a hard shoulder. “Remember, a day of advance notice so we can pick up Maria.”

“Of course.” Felipe looked down at his feet. “And… thank you, again.”

Takashi smiled briefly, despite himself. “Least I could do. And now, I think you’d better get going.”

The door closed, and the visitor vanished into the darkness once more.



“We had a deal, Holk!”

“I’m sorry,” Manza Holk said, making a show of sipping from his glass of red wine. “I’m afraid I’m at a loss as to what you’re referring to.”

Their fleets were at the arranged rendezvous point in hyperspace, just 10,000 km apart by local reference. Though they were still too far apart for any one trigger-happy frigate skipper to actually cause an incident (while being close enough to eliminate any undesirable transmission lags), there was no mistaking the palpable tension in this meeting. Only Holk seemed unaffected by it.

“Don’t play games with me, pirate!” Skilleton barked. “Five million tons of freight - including an entire disassembled autofactory with UACs - disappeared! Are you really going to tell me you had nothing to do with it?!”

“And the basis of your accusation here is…?” the other man answered calmly. “I’m hardly the only pirate in the subsector, you know. For that matter, It’s a big, dangerous sector, and accidents happen all the time.”

His eyes inched to the other person on the split screen, on board the Omen-class frigate carefully placed to catch the comm laser the Overseer thought it was beaming straight to the Doomfist. In contrast with the pale-skinned, clean-shaven, immaculately tailored Skilleton, this tanned man was dressed casually, with a goatee that Holk felt went very poorly with his eyeshadow and braid.  So be it. He hadn’t hired the best former Tri-Tachyon cyberwarfare specialist he could find for his fashion sense.

I wonder if Mr. Corporate Executive here knows what he’s set himself up for?

“Forty seconds,” the hacker said, and Holk turned back to the person he was supposedly having a one-on-one conversation with.

“- the ability to hit a convoy of that size,” Skilleton was going on. “For that matter, none of them would even dare operate on that route! There is no other group that could have done this, only the Hatchet! And don’t give me any of that ‘accident’ crap!”

“You make too many assumptions, Mr. Executive. For one, if your ships were indeed carrying an autofac, someone who was able to discern this fact would easily be sufficiently tempted by greed to accept the risk of an attack on the convoy. And given all the high-tech ships and weapons you’ve been handing out like candy, half the two-bit bands around here could easily scrape together enough firepower to make the attempt.” He shrugged. “What can I say? We pirates are a fractious, insubordinate lot at the best of times.”

The CEO’s face turned a dramatic shade of puce. “Listen here, you -”

“Of course, if you do discover the identity of the actual perpetrator, I can help you… deal with them appropriately.” Holk reclined in his chair. “It’ll cost you, of course.”

“Don’t you dare trifle with me, Holk,” Skilleton snarled. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be a pissant little pirate chieftain in the back of nowhere. I’ll have you show respect to your betters.”

“Indeed? Forgive me, but while I don’t wish to cast aspersions on your boundless magnanimity, I was not under the impression that your contributions were intended as an act of generosity. Or did you charge them to Quasar’s CSR budget? I must admit, that would be quite amusing.”

Shut up!” If he had something to throw at the screen, he would have; as it was, he simply slammed his fists on the console.

“Mm. It does seem as if further discussion of this topic is moot at this point.” The pirate glanced at his tech pet, and nodded almost imperceptibly at the thumbs up. “Very well, then. If there is nothing else, I’m sure we both have errands to run. See you around, Mr. Skilleton.”

Kenneth Skilleton started spluttering indignantly, but Holk terminated the connection before he could find the words. One image vanished from his display, the other expanding to fill the remaining space, and he smiled. “Very good, Mr. Gibson. Now let’s see what we’ve picked up, shall we?”

He brought up another screen, and started browsing through a long list of files. Shortly thereafter, his brow furrowed, and he began stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“My, my… a detailed itinerary?” he murmured to himself. “This raises certain interesting possibilities indeed.” He stared at it for a while longer, then looked up. “Rigo, prepare a message for Pollaxe. Notify them that their operation is suspended and they are to assist Tomahawk instead. We’ll have another mission of our own that week.” And Kenny boy isn’t going to like it one bit, oh yes.
[close]



Chapter 13
Spoiler
Like many other stations catering to those who prefer not to advertise their presence, Port Ikonia around the planet of Catal in Thrace featured enclosed docking bays that offered privacy from casual snooping for a fee. These were generally meant to accommodate destroyer-sized vessels, but with a little clever maneuvering it was possible to squeeze a cruiser into one.

Hypothetically. As was tested when a loud, bone-jarring crunch echoed through the hallways of the PLS Valiant while it tried to reverse into one such bay.

“Bruno!” Archer snapped.

“It’s not my fault, Captain!” Chief Petty Officer Divila said defensively from the helm. “It’s geometry! Bay’s too narrow and ship’s too wide!”

“Hold on,” Jaitley said, before his captain could retort. He punched a few keys on his console. “Engineering, this is the XO. We’ve just collided with something. Get us a damage assessment and options. Clear.”

Half a minute later, the response came in, and he piped it to the captain’s display as well. “We’ve got a camera on the damage,” Rollyn Bracket said, her concerned expression inset in the video feed. “Looks like the port missile rack hit a maintenance catwalk. It’s slightly dented, but the diagnostic checks out. Can’t say the same for the structure, though.” Indeed, the cheap alloys had crumpled like tissue paper. “We could burn the rest of it off with one of the PD lasers,” she tapped the tips of her index fingers together rhythmically, “but the owners might not like that very much.”

“No point cancelling our reservation now,” Archer muttered. “Get the obstruction out of the way. If they complain, tell them to send the bill to the League.”

“Can’t,” Jaitley said. “We’re supposedly the independent mercenary vessel ISS Fortuna, remember?”

“Ah. Right.” Artemis throttled a scowl. “Guess it’s coming out of our discretionary fund, then. What’s left of it after a month of Sybitz cleaning us out.”

“You could always fire her, you know.”

“I think I might.” She shook her head. “But for now, I’d just like to get our ship docked nice and clean.”

Clearing the catwalk took another minute, and the Eagle eased the rest of the way into the bay without further incident. Fortunately the docking tubes were able to handle the ship’s twenty-degree tilt on her long axis, although actually using them would be an awkward proposition.

“Seal is green,” Jaitley reported. “But after what happened back in Algre, I don’t think any of us are in any real hurry to take some shore leave.” He looked at Archer. “I guess we may as well see about scheduling that secure interview with the commissioner.”



“Good afternoon, Madam Commissioner,” Archer said pleasantly to the plump woman on the conference room viewscreen.

“Good afternoon… Captain Archer.” Seeing the other woman’s eyes widen ever so slightly, Defense Commissioner Sezen Tevetoglu laughed. “Come now, Captain! Do you think our agents don’t make it a point of paying attention to such things? How do you think you got a piece of my always-too-busy schedule so easily?” Another laugh. “Oh, don’t look so down. We’re good at keeping our friends’ secrets, you know.”

Archer stared at her for a while, then exhaled slowly. “Alright, you got me. In that case, let’s skip the formalities and get to business, shall we?”

“Of course. What can we do for the League today, Captain?”

“We’re looking for a pirate leader named Dmitar Krešimirovic,” Archer said, leaning forward and resting her good forearm on the table. “I was wondering if you could slip us some help on that subject.”

“Ah, him.” Tevetoglu’s face turned sour for a moment. “May I ask what you want with Mr. Krešimirovic?”

“I’m sure you’ve noticed the recent, inexplicable upswing in the subsector’s pirate activity these past several months, Commissioner. We have reason to believe the pirates are receiving material support from an outside power, and our information suggests Krešimirovic may be able to… shed some light on this matter, shall we say.” Her eyebrows inched up. “Will there be a problem, Ms. Tevetoglu?”

“‘Problem’ would be one way to put it, yes.” The older woman grimaced. “Say better than our boy Dmitar and others like him have single-handedly thrown the Republic of Catal into its first recession in thirty-five cycles. My own son’s shuttle export business was pretty much ruined by the fact that half our cargoes never even show up at their destinations. And of course, the interstellars like Quasar have been more than happy to buy up the remaining scraps for a pittance.” Shaking her head: “It’s gotten to the point where he actually dares to show up in person on our turf. In fact, we’re actually monitoring him on the planet’s surface right now.”

Archer straightened abruptly in her chair, staring at Tevetoglu. “Shouldn’t you be arresting him right this instant?”

“We could,” the Commissioner said grimly. “And then what? Krešimirovic’s a loose cannon at the best of times, and the rest of his gang takes their cue from him. If we busted him, they might well launch a massive reprisal against us the next day, and with all the reinforcements they’ve been getting, they could hurt us pretty badly. Sure, they’d probably get trashed too… leaving someone even worse - like the Hatchet - to move in. Or maybe they leave the boss to his fate, and someone less inclined to substitute brutality for competence takes over the Claws.”

She paused, staring at her desk, then sighed. “Even then, we once decided it’d be worth the attempt. So a few months back, we tried to grab him as he was leaving Port Ikonia.”

“What happened?”

“It was a set-up,” Tevetoglu said flatly. “The team walked into an ambush. We lost seven good officers that day, and four civilians were killed as well. Thirteen other people were injured. And then, just for good measure, Inspector-General Stoichkov’s air car exploded with his entire family inside two weeks later.”

“Dear god,” Archer whispered, then shook her head. “I take it helping us is out of the question, then?”

“I don’t know.” She rubbed her forehead, pushing her muddy brown bangs out of the way, and straightened in her chair. “I… can’t help you officially, not without the Prime Minister’s approval and especially not until we’ve rooted out all the moles in the force. Unofficially…” she placed her hands on her desk, staring into the camera, “I can arrange for you to tail our mutual friend, if you promise not to do anything that might conceivably be traced back to us. In fact, if it’s at all possible, I’d strongly prefer it if he never realizes anything happened at all. Can you do that?”

“We’ll do our best, Commissioner. Subtle’s the word.”

“I’m glad you understand. Very well, I hope to get back to you in a few hours. In the meantime,” she put on a charming smile, “would you like to see the sights? I can arrange for a tour of the most popular destinations in Bospora for you and your officers.”

“Um.” Archer winced, a hand involuntarily going to her wounded shoulder. “Well, I… appreciate the offer, but I have a lot of paperwork to catch up on right now.” She grinned awkwardly. “Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to enjoy your hospitality.”

“I see. Well then, take care, Captain. Tevetoglu, clear.”



“Well, here we are,” Diata Mukendi murmured, hands behind her back as she stood studying the display of the station two light-minutes away from them. “Anything on their defenses, Matty?”

“Two frigates and an Enforcer-class destroyer are maintaining orbit with the station,” the Medusa’s AI said. “There is also a patrol with a Hammerhead, a Vigilance and a Shepherd directly ahead and closing, range two point seven light seconds. Five more frigates, two destroyers and a light cruiser are present elsewhere in the system, but none can arrive at the target sooner than two hours from their present position.”

“This will be fun,” Giulio Pizzati chuckled from the tactical officer’s station, and Mukendi turned to him with a raised eyebrow.

“Fun, Mr. Pizzati?”

“Yeah. A pitiful backwater-planet patrol against our might?” His grin was sadistic as always, she noted sourly. “It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“I’ll remind you not to take our opposition for granted at a time like this, Mr. Pizzati,” she said in a frostbiting tone. “Or would you like me to arrange your transfer to Adze Squadron?”

He winced at that, and she let him squirm under her glare for a few seconds before turning back to the master display. Good. Better for his gung-ho overconfidence to be corrected by embarrassment in front of his peers now than by Darwin’s laws later.

Mattock Squadron wasn’t the most heavily armed unit in the Black Hatchet, but it was the most disciplined - and not just by pirate standards, either. Mukendi kept her crew on a tight leash, and some of the rowdier crew had initially protested her leadership style. Openly, too, for a day or two - before she broke them, or disposed of them. Thereafter, the complaints were confined to muttering over card games or when alone.

But her methods got results, and the subsequent distribution of the loot among the crew quickly ended even the mutterings.

She studied the astrogation chart again. At the moment, ISS Razor’s Edge - no, it was DMS Razor’s Edge now, she reminded herself - and her escorts were pretending to be a legitimate mercenary fleet, en route to this quiet planet for resupply and possibly a little recreation. This would (hopefully) keep the locals from getting too suspicious and drawing in their dispersed units, until the attack started and the station picket was crushed decisively. Assuming everything went to plan, she ought to wipe them with no losses.

If.

The most likely way this could go wrong, she thought as she ran her fingers through her cornrows, was for the station team to get hit by some delay or other and miss their schedule. Or conversely (and worse), go out of control and launch the attack prematurely before Mattock could get in position. Which would just be typical of them. Most of Trojan Force was nothing more than common thugs and murderers, and the mercenaries leading them were almost worse.

I just hope we can get there in time and rein them in before they get too carried away. I am not going down in the history books as a mass murderer.

Diata Mukendi cherished no illusions about who and what she was. She’d joined the Hatchet because it was the best game in town, and she’d been playing it too long to start feeling pangs of conscience about all that she’d done now. But that didn’t mean she had to like the butchery that went all too often with piracy in this subsector, and even if Holk himself was perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to it, she wasn’t.

“Alright, Matty,” she said, sitting down in the captain’s chair. “Order all units to proceed to Point Alpha. Fifteen minutes of advance notice should suffice for Trojan, and I want us right on top of that picket when it kicks off.”



“What a rundown place,” Loz Sequeira muttered as he and Sybitz parked and secured their rented hoverbikes in an alley the edge of the abandoned industrial complex. “I wonder what they could possibly be doing all the way out here?”

“If we knew the answer, we wouldn’t be here,” Adela said. “Come on, we don’t want to miss the show.”

The derelict warehouses and factories stood silently all around, coats of paint ranging from bright red to soft beige slowly flaking off. One of the nearby buildings still bore the scars from a police raid on a drug lab not two weeks ago. The general drabness was punctuated only by rows of slowly wilting palm trees and the patches of grass eking out a tenacious existence beneath their fronds.

Sybitz peeked around the corner with the microcamera Archer’s Marines had loaned her. The gravtruck Krešimirovic had brought here was parked on a pad just outside one of the storage buildings, a guard leaning casually against it. There was no sign of anyone else.

“Another person on the other side of the building, by the west entrance,” Dragunova’s voice came in through her earpiece. “I think she’s just a chauffeur, though. Mohawk Pirate and his friends are just inside the entrance. No electronic traces except on their persons.”

“Understood,” Sybitz murmured, and gave the scene another look-over. The durachrome wire fence offered no concealment, but if they slipped around to the side bay where the now-empty cargo containers were piled on the grounds…



“Brand new T7 security drones, assembled right here on Catal,” the bearded man in a dark blue business suit said with a smile. His name was Hasyim Ismail, and his employer had given him the rather unenviable job of managing the pirate leader standing before him now. “Nanocomposite armor of up to twelve centimeters on the chest, 8.6 millimetre tribarrel capable of ten thousand rounds per minute, and can move at forty kilometres an hour on flat unpaved ground. I’m sure you’ll be pleased with them.”

“Maybe.” Krešimirovic looked at him suspiciously. “But I seem to recall being promised eighteen bots, and t’would seem there are but twelve here.”

“Well, yes. Unfortunately, the transport carrying the parts was lost on its way to the subsector, and we’ve had to scale back local assembly. Don’t worry, we’ll have them ready for you as soon as possible.”

“That wasn’t t’ agreement,” the pirate growled.

“The deal still stands, Mr. Krešimirovic,” Ismail said evenly. “You’ll get the rest of your droids when they get here. For now, twelve is still an ample amount of firepower in any boarding operation you might face.”

“I need all eighteen, and I need them now. T’is is not negotiable.”

“Mr.  Krešimirovic, you know we can’t-”

“Enough excuses!” he barked. Muscles flexed under the pale skin, and the two bodyguards on each side were already moving their hands to their weapons. “I know you have them. Hand them over. Now.”



The guard was pausing to check his rifle when Adela Sybitz slipped behind him, stunner in hand. He heard her approaching only at the last moment, and had just started to turn when she grabbed his shoulder and jammed the metal prongs against his carotid. He writhed with the involuntary spasms of the violent electric discharge for two whole seconds before she released the trigger and lowered his unconscious body to the ground beside the truck.

“I thought we weren’t leaving any fingerprints,” Sequeira said as he came to a stop beside her.

“Beats being seen and shot at with no cover,” she shot back. “Now be quiet, we’re missing the conversation as it is.”

She moved back to the wall of the building, inching her way towards the wide open entrance. The shouting was indistinctly audible even from here, and she frowned slightly as the camera showed her a situation that was clearly escalating to a standoff.

“Loz,” she whispered, reaching for her own automatic, “I don’t think fingerprints are going to matter any more in a moment.”



“Be reasonable, Dmitar,” the corporate representative said as pacifically as he could, holding his hands out. “I’d like to help you, really. But I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

“Then what good are you to me?!” Krešimirovic snarled, and Ismail felt cold sweat beading on his forehead as he recalled that item in the newest intel report on the Claws of Adria. It was only rumors, but they’d mentioned something about the pirate developing a methamphetamine habit… was this what he was seeing? Or had he simply always been the swaggering thug he seemed to be?

The guns were drawn and pointed now, and he found himself wishing he had a way to easily activate the bots and have them deal with this. He’d known there would be some trouble when they came up short with the delivery; in fact, there were only any bots to give Krešimirovic at all because they'd skimmed from a legitimate order (and that client was also having nasty words with the company, no doubt). But to react with this… this petulant tantrum, like a five year old who’s just been told that no, he couldn’t have any more candy?!

Of course, most five-year-olds aren’t allowed to have guns...

“I…”

The next two seconds went by in a flash. There was a deafening roar reverberating in the warehouse, savaging at his eardrums as someone fired an old-fashioned chemical-powered handgun. And then another, and another, and another. By the time he realized what was happening, he and Krešimirovic were the only ones still standing, four bleeding corpses surrounding them.

And the pirate was armed, and he was not.

He could only stare, wide-eyed, at the sight of the enraged criminal leveling the gun, squeezing the trigger…

And then Krešimirovic’s head shattered in a burst of grey, red and pink before his eyes, the supersonic crack audible a split second later.



“Tina!” Sybitz hissed over the comm.

“You were too slow,” Dragunova snapped. “Now hurry up before we lose both of them.”

That much, at least, she couldn’t dispute. She swung around the corner, gun drawn, and pointed it straight at the only man still alive in that mess. “Hold still, Mr. Necktie,” she said firmly, as Sequeira came up beside her with his own sidearm. “You’re doing pretty well so far at this not-dying thing, and it would be a shame if you messed it up at this point.”

He just stared slack-jawed at her for a second or two, and then his limo driver came in from the back door. The woman took one look at the scene, then at Loz Sequeira pointing his gun at her, and disappeared around the corner with almost cartoonish haste. Ismail bolted after her, and got almost four meters before Dragunova’s sniper rifle fired again and blew out his knee joint. He fell to the ground with a scream, scrabbling at the plasticrete floor as the two newcomers walked up to him.

Sybitz turned him over with her foot, her gaze intent as he trembled beneath her. “My, my. That’s a nasty wound you’ve got there. Does it hurt?”

“W-What are you talking about?” He sucked in a sharp breath between his teeth, clutching his ruined knee with bloody hands. “Of… of course it hurts!”

“Good. Now, I have a lot of questions for you, but for now I’ll stop the pain if you answer just one of them. Who do you work for that’s paying off pirates like Krešimirovic in the subsector?” He stared up at her, and she gave him a fangs-bared smile. “You have ten seconds to decide.”

For half of that time he stared sullenly up at her, then finally sighed, slumping back on the ground. “Ah, what’s the use. Quasar. Quasar Industries.”



“You’re serious?” Artemis Archer stared incredulously at her comm screen, then shook her head. “Sorry, stupid question. It’s just… I never expected something quite this brazen from anyone, even the most amoral dictatorship or interstellar corporation.”

“Yeah,” Sybitz said. “I kind of suspected something like this all along, but to have actual confirmation… According to Mr. Ismail, this whole project was the idea of the CEO, Kenneth Skilleton, done off the books. Apparently his idea was to ruin his competitors and weaken the national economies around here in order to extort things like trade concessions and such.” She frowned. “Judging from what we’ve seen around these parts, it seems to have worked quite well too.”

“Dear God,” the captain whispered. “It’s terrible… terrible, yet effective. No wonder none of the system governments here stood a chance. And on top of that massacre in Duval...”

“A real piece of work, alright. The question now is: what do we do about it?”

“I… I’m not sure. A revelation this big is going to involve a lot of discussions that are way above my pay grade.” Archer rubbed her forehead. “I figure we’re going to go public with this sooner or later, though.”

“And then what? All we have for evidence is the word of one relatively low-level corporate flunky, hardly enough for a conviction. And even if it was, I don’t think the League is going to try serving arrest warrants on the management an independent corporation not based in its territory. Nor are you going to declare war on it. Sure, you could probably still hurt them in other ways, but nothing compared to what that scumbag deserves.” Sybitz clenched her jaw for a few seconds, then took a deep breath. “Sorry. I know it’s not your fault. It’s just that…”

“...that seeing that guy get off practically scot-free for pillaging a dozen systems out of unbridled greed really sticks in your side. I know.” Archer flashed her a thin smile. “I understand. Still, I’m sure we can figure something out-”

The priority signal flashed on her console, and she turned to look at her comm officer. “Sorry, ma’am,” Lieutenant Gray said. “It’s a priority message from Commissioner Tevetoglu.”

“Ah.” Archer turned back to her screen. “Sorry, Adela,” she barely even noticed she’d just used the other woman’s given name, “but I’ve got to take this call.” She pressed a button on her console, and the original image shrank into an inset in the corner as another face appeared. “Can I help you, Commissioner?”

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything, Captain,” Sezen Tevetoglu said in a disturbed voice, “but we have a serious situation here.”
[close]



Author's notes
Spoiler
Big Revelation!™

Out of curiosity: Do you think it came out of left field? Was it properly foreshadowed? Or too obvious? Let me know :)
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.12 & 13: 2014-12-14)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on December 14, 2014, 10:06:41 AM
FU** YEAH, more Marenos Crisis!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.12 & 13: 2014-12-14)
Post by: SafariJohn on December 15, 2014, 10:12:16 AM
Two of the names are throwing question marks in place of letters.

Teveto?lu
Krešimirovi?
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.12 & 13: 2014-12-14)
Post by: Histidine on December 16, 2014, 04:31:59 AM
Two of the names are throwing question marks in place of letters.

Teveto?lu
Krešimirovi?
Oh dear. Seems the forum is messing up the Unicode somehow?

Test:
Spoiler
(all of these work fine in preview)
?
š
?
??
??
[close]
... okay, bug report time. I'll fix the fic later maybe, dunno. (EDIT: there we go)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.14 & 15: 2015-01-04)
Post by: Histidine on January 04, 2015, 02:13:35 AM
Sorry for the lack of updates, everyone! I, uhh, went on a Space Rangers HD binge... (you should play it BTW, it's a great open world space game)

To make up for it, here's yet another double chapter - includes the story's largest battle scene by text length yet. Enjoy!



Chapter 14
Spoiler
The first shots were fired at the security station on Level 3, East District, at 1427 hours local time.

Officer Orhan Asik was on guard duty at the loading bay, leaning against a section of wall between the big red blast doors and watching people go by about their business. Truth be told, he wasn’t really paying attention to them; it was a rare day when anything more serious than pickpocketing or shoplifting happened around here. Sure, there was the occasional armed robbery, but no-one in their right mind would commit it next to the police station, would they?  Instead he let his mind wander to other things, like what to get for his son’s birthday next week.

He did take note of the four men that came down the street together, each of them wearing a jacket or a longcoat. Such a number of people together was atypical, as was their clothing… but they walked past without anything in particular happening, so he didn’t think too much of it.

Until they reached the edge of his patrol position and wheeled around, and he only had a second to glimpse the rail-carbines they’d produced before his torso was perforated by a hail of metal.

Another officer came bursting out the door, alarmed by the sound, and was rewarded for his troubles with a pair of three-millimeter capsules blowing out his carotid and part of a vertebra. Two of the attackers ran forward under the cover of their fellows’ guns, one of them already pulling out a pair of grenades. A single frag went flying through the doorway into the walkway adjoining the cargo-filled bay, and two more cops who had been running towards the scene of the crime were swiftly blown into unrecognizable chunks of gore. The gas grenade that followed was almost anticlimatic, but it did serve to keep anyone else from doing further reckless charges.

While this was going on, the other man was producing a small box-shaped object from his bag. It took a few button presses to activate the device and set the timer, and he hurled it through the door as well before all four of them scattered.

The fuel-air explosion that followed fifteen seconds later killed thirteen people and destroyed three police hoverbikes, four crateloads of various spare parts, two repair bots and an entire armory of equipment. Yet by then it was already becoming a footnote to the chaos unfolding elsewhere on Port Ikonia.



Even all the way here in Private Docking Bay 02, Supakorn Ngamsan could hear - and feel - the explosions thundering in the west commercial district. It was an old, familiar sound, one that the broad-torsoed man with the close-cropped grey hair had heard many times before in the service of the Hegemony Marine Corps. But that was cycles ago, before the reports of brutality concerning his battalion had came to the attention of the JAG. Only his distinguished combat record had kept the repercussions from being more severe than a dishonorable discharge, but his career was over all the same.

So be it. He’d found a much more lucrative avenue for his talents.

He flexed his neck muscles, then walked out the Buffalo’s cargo hold as the loading ramp unfolded before him. Only one of the vac-suited technicians in the bay noticed him; the others were still staring in the direction of the bombings. The woman was gaping at him - hard to blame her, really, nobody had mentioned anything about the freighter being filled with heavily armed men in coal-black power armor accompanied by mobile gun platforms.

“Hey-”

He levelled his infantry tribarrel and sawed her in half with a burst of armor-piercing darts. Rifle fire did for the other workers, all of them dead before they could even think of warning those outside.

“Get the other bays locked down now,” Supakorn said firmly to the other mercs and pirates following him. “We’re proceeding straight to the command center.”



“Trojan reports the operation has commenced,” Matty’s dispassionate voice came over the comm. “Estimate 95% probability he will have disabled or seized the station’s defences within 23.74 minutes.”

“So it begins,” Diata Mukendi murmured. Her thoughts were only peripherally on the chaos surely unfolding on Port Ikonia now; at present, her eyes were on the tactical display, showing the understrength patrol that had come out to inspect her fleet. “Think they’ll abort and run back, or figure they can’t do anything about whatever’s going on back there and proceed with the inspection?”

“Insufficient data. But irrelevant. They cannot avoid action given the current geometry.”

“Mm.” She watched steadily as the Catal ships continued approaching for their scan - they were now scarcely six thousand kilometers away. Just a little closer, and…

Now!

The icons seemed to freeze on her plot as the inhibitor kicked in, tearing the patrol’s vessels out of the spacetime bubbles that let them cross interplanetary distances within days. It couldn’t have been entirely unexpected; the reason they were attempting to perform the inspection in the first place was because such a large combat fleet in this relatively undeveloped subsector was naturally suspicious, after all. But what they had been expecting didn’t matter, not against such an imbalance of firepower.

Mattock Squadron’s two Thunder wings swept over the patrol frigates as they tried to flee, disabling their engines long before they could escape the trap. The Shepherd’s drones swarmed over its attackers, slicing at them with mining lasers, and one fighter was destroyed outright and another forced to limp away with half its avionics turned to slag. But in their distraction, they failed to notice the true threat - not that they could have stopped it even if they had. An Afflictor unphased beneath the drone tender, and two antimatter bolts blew the latter into oblivion.

The Razor’s Edge pursued the Hammerhead, closing the distance with sharp flashes of its phase skimmer.  Finding itself cornered, the prey raised its shield and turned to face its foe, unwilling to go down without a fight. But such a decrepit warship, with its fractured armor and defective flux grid, was no match for a fully functional Medusa. Light autocannons chewed away at the older vessel’s shields before it could bring its front-facing weapons to bear, and Giulio Pizzati’s eyes blazed with evil glee as a blast from two mining blasters sent his target into overload.

From there, it was simply a matter of pounding away at the defenseless ship. By the time it recovered, two Brawlers had come up to add their medium guns to the funeral pyre, and the explosion that consumed the ship seven seconds later spat out a lifeless wreck in its place. Moments later the last patrol ship died, the Vigilance’s thin hull gutted by a pair of Harpoon missiles, those internal circuits that had not been melted in the explosions now fused and burnt out by ion cannon fire.

“Well executed, everyone,” Mukendi said simply, quietly. “All units, reform on me and advance.”



“What have we got?” Archer’s voice was tense as she leaned on the conference table, sky blue irises gazing at the render of Port Ikonia’s whorled spindle form in the center.

“Main force of unknown size advancing south from the private bays, headed for the central area,” Koniecpolski said, highlighting the route on the schematic with a crimson line. “There was a Buffalo in that one bay and a Tarsus in the other, which suggests an outsized company or so. Call it maybe two fifty to three hundred hostiles. Based on the surveillance feed we got before it was shot out, about a quarter of them will be armored, and they have at least one MWP, likely more.”

He looked grimly at the other Marines who’d joined him, the Captain, and Commander Jaitley around the table - Lieutenant Park, First Sergeant Mokhtar, and all four of his squad leaders. All of them could do the math; all of them knew they were outnumbered five-to-one - at least - and caught badly out of position at that. Some of them probably wouldn’t be coming back tonight.

“We can assume they intend to secure the space elevator and Central Security,” Commissioner Teveto?lu said, her worried face displayed on the wallscreen to the side. “This will keep us from moving reinforcements through there, and give them control of Ikonia’s guns. And with that fleet closing in…”

“I assume you have a Plan B,” one of the NCOs muttered.

“We’ve got a pair of Valkyries with Marines prepping for liftoff now; ETA twenty-five minutes. If they can unload, the invaders will be completely outmatched and will have no choice but to surrender. But if the fleet or the station’s guns gets to them…”

Archer traced a pattern on her console, and the station map scaled down to make room for a display of the space around the planet. “So in space, we’re looking at one Medusa, two Brawlers, one Afflictor, and one Gemini with at least two fighter wings embarked. And to oppose them, we have one Enforcer (D) and two Monitors.” She frowned. “Can your forces hold Ikonia’s defense controls, Commissioner?”

“I’m afraid not, Captain. We should be able to put the system in lockdown for a while, but…”

“I see.” Her face was hard. “In that case, Major, I want your platoon disembarked immediately. Once they’re all off, the Valiant will perform an emergency undocking and move out to meet the enemy outside the range of Ikonia’s guns, stopping just long enough to destroy their docked freighters.” The planet view disappeared, and the station schematic returned to its full size. “What’s your plan for dealing with the ground threat?”

(http://i.imgur.com/gWac8Lt.png)

“If they’re headed for the centre of the station, then that’s where we’re going as well.” Koniecpolski highlighted a fresh path on the schematic. “The platoon will move straight towards Security Central till we reach the east spindle access, then squads three and four will peel off to seize the elevator. The rest of us will continue on to the previous objective.”

“They’ve got a head start, but without power armor the bulk of their force will be slower than ours. They’ll probably still get to the elevator before we do, but we should be able to relieve Security Central before it’s overrun. It’s overlooking the inner boulevard and can fire on them as they approach; we’ll have to hope that gives the defenders the edge they need. What kind of defenses can your people muster at Central, Commissioner?”

“A few security bots, and some automated gun emplacements. You have to understand, Major, that we’re not a military force. We never expected to stand off something like this.”

“Can’t be helped now. What about your special response teams?”

She shook her head. “Most of them were dispatched to the terror attacks around the station before we realised what was going on. We’re recalling the ones that aren’t engaged right now, but…”

“If they get there, they get there.” He looked around at the table again. “Alright, time’s short. If anyone has anything to say, do it now.”

Sergeant Mokhtar raised a hand. “If we use heavy weapons inside the high-density areas, we’ll cause a lot of damage. Rules of engagement?”

The major thought for a while, then grunted. “If you encounter armored units, go ahead and turn them into kielbasa. Else, don’t fire any plasma cannons or missiles until I tell you to. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“Alright, then. We’ve all got places to be, so let’s get suited and get this ball rolling.”



As Archer left the conference room, a corner of her mind remembered to be grateful that Sybitz had turned down her offer of detaching a squad as backup for the Krešimirovi? raid. “Putting your armored heavies anywhere on the planet, much less having them follow me around, is at the very least going to make everyone suspicious once the witnesses start circulating. They could even blow my cover outright.” She grimaced. “As it is, half the subsector probably knows I’m a turncoat. I don’t think I’ll be able to ply my trade ‘round these parts after this.”

Well, thank goodness, Archer had carefully avoided muttering.

“Anyway, thanks for the offer, but we need subtlety for this, not firepower. Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” Adela smiled. “If all goes well, we’ll get your info and nobody will realise anything even happened.”

Which was how they’d successfully uncovered the Quasar plot, and she now had four whole squads of Marines to deal with this crisis instead of three. Thank god for little silver linings.

Now it only remained to be seen if they would live to make anything out of it.



“All units disembarked,” Mokhtar’s voice came in through the armor’s comm system. “A minute to assemble and we’ll be on our way.”

“Good,” Koniecpolski said. “Report when we’re ready and Captain Archer can take her ship out of here.”

He looked at the Marines in their mottled green armor forming up in neat ranks, the four-legged Mobile Weapons Platforms coming up behind with a whirr. Hardly parade-perfect, but parade-perfect was pretty much at the bottom of the list of things they needed right now.

Great. I’m a “major” in charge of a single platoon, about to lead them against five-to-one odds, with the knowledge that if we fail a whole planetary government is getting overthrown. Even with our superior training and equipment - thank goodness cruiser-embarked platoons come with a full set of power armor - this is going to be one hell of a fight. The recruiter sure as hell didn’t say anything about this.

“Man, if this works,” one of the privates said, tapping his plate shield, “I’m proposing to Commander Bracket right away. Don’t care if she’s a Navy puke.”

“Me too,” a female - and definitely heterosexual - corporal chimed in.

Koniecpolski suppressed a smile, examining his own shield. It was a simple sheet of multilayered composite armor for a starship, shaped into an elongated hexagon in the Valiant’s machine shop and attached with a clamp to the off-shoulder of his power armor. With it, he could be assured of protection from small arms kinetics and even (theoretically) light anti-armor single warheads across up to ninety degrees, and still fire his rifle two-handed. It might just save a few lives when First and Second Squads came charging down the boulevard with nary any cover.

“Well, in that case,” he said, “we’ll just have to make sure we all live to make it to the wedding, don’t we?”
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.14 & 15: 2015-01-04)
Post by: Histidine on January 04, 2015, 02:16:06 AM
Chapter 15
Spoiler
“Marine platoon has left the bay,” Jaitley reported. “All civilians have been evacuated. We’re ready to go.”

“Alright.” Artemis Archer looked at Chief Divila at the helm, her expression carved from stone. “Burn it, Bruno. No need to worry about accidents this time.”

“With pleasure. Fasten your seat belts, people.”

Two seconds to warm up the main thrusters and maneuvering jets, and then the PLS Valiant shot out of the bay in a screaming pillar of flame, scorching every exposed surface behind it. She swung around the station, coming to a halt outside Bays 2 and 3, and HVDs and phase beams fired ruthlessly at the ships docked within.

With no maneuvering possible and no shields to interdict the incoming fire, the result was a foregone conclusion. The freighters inside went up in massive fireballs, blasting their cradles into so much debris and burning everything in the vicinity. The bulkheads actually held - they were built to survive precisely such a disaster as this one - but in every other aspect, the only thing the port authorities would ever be doing with the docking bays again would be collecting the insurance on them.

The Eagle was already speeding off, ready to challenge the foes still ahead.



Deus!” Giulio Pizzati exclaimed as the computer displayed the thermal imagery of the explosion ripping out a chunk of Ikonia’s whorl. “Was that Trojan?”

“Possible but uncertain,” Matty answered. “However, it may be related to the cruiser-sized vessel leaving the station.”

“What is it?” Diata Mukendi said stiffly, her arms tensing as she leaned forward in her seat.

“Identifying… Eagle-class,” and she felt her blood run cold. “Transponder identifies it as the PLS Valiant.



The two security guards outside the central elevator shaft crumpled to the deck in a bloody heap, and Suparkorn Ngamsan watched as his mercs stepped over the corpses. Their light ballistic armor had never been intended to stop tribarrels or heavy infantry lasers, and the attack had reached them before they could finish evacuating the civilians from the area.

A couple of the pirates mowed down the stragglers, laughing at their screams; it was strictly unnecessary, gratuitous murder, but Supakorn wasn’t about to stop them. The heavy steel-cored blast doors had been sealed just ahead of them, but a combat engineer was already walking forward with breaching charges, sticking them to the grey surfaces. Four of them were attached in a rectangle before he ran back, the others promptly taking cover behind walls and around corners.

“Fire in the hole!”

The industrial-grade blast door was tough, but the seismic charges had been designed specifically to deal with such as it. They tore half a dozen large chunks out of it, the smallest the size of a ground car’s engine block, and sent them hurtling into the waiting area beyond. Into the breach went a pair of tracked MWPs, to be met with a hail of rifle fire. Ferrous capsules pinged and flattened against the hard armor as more of the security personnel desperately tried to stop the advance of those who had invaded their home city.

A few short bursts of MG fire dealt with that nuisance, and the armored mercs followed their robotic allies into the breach, seeking out the space elevator’s control center.



“Contact,” someone said over the comm net, and Koniecpolski jerked his rifle around to bear on the targets highlighted on his display. Two of the terror cell operatives were crouching near a wall beside the burnt-out husk of what had once been a clinic, taking pot-shots at a police officer. The cop’s incapacitated partner was lying in a pool of blood nearby, a bullet having punched clean through her left kidney.

“I got this,” came the calm voice of one of the fireteam leaders, and a rifle grenade darted from the side to just behind the target. The explosion that followed was small, but more than sufficient to do the job.

There were no more hostiles in the immediate vicinity, but gunfire and explosions were still audible in the distance ahead, and the major tensed at the thought of the corpses that were no doubt awaiting. He avoided looking at the charred and bullet-ridden bodies of civilians strewn about in this very corridor, instead watching one of First Squad’s medics as he tended to the wounded officer.

“Thanks,” the other officer said, still shaking a little.

“Any more hostiles up ahead?”

“Not until the elevator,” he said, accepting a water canteen from one of the other Marines. “But from the radio chatter, the main force has already reached the Inner Loop. I don’t think our guys will be able to hold out for long.” Not all the weariness on his face, Koniecpolski knew, was from the gunbattle he’d just been in. “Please, hurry.”

“We will. Anyone there we can talk to?”

“Captain Kostadinov’s coordinating the defence. You can reach him on wideband at 140.85.”

“Understood.” Koniecpolski signalled the others with a jerk of his head. “Double time, people. Those boys and girls out there are counting on the cavalry, and that’s us.” As he fell in behind First Squad, the spidery form of the MWP blazing a trail ahead, he thought: I just hope their faith isn’t misplaced.



“Incoming comm, sir!” one of the men reported sharply.

Hristo Kostadinov tossed the rifle magazine in his hand to another officer and got up from the open ammunition crate to walk to the communicator on the plastic table in the middle of the room. “Captain Kostadinov, Special Response Unit,” he said simply to the image of the hard-faced, clean-shaven man. “You are?”

“Major Koniecpolski, League Marine Corps. I’ve got a platoon coming to relieve you.” The noise of gunfire rang in the room, but the security officer continued listening to the crisp, clear bass on the speakers. “It sounds like you’re heavily engaged down there. How long can you hold out?”

“Like this?” He shook his head. “Place no bets on longer than five minutes. Definitely not ten. And the offer of assistance is appreciated, but one platoon seems… insufficient against what we face.” He didn’t mention the oddity of a major commanding a single platoon.

The Marine frowned slightly, almost imperceptibly, for a moment. “Right,” Koniecpolski said, smoothing his expression. “But I think we’ll surprise you with what we can do against impossible odds. What are your numbers?”

“Three security bots still functioning, but they’re bringing up more heavy weapons. About half the turret grid is up, plus forty or so people who can use a gun.”

“Got it. Is there any information you can provide to help us equalise the field a little?”

Kostadinov started to say something, but was interrupted by a rumbling explosion that shook the building and several unsecured objects toppling to the floor. He righted himself, then went on as if nothing happened. “Their lead elements…”



“Flank attack! Flank attack –”

Supakorn almost whipped his head around at the pirate’s exclamation on the comm net. Several indistinct noises followed, then a scream, and the transmission went dead.

He grunted in disapproval, bringing up the feed from one of the MWPs. The two miniature armored vehicles accompanying the elevator detachment were already turning around to deal with the newly emerged threat. They’d just gotten to the east elevator access when the blast doors opened - whoever the attackers where, they’d apparently managed to bypass the controls - and smoke grenades burst into thick grey clouds.

Then the power-suited figures came rushing through the fog, and he stiffened in shock. Even if he hadn’t recognized the color instantly, there was no mistaking the insignia on their breastplates.

League Marines!? Here?!

The MWPs opened fire immediately, their heavy ballistics cleaving through even the thick ballistic plates of their opponents, and the first two hostiles went down. Then the green glow of an infantry plasma bolt lit up the smoke a split second before it struck one of the vehicles dead center, and Supakorn stifled a curse as the feed went blank.

“Order Platoon Three back to secure the elevator,” he told his lieutenant. “The rest of us will proceed as planned.” If those incompetents can’t deal with this on their own, they can expect no aid, he did not add. That much was already understood, in this line of work.



The Edge’s phase skimmer activated less than a dozen milliseconds before the lead HVD round struck its shield, and Mukendi gritted her teeth. Another skip backwards and one of the Brawlers shifting to cover it, and the Medusa’s badly strained flux capacitors were finally able to vent.

She’d fought some tough opponents before, but this Eagle was something else entirely. She turned with far more grace than any ship her size had a right to, and when she fired it was rare indeed that she missed. Not even the squadron’s Afflictor could get behind her to threaten her unshielded engines, especially not with the Catal Space Force’s Monitor covering her six and that insufferable Gladius wing buzzing about. And there was no way she was going to take a destroyer and three frigates against an escorted cruiser in a head-on fight.

Jujitsu has overloaded!” Pizzati barked suddenly, and the pirate captain stifled a snarl as she saw the traces of ballistic fire streaking towards the frigate on her ship’s port. “Harpoons incoming!”

She started to bark an order, but Matty was already moving the ship to cover their smaller ally with its point defense lasers, and she shook herself. It must be awfully nice to be an AI, the thought wandered through her mind even as she watched the lasers - thankfully - catch all the incoming missiles short of their target. No jittery nerves, no stunned delays in reacting to threats, no sense of hopelessness…

But not even Matty’s cybernetic reflexes and wit could overcome the disparity of firepower in this slugging match, and she curled her fingers into a pair of fists. Then her hands were flying over her console, mapping out an attack pattern, and she punched the key to submit.

“All units, attack plan has been uploaded and designated as Gamma,” she spoke into the comm. “Execute on my mark.”

The four combat ships and two fighter wings of Mattock Squadron drew back for several seconds, staring down their foes… then drove forward simultaneously, converging on the CSS Oz.

Caught by surprise, the aged destroyer by the Eagle’s starboard side found itself facing a blistering hail of concentrated fire. Phase beams, flak cannons and PD lasers cut many of the incoming Thunders to shreds, but enough of them survived to loop around fire their ion cannons and Harpoon missiles at point-blank range. The Enforcer could not possibly shield against threats from so many directions at once, and circuits fused and hull plates shattered under the battering. Then the Afflictor was in attack range, twin, antimatter blasters discharging, and the Oz’s engines burst into crew-roasting flames.

But even as the Razor’s Edge closed in to finish it off, the Valiant was there, lunging ahead on maneuvering jets to interpose herself between predator and prey. The cruiser turned her righteous fury on her high-tech foe, and with a few of the Gladii breaking off their hunting the surviving enemy fighters to use their machine guns on a larger target, even the Medusa’s deep flux banks withered under the strain. It took a few seconds for the skimmer to recharge and make good its hasty retreat; a few long seconds during which huge, air-bleeding gashes were torn into its bow.

“Tch,” was all Mukendi said as she watched the wounded but still living Enforcer huddle closer to its companions for protection.



The Inner Loop was two wide road analogues, separated by a row of trees, with a tramway running down the middle of each road. The deckhead rose five storeys above, suspended lights shining brightly to match the midday on the dirt-bound city beneath the station. With the sudden pirate attack, the transit service had stopped and the crowds normally thronging the area had scattered in fright, often leaving their belongings scattered about.

“There they are,” Mokhtar murmured, as Koniecpolski looked through the recon drone’s feed and frowned. The defenders of Security Central were dug in fairly well, and they had a good number of heavy weapons, but the incoming volume of fire was far greater than their own. He suppressed a wince at the sight of the rocket streaking from the right, cutting a fiery path through the air till it struck the fourth floor, and a human body fell through the plume of smoke to hit the deck.

“Now’s our chance to hit them from the flank,” he said, zooming out a bit. “Rafe, what’s your status?”

“We’re driving them back, but they’re putting up a hell of a fight,” Third Squad’s staff sergeant reported. “I’ve already got three men down, and they’re starting to break out the heavy weapons.”

“But you can take the objective.”

The pause was brief, less than half a second. “Yes, sir. We’ll break them.”

“Copy. See you at the debriefing.”

The major turned back to his own looming battle, and his face was solid granite. “Leapfrog by squads to one hundred meters, then section full charge. Last fireteam from each squad and MWPs will suppress. Squad leaders, confirm.”

“First Squad confirms.”

“Second Squad confirms.”

He nodded, even though he knew no-one could see it. Rifle in hand, he raised his right arm high, then brought it down to point straight forward in a chopping motion. “Section, forward!”

First Squad charged ahead, exoskeletal “muscles” propelling them on the hard deck around the curve at thirty-six kilometers an hour. As the flank elements of the enemy force turned to face them, they came to a screeching halt, dropped behind their shields, and opened fire.

The mag-rounds zipped back and forth, but Janusz Koniecpolski’s men were largely safe behind their metallic barriers. Even those high-power rounds that would normally have penetrated either their shields or armor could not get through both at once, slowed and deflected as they were. In contrast, the pirates and mercs without power armor went down in bloody rows - as did those who did, once the plasma rifles and mechs’ light cannons got to them.

But for every enemy who fell, two more seemed to take his place, and one of his Marines stumbled, then fell as two burst lasers cut loose on her at once. Cursing, Koniecpolski dropped his rifle and drew a smoke grenade. It went flying forty meters along with two others, and the burning beams were suddenly scattered and decohered into harmlessness by the reflective particles. Second Squad was already running up and past them, forming a line just behind the smoke as blind-fired projectiles flew in both directions.

The clouds dispersed… and revealed no less than three tracked MWPs coming to the front of the invaders’ line, accompanied by at least two mercs with infantry missile launchers and one with the multi-launch armor-mounted version. The Trojan line was briefly punctuated by thick clouds of backblast and smoke, before the the League’s own, heavier mechs and the two missile-armed Marines of Second Squad answered with their own launches.

Point defense lasers did their best, but they couldn’t possibly catch them all. Of the twelve incoming warheads, four were stopped short of their targets, and two went wide and struck empty ground, the high-grade armor power armor protecting the Marines from the worst of the blast and fragmentation. The other six ripped through the squad, and one of the MWPs went down, collapsing in a leggy pile of scrap as its hull took a direct hit.

But their missiles were fire-and-forget, and sped on without a care as to what brutal fate had befallen their masters.

The heavy machine guns on the older pirate/mercenary MWPs were workable as an anti-missile defense, but they turned too slowly and their software was too primitive for them to be truly effective. They got but three of the ten incoming projectiles, and then the darts dove into the mess and fully repaid the carnage their victims had just before inflicted on others.

More of the League’s missiles had gotten through, the pirates and mercs were generally less well-armored, and they were more tightly packed. Warhead detonations and secondary explosions tore through them in a murderous orgy, gouging and pulping their formation, and even among their mechanical subordinates, only one survived for a First Squad plasma gunner to disable with a shot to the turret.

Those of what had once been an oversized platoon that could still run, did so. Most of them were no longer in a condition to do so.

Koniecpolski and the others came running up, killing any of the invaders still shooting at them, and then he brought up his armor’s optical magnification and stifled a snarl. A section of hostiles led by armored mercs was bursting through the front gate of Security Central, running past the crippled hulk of a patrol bot, and the surviving pirates were coming up to hold the rear. The objective was still a hundred and forty meters away.

“They’re inside,” Mokhtar hissed. “If we don’t catch them...”

Koniecpolski looked over his armored shoulder at First Squad, still largely intact, and the battered remnants of Second Squad. “Macklin, Nzuji, Wu, form on me and the spider. Rest of you, cover us.”

“Sir,” Corporal Wu began, “I don’t think that’s –”

“No time, soldier,” the major said firmly, taking a moment to reload his rifle. “With their perimeter breached, it’s up to us now to stop them before they get hold of the station’s guns. Move!”

And he took off down the boulevard at a dead run.



“They’re inside!”

Kostadinov looked up from his console just in time to see the officer who’d said that tumble backwards in a trail of crimson droplets, the projectile punching through her left lung before burying itself in the ceiling.

He looked around sourly at the dusty, pocked, bloody room around him. Of the seven people who’d originally piled in here, two were dead, and Inspector Ceylan might soon be joining them. Another officer was bent over him, dressing his wounds in a far more methodological manner than should have been possible under the circumstances. At least the cracks of mag-rounds striking the windowsill and the walls had stopped, probably because there was no-one left shooting at the pirates still outside.

“Battery Control must be protected.” He picked up a well-used carbine from table. “Mardin, with me. Turan, Bagryana, stay here, try to rally survivors.”

He didn’t even wait for their acknowledgements before speeding out of the room, praying he’d get there in time.



As Major (Acting) Janusz Koniecpolski rushed forward through the sleeting mag-rifle fire, the traditions of distant ancestors long left behind on Earth seemed to follow him. True, there were many differences. Despite being a career soldier, Koniecpolski had never been big on military tradition; his power armor was a poor aesthetic match for a good warhorse; and if someone had suggested attaching huge wooden wings to his gear to make intimidating noises, he would have politely recommended a good rehabilitation center.

It didn’t matter. At that moment, charging into the teeth of the foe, he was every bit the hussar of old.

The fifteen seconds it took for him and his impromptu fireteam to cross the distance seemed like forever to the other troops covering him, but they held somehow. Rifle, tribarrel, autocannon and plasma fire drove more than one would-be killer back - or down - for that precious quarter minute, and then Koniecpolski was in their lines. He vaulted over the still-burning husk of a destroyed MWP, one-handed mag-rifle fire perforating a pirate’s torso, and knocked out another with a shield bash that sent the hapless gunman flying into a wall.

The three handpicked marines had fallen in, now, and capsules and 40 mm grenades dispersed the stragglers quickly. With no time to dig in, the rearguard for the invaders’ entry team was neutralized in short order, and the major and his men went in as their mech parked itself outside the compound entrance, keeping any would-be pursuers at bay.



The two halves of the plastic double door flew open with a pair of sharp kicks, and armored mercs poured through the gap into the foyer. They responded to the low-power handgun shots bouncing off their armor with staccato rifle bursts and a single HE grenade, and Suparkorn Ngamsan’s tribarrel blew apart a security droid on the other end of the room.

Despite the flawless outcome of the exchange, he clenched his jaw in frustration. Ahead, between him and the control center for the station’s guns, he faced only the Ikonia security force’s desk jockeys and criminal investigation types. Good enough men and women at what they did, but no match for his war-bloodied mercs in a tooth-and-claw fight. But behind him and closing fast were the League Marines, tearing through their opposition like demons from the darkest afterworld.

How? It shouldn’t have been possible! A single platoon, however good, overcoming an entire heavily armed company?

But it was happening, all the same, and he had no choice but to deal with it. If he could take the control room and dig in till Mattock arrived and forced the station to surrender, he could still come out on top. He still had enough troops to hold the League back until then, and…

Actually, where was Mattock? They should have been surrounding Port Ikonia by now.

But that, too, was out of his control, and so he focused on the task in front of him. The lead fireteam was going around a corner now, and screams filled the corridor ahead as they hosed it with iron. In two seconds more they were moving again, the ex-Hegemony officer taking only a brief moment to double-check the floor plans the Hatchet mole had secured. Just five turns and two stairs down more, and all that would be left to do would be to breach the security door. That task they had more than enough firepower for.

A series of thumping explosions came down the hallway behind them, and Supakorn felt the urge to start running. The pirate “company” lacked the proper command & control net he’d have access to back with the Hegemony, so he’d only know how well the rearguard was doing when or if they reported in, but he suspected the answer wasn’t a pleasant one.

Regardless, there was nothing to do but keep moving. He just wished he’d brought some area-denial charges along.



The corridor was clear, except for yet more dead bodies and pools of blood. Koniecpolski tightened his grip on his rifle as he followed Sergeant Macklin past the perforated plastiglass office partitions, eyes wide open for the ambush he half-expected. But none came, and the only sound other than their footfalls was the gunfire further ahead.

The NCO burst past a double door into a cafeteria, then snarled as his shield caught a full burst of rifle fire. A laser struck his right torso, the vaporizing composite staggering him with explosive force, and he stumbled as more hits struck the shield.

But then Specialist Nzuji brought up her grenade launcher and squeezed the trigger four times. She didn’t have a direct line of sight, but she didn’t need one. Four plasma grenades went flying into the room, and none of the airbursts triggered more than five meters from at least one of the armored mercs engaging them. Any unprotected human would have been killed instantly; as it was, both the hostiles were sent reeling, nanocomposite “skin” fusing and deforming under the sudden fiery heat.

Koniecpolski rushed into the now-burning cafeteria, jumping over a molten puddle of what had once been floor tiles, and sent a table flying into one of the mercenaries. There was no time to take prisoners; he stepped over the man who’d been knocked to the ground, and fired a three-round burst straight through his visor, clenching his jaw only slightly as the translucent material was smeared with thick splotches of bright red.

There was another series of shots off nearby to his side, and the other red indicator on his display vanished as well. “Macklin?” he asked, still looking ahead for fresh threats rather than back.

“Armor’s compromised. My rifle’s broke, too.” The sergeant shuffled his feet. “Wish I could move the shield to the other side.”

“Grab one of these guy’s guns - if they still work - and bring up the rear. Wu, take point.”

“Aye, sir.”

They piled into and went down the stairwell off to the side, Koniecpolski frowning at the noise they were making. They’d gotten lucky with that last ambush, but fortune plays no favorites, and there were only four of them to lose.

He didn’t have a communicator that could reach the Valiant, and had no way of knowing how the battle in space was going; for all he knew the enemy had punched through and was closing in on Ikonia right this moment. Which meant they had to seize the station’s guns, one way or another.

“Kostadinov, what’s your status?”

“Inside Battery Control,” the harsh response came. “They’re outside. Doors secure, but I think they plan to breach…”

They’d almost gotten down the needed two floors when connection was abruptly terminated and the stairwell rumbled, a loud explosion sending shockwaves through the walls. “We’d better hurry,” he murmured.



Unexpectedly enough for the invaders, two of the men in the control room was not only not disabled by the breaching charge blowing the double door in, but sturdy and disciplined enough to fire their weapons at the intruders. One was using a mag-carbine, and at this close range even the relatively lightweight weapon was more than capable of sending tungsten AP rounds through the point man’s torso armor. He fell forward, power suit hitting the deck with an unceremonious thud.

The other defender’s scattergun wasn’t quite able to match that feat, but its lighter flechettes did carve through his target’s thin joint armor. Even from behind the helmet, the merc’s scream as three-millimeter darts shredded his right elbow was clearly audible.

Another burst from the carbine sent the third man through sprawling, but not before he triggered his own weapon. The rifle bullets went through the security officer’s unpowered body armor and the flesh and bone behind it, and he fell back in a dying heap. The fourth attacker followed up swiftly, killing the other man - and an unarmed technician behind him - with a pair of skull-shattering rounds, and then they shot up two more people - street cops who hadn’t been trained to stand up to a door exploding in their faces.

Supakorn walked in the large room, took one look at the the red warning signs flashing on the holo-screens, then turned to the control techs cowering under their desks and glared. “I want someone to help unlock and reprogram the system. You have three seconds to volunteer.”

They just stared at him, unmoving, till the three seconds were up. Half a second later, there was a cacophony of screams as one of them was shredded into a bloody carcass by a hundred tribarrel rounds.

“Two seconds.”

“I’ll do it,” one whispered hoarsely. “J-Just stop shooting.”

The mercenary leader nodded, and one of the armored figures stepped forward to help as the operator timidly crawled out from under the console.



“Four tangos,” Wu reported crisply, sweeping the microcam across the room. “All in armor, and one has a tribarrel. Could probably punch through any cover in there. And they’ve got at least one hostage.”

“Explosives are precluded, anyway. We need the controls intact.”

“Suggestions?”

“Two of them are facing away from us, and the third appears to be wounded,” Nzuji said. “Subtlety’d be wasted on this one. We’d better hurry, too; I think they’ve unlocked the controls.”

“Direct breach, then.” Koniecpolski started a five-second countdown. “Macklin, swap with Nzuji, then stay out here and cover our six. Rest of us, pick targets.”

The icon of his chosen mark turned green, and two others went blue. The milliseconds zipped past in flashing red digits, and he tightened the grip on his gun…
 
Wu was first through the door, mag-rifle snarling as he sent a fistful of tungsten through the nearest merc’s face and throat. The major was right behind him, aiming at the tribarrel-armed one near the centre of the room, but his rounds went flying overhead as the target ducked with remarkable speed. The distraction gave time for the merc further behind him to dive for cover as well, and Koniecpolski hissed even as he continued rushing forward.

Behind him was the sharp crack of a bullet striking hard alloy, and then the barking retort of railgun fire; the target indicator dropped to the floor and vanished momentarily after. Panicked cries of the would-be hostages filled his audio pickups, the sole standing civilian dropping to the floor and curling up in a whimpering pile, but he had other things on his mind.

The tribarrel gunner was wheeling around the corner, and his weapon sprayed lead at four thousand rounds a minute. The major heard Nzuji shriek in pain as her pavise was perforated, bullets cleaving through holes left by their earlier compatriots, and felt a punch in the gut as her indicator flashed to the orange of incapacitation.

Then the bastard was hidden again as Wu’s volley clawed at the plastic workstation, even as the other surviving merc blind-fired at Koniecpolski from behind cover. Fortunately he was able to bring his shield around to catch the supersonic capsules, and a fresh burst from the other Marine drove the hostile back down.

A vaulting leap over the console brought him on top of the enemy gunner, knocking the armored figure to the ground. He swiftly turned and killed the other tango with a burst to center mass, but then found himself falling as the one beneath him grabbed his leg with both hands and jerked it sideways with a full-body rolling motion. They separated quickly and stumbled to their feet, the Marine swinging his rifle around.

The merc grabbed the weapon’s barrel with one hand and shoved it aside, sending the triggered burst into the nearby wall, and seized the shield with the other. A sharp push sent his League opponent spinning, sprawling on the floor, and he leapt on the vulnerable Marine.

Koniecpolski flipped over just in time to catch his adversary’s arm, the monomolecular tip of the wristblade just inches away from his vulnerable throat. They grappled violently in a throwback to the oldest, crudest contests of strength between men, armored kneecaps driving into bodies with all the force their exoskeletal actuators could muster, voices each a snarl of hate and fury…

Until Corporal Wu Xunjian wheeled around the consoles at the other side of the room, rifle at the ready, and turned Suparkorn Ngamsan’s cerebellum into so much jelly with a well-placed squeeze of the trigger.



It took several seconds for the ferrous shell from the heavy gauss cannon atop Ikonia’s to cross the several thousand across space to where Mattock Squadron had driven back the station’s defenders. It took but a split second more for it to vanish in a blinding flash and a shower of sparks on the shield of the Razor’s Edge.

“Please tell me that was friendly fire,” Diata Mukendi grated as flux warning alarms rang out on the bridge.

“Negative.” Matty’s tone as he engaged the phase skimmer and sidestepped the following shot was as emphatetic as it was possible for the AI to be. “They have fired three shots now, with each trajectory intersecting our position at time of fire to within 16.2 centimeters. Barring an IFF system or target identification failure, prior probability of this is estimated at under six point four percent.”

“And we still haven’t been able to contact Trojan.”

“Yes. Additionally, the response force from Catal’s surface is now two point seven minutes out from Ikonia.”

She let out a long, drawn-out sigh. The enemy fleet was pulling back further, under the umbrella of their fixed guns, and she dared not follow them - not that it would have mattered much anyway, without Trojan’s troops in control of Ikonia. She’d had her chance to kill them and break through, and she’d blown it. Holk would not be pleased. He might understand, but he wouldn’t be pleased.

“Get us out of here, Matty. Our mission is over.”



The overhead spinal lights of the Inner Loop illuminated the ghastly scene at the makeshift hospital/morgue set up in front of Security Central, rows and rows of wounded  lying on white cots. The security officers who were still on their feet - there weren’t many of them, now - stood about awkwardly beside the armored golems of the Catal planetary army, keeping back the crowds of weeping families.

Captain Artemis Archer followed her lead bodyguard - one of her Marines, still in armor, as he gently but firmly parted the sea of people in their path. Her fingertips were oddly numb, and she couldn’t suppress a slight shiver at the low moans of the many patients or the persistent odor of antiseptic in the air.

The people she was looking for were off to one side, at a small wooden desk. “Captain,” a weary-looking Sezen Tevetoglu said, not even getting out of her chair. Janusz Koniecpolski was standing beside her, still in his armor but sans helmet, his face seeming to have aged far beyond his thirty-one years.

“Casualties?”

“We’re still counting the bodies,” she said morosely. “About seventy-two of the port’s security personnel are confirmed dead, along with sixteen of your Marines. We’ve got 213 civilian deaths so far, along with 167 of the invaders. Another hundred and two surrendered, and we’re treating some four-hundred-odd people from all groups for injuries.” She glanced, crestfallen, at the battered tower that had once housed Port Ikonia’s peacekeepers. “I suspect we’ll have a lot more work for the undertakers by next morning.”

Artemis closed her sky blue eyes for several moments, breathing slowly. She opened them again, her gaze sweeping across the victims of today’s events in the camp as doctors and medics frantically swarmed over them, and her face was a mask of iron when she turned back to look at the Commissioner.

“Kenneth Skilleton has a lot to answer for.”
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.14 & 15: 2015-01-04)
Post by: SafariJohn on January 05, 2015, 07:49:47 AM
That ground combat was very well written.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.14 & 15: 2015-01-04)
Post by: ArkAngel on January 05, 2015, 10:09:24 PM
As Hartlord said, very well written indeed. Was not expecting the attack on the station before I read the chapters. It was quite entertaining.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.14 & 15: 2015-01-04)
Post by: Histidine on January 06, 2015, 06:26:14 AM
I realised I haven't said this enough (or at all...?) before, so: thank you, everyone, for all the positive responses :) It's always good to know that one is on the right track.

Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.14 & 15: 2015-01-04)
Post by: SafariJohn on January 06, 2015, 07:02:55 AM
I realised I haven't said this enough (or at all...?) before, so: thank you, everyone, for all the positive responses :) It's always good to know that one is on the right track.


No it's not! You haven't posted another chapter yet! :P ;D ;)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.16: 2015-01-18)
Post by: Histidine on January 18, 2015, 05:47:14 AM
EDIT: Added a bit more scenery description
EDIT2: Added a new scene; correction to another

I realised I haven't said this enough (or at all...?) before, so: thank you, everyone, for all the positive responses :) It's always good to know that one is on the right track.
No it's not! You haven't posted another chapter yet! :P ;D ;)
Hah, you got me there :D Okay, here you go:


Chapter 16
Spoiler
Leaning on the conference table two days later, staring at the flashing red icons on the astrographic plot, Artemis Archer decided she didn’t like it one bit. To be sure, she’d known the details already, but seeing everything represented like this really drove home how bad it was… and how much worse it could get still.

“This is the confirmed list?” Rollyn Bracket whispered.

“As far as ‘confirmed’ goes, yes,” Ashok Jaitley said. “Memphis, Yunan, Algre and Ibers are all under the control of this… mysterious new entity. Secille is still holding out, but it’s under siege and likely won’t last much longer. It’s probably only a matter of time before most of the other systems go down as well.”

“Do we know who ‘they’ are?” Ross Diamond asked.

Archer shook her head. “No-one outside knows for sure; they’re keeping a tight lid on the occupied systems, and we haven’t heard a peep out of any station or planet once it fell under their control. But I doubt it’s a coincidence that their territory appears to be centered on Vaas.”

Hanna Battuta nodded. “You believe we are seeing the birth of a pirate empire.”

“And given the association we’ve discovered between Quasar Industries and the pirates, all sorts of worrisome possibilities spring to mind.” The captain’s expression was grim. “Whatever it is, it’s likely going to be more than we can handle ourselves.”

“So what’s the plan?” That was the displayed head of Adela Sybitz on a two-dimensional display screen; a few of the Valiant’s officers had expressed surprise at her being invited to this meeting, but none of them had really objected. There were just too many other things to be worried about.

“We should proceed immediately to Carda and reinforce it,” Jaitley said. “They aren’t technically a League associate member yet, but the diplomatic repercussions if it falls are undesirable all the same. Further, the safety of the Persean mission and citizens there need to be safeguarded. Navy reinforcements have likely already been requested, and we can link up with them for the counteroffensive.”

Archer looked at him. “Sensible. But I’m also worried about Quasar’s role in this. It’d be good if we did some more digging into them. Might be helpful if we could use Sekos’s military against the pirates, too.”

“Captain,” the XO said evenly, “if this is a Quasar plot to take over the subsector, walking right into their headquarters sounds contraindicated. And even if it isn’t, I’m not sure this is the best use of our time.”

“Carda will be fine on its own, Ash. They’ve got a pretty strong navy, and while the couple of destroyers we’ve got on station won’t add much power on their own, I doubt the pirates are willing to cross swords with the League just yet.” She tapped her console. “What we need the most right now is good intel. I think we’ve all had enough of fighting blind like this. Besides,” her face tightened, “once the smoke clears, Quasar’s probably going to destroy any evidence of their involvement. I want to stop them before they do, and I want to see the murderous scum responsible for this nailed to the wall.”

There were a few glances by the attendees at each other, but no-one voiced an objection. In fact, a collective murmur of approval went around the table.

“What about Catal?” Diamond put in. “Is it safe for us to leave them on their own here?”

“They’ve recalled all their fleet units and are holding their civilian ships in port. Commissioner Tevetoglu assures me that they’ll be able to stand off any force that isn’t significantly stronger than the one we fought off.” She frowned. “It’ll be hard on their trade for a while, but things should recover quite nicely when the pirate issue is dealt with once and for all.”

Her captainly gaze went around the table once more. “Anything else needs bringing up?” No-one said anything, and she nodded. “In that case, I’ll write out the message informing Fleet Command of our findings and intentions after this. In the meantime, how are our supply stocks?”



“Is this really necessary?” Loz Sequeira couldn’t help but stare at the bots removing the rocket launchers on the Armed & Reckless’s wingtips, their companions waiting nearby to fit the replacements.

“We’ve still got more than enough close-in firepower to gut any ship our size,” Sybitz answered beside him, her hands clasped behind her back. “What we’re lacking is a way to punch out the big boys when we need it, and this is just the solution to that. Besides, we can use the space freed up by the rocket magazines for more capacitors.”

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “Still seems like overkill to me.”

Five meters away, Valentina Dragunova scoffed, not even looking up from the maintenance console. “There is no such thing. There is only ‘open fire’ and ‘reload.’”

“Do you really have to quote that silly book every other hour?”

“Maybe if you’d try reading it, you’d be less of an embarrassing weakling!”

The conversation only got louder from there, and Sybitz had to cover her mouth with a fist to mask her chuckle. You guys, she thought, shaking her head. Up above, she saw the bots now moving on to the task of installing the new weapons - two Reaper-class torpedoes, shining scarlet in the light of the docking bay.

I just hope it doesn’t come down to actually firing them, a small voice whispered in the back of her mind, but she set it aside.



The face in the mirror never looked so sickly, Jennifer Lain reflected with a sigh.

In broad terms, it actually hadn’t changed at all. Generally smooth contours highlighted by the shoulder-length straight blonde hair, light brown irises, and typically sized and shaped nose, chin and lips, the last of which was colored a light shade of red as usual. It took a close observation to see the little hints like the fraying strands of yellow, the slight darkening under the haunted-looking eyes.

She turned away from the dresser, briefly closing her eyes. It’s nothing, really. I just can’t sleep, that’s all.

Yeah, can’t sleep. Wonder why that is.

She’d told herself she was only doing her job, that the one responsible for all this was CEO Skilleton, but that didn’t make it any easier. And if it did become easier… then what? She turned her head, glanced at her reflection again, then jerked away with a shudder at the piercing gaze that met her.

Briefly she wondered if Skilleton actually realised the full implications of what he’d done. He’d arrived just a few days before, and most of that time was spent hobnobbing with the ruling clique on Duval, so that he had no idea what was actually going on in the streets or the factory floor. Not that his fundamental arrogance or his obsession with his own lofty status would allow him to see what was in front of him even if he did. It was left to her to witness - and deal with - the resentment simmering beneath the surface, the little acts of resistance. The deliberate inefficiencies, the working to rule, the rare instance of minor sabotage.

To be sure, none of it was quite as bad as the open striking had been… yet. Who knew what would happen a month down the road, or a year?

And now there was yet another issue at the processing facility in Pynchet that required her personal attention. Exhaling sharply, she checked to make sure her white blouse and dark brown skirt were straightened out before starting to pack her things.



“Oh, look,” Lieutenant Commander Geraldine Cheah muttered. “Something interesting is happening for a change.”



From a distance, the Sekos system seemed like any other. A single habitable planet with cities bustling on its surface, ringed with satellites of various kinds. A couple of space stations drifted lazily, kept in place by the hi-tensile nanofibre cables of space elevators. Further out from the G3 system primary, asteroid mining operations were scattered about, and a single carefully guarded station siphoned hydrogen from a gas giant.

Even getting down and about with the locals didn’t always reveal the story. Knowing as ever the value of public relations (especially after the May Massacre), the system government was always careful to steer foreign visitors towards the most gilded districts of their stations and cities. Dazzled with all the pomp and splendour Sekos and its patrons could muster in the tourist and commercial areas, it was all too easy to overlook the skeletons in the closet. Unless one was already prejudiced against the local polity, or otherwise inclined to dig a little deeper than that…

“Ugh,” Diamond muttered, briefly taking his eyes off the dossier on his wristcomp to look at the planetary display on the main plot. “I can sense the stench of fascism reeking into the ship already.”

“You don’t approve of the local government, I take it,” Battuta said tonelessly, looking at him from her astrogation console.

“It says here they average thirteen public executions a cycle. Thirteen! What kind of dystopian hellhole even has one?”

“Actually, at least eleven polities in the Sector are known to actively practice it. Another thirty-four are recorded as doing it at least once since the Collapse.” He stared at her, and she lifted a hand. “I’m not saying it isn’t a horrible practice. All I’m saying is that it’s not all that extraordinary.”

“Well then, maybe we need to change the meaning of ‘ordinary’!” Diamond snapped.

“Calm down, Ross,” Archer cut in. “Got a read on those big ships docked at the station yet?”

The lieutenant commander had the grace to look abashed. “Um, sorry, ma’am. Alright… there’s an independent-flagged Atlas doing a transshipment, and a couple of escorted cruisers registered to Quasar Industries. He paused, then sat up abruptly. “Whoa, transponder identifies the Apogee as the QIS Overseer. If the database isn’t mistaken, it’s basically a private yacht for their top executives.”

“That’s… interesting. Does it say who it is?”

“No, ma’am. But I expect we’ll find out soon enough.”



“...so,” the engineer said as he lead the small party through the loading bay, “we were able to resolve the immediate problem with the gangue contamination, but the smelter continued to…”

General Manager Lain heard the words, but her mind was elsewhere. The technicians moving about the machinery around them seemed… unusually tense, for lack of a better descriptor. That was expected to some degree, with an inspection by the highest-ranked Quasar executive permanently stationed in Sekos, and it had only gotten more pronounced since that incident. But this was different somehow. Like they were waiting for something…

“Look out!”

Her head snapped to a pounding noise not far away, and was greeted with the sight of a five-metre utility mech charging at them, a rushing titan of grey and blue. She froze for almost a full second, gears racing in an effort to comprehend the situation, and then one of her bodyguards lifted her up and was spiriting out of the machine’s path.

The other guard drew a heavy gauss pistol, standing his ground as he levelled the weapon in a two-handed grip and fired. Wide-bore capsules struck the thick plastiglass in front of the cockpit over and over, denting and fracturing the material, but the machine didn’t even slow down. It raised both arms and brought them down, and he rolled out of the way a split-second before two meganewtons of hard metal cracked the ground where he stood.

He wheeled around and fired again and again, capsules ricocheting off the mech’s hard body. He didn’t even notice one of the technicians retrieving a gun of her own from a trolley - a much smaller pocket pistol, but scarcely less lethal for its size - till the woman opened fire. The two small-caliber shots that connected didn’t penetrate his low-profile body armor, but they nevertheless struck with bruising force that sent him reeling. She adjusted her aim quickly, before he could turn his gun on her, and put a single round through his left eyebrow.

Fifteen meters away, Lain gasped as her other bodyguard was swiftly dispatched in a bloody mess as well. He’d set her down next to a wall and unholstered his gun, ready to assist his partner, when a dozen flechettes from a scattergun shredded his torso. He was dead before he hit the ground, and yet the man who’d killed him walked over him and blew his face into a bloody ruin for good measure.

More gunfire and screams echoed from elsewhere in the building, and a blanched Jennifer Lain looked up from the ground to see a gaunt, bronzed figure with an automatic rifle advancing towards her. The gun was pointed straight at her collarbone, and she felt a cold sweat beading on her neck as she stared into the man’s hard grey eyes.

“Hello, General Manager,” Felipe Arrastia said in a voice of frozen helium.



“I’m very sorry, Captain,” the 3D image of the pleasantly attractive officer said, “but I can’t possibly arrange a meeting with Director-General Bellerive on such short notice. She’s a very busy woman, you know, especially with all the civil disorder going around these days.”

“I’m not asking for a meeting!” Archer snapped. “I just need a few minutes of comm time!”

“All the same, Captain, the director-general is…” she looked nervously offscreen for a moment, “...preoccupied at the moment. I’m sorry, it’s an issue of national security. If you’d like to leave a message, perhaps we could…”

The League officer let out a long, drawn-out breath. “Fine. You tell your boss to let me speak with her within the next twelve hours, and she stands to collect a sizeable monetary reward for herself. Else, I get what I need some other way and leave, and in six months she faces a tribunal for her involvement in interstellar piracy and crimes against humanity.” Fangs bared: “How about that?”

A carefully manicured hand went up to the woman’s collar. “Surely… you can’t be serious…”

“You damn right I’m serious!” Archer brought her left palm down on the table with an explosive crack. “And my name isn’t Shirley!”

“I’ll… I’ll be sure to inform her, Captain.” She shuddered, her hands shaking. “Just… just give me a minute.”

“Good,” the Valiant’s CO said. “I’ll be waiting. Archer, clear.”

The projector disengaged, and she sighed as she turned back to the schematic of the Quasar station she’d been examining. Any temptation to try a raid, even assuming she didn’t mind any evidence acquired in this manner being summarily thrown out, was instantly depressed by the sight of the torus-shaped structure. It could bring the firepower equivalent of a battleship to bear on any one target, and in what she could only describe as a fit of paranoia, the documentation suggested an entire battalion’s worth of security droids on standby in the station. There was no way she could justify sending her now-understrength Marine platoon into that.

A chime sounded from the communicator, and her finger on the receive button brought up the familiar caramel face of Lieutenant Belle Gray. “Transmission from the Sekos Security Directorate, Captain,” the communications officer said. “It’s coded as high priority.”

“Well, that was quick,” Artemis murmured. “Put them through, Belle.”

This time it was the two-dimensional screen on the wall that flickered to life, and she turned to face it… then paused, eyebrows raised. The broad-shouldered woman in the grey uniform she’d been expecting was there, alright, but a couple of other obvious bigwigs were also present. The heavyset man in the expensive-looking suit at the end of the table was…

“Captain Archer?” he said, in a tone that sounded like it was trying a little too hard to be courteous. “My name is Kenneth Skilleton, and I am CEO of Quasar Industries. We have a situation we would like the Persean League’s assistance in resolving.”

“Situation.” The perfectly neutral, innocuous word was surprisingly sour in her mouth. “Explain.”

“Four hours ago, terrorists took control of an ore processing facility in Pynchet belonging to Quasar Industries, Captain,” Michèle Bellerive put in. “They’ve taken hostages and rigged the compound with explosives. We have them surrounded with no chance of escape, but they’re dug in, and one false move could cause a lot of deaths and cost Quasar a considerable amount of damage.”

And I’m sure that’s the order of your priorities, Archer did not say. “That is concerning, alright. Who are they and what do they want?”

“A group of Quasar employees and planetary dissidents, as we understand it. Their stated demands are, and I quote: reparations of a thousand credits each to the next-of-kin of those killed in the May incident, removal of all Quasar business operations in the Sekos system, and a ship to take the conspirators to a planet of their choosing.” She shook her head. “It goes without saying that neither the government nor CEO Skilleton will in any way accede to any demands by a terrorist organisation.”

“Okay. But I’m certain you can deal with it out of your own resources, and I don’t see how much we could add. Why do you need my help?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Skilleton’s tone was testy. “If the Sekos government - or Quasar Security - is the one to break the terrorists - no matter how much they deserve it - the media windbags will be bloviating for a month about our ‘heavy-handed methods’ and ‘the terrible lengths’ to which we’ve driven them. Whereas if it’s the League that resolves the matter, it’ll be seen as what it is: a police action against a violent extremist group.”

“I see.” Her right hand was safely under the table, and she could clench her fist without anyone noticing. “Now tell me just one thing: why would I agree to this?”

An indignant reaction immediately started boiling around the table, but Director-General Bellerive held her hands out. “Calmly, gentlemen!” she said urgently, shooting a quick glance at Skilleton before turning back to the naval officer. “Please, Captain. I know you may not approve of our government or Quasar Industries, but if this situation isn’t resolved cleanly, a lot of innocents will be killed and our society will be thrown into a state of panic. Everyone is hopeful that we can get the hostages out safely, and the Persean League has a good reputation in the Sector, both militarily and diplomatically. If you were to throw your support behind us, we’re confident of a positive resolution to the situation.”

“Further to that,” Skilleton said, “Quasar Industries possesses a significant degree of wealth and influence, as I’m sure you know. We are prepared to… demonstrate our appreciation in an unambiguous manner should you be successful in this effort.”

Archer’s eyes narrowed at the implied bribe, but she made no comment. “Fine. Suppose I were to offer my assistance on the matter. Are you just asking for a Marine breaching squad, or do I get to talk to them first?”

“It would be most ideal if you could persuade them to surrender, yes,” one of the other men at the table said. “But under no circumstances are you to make any promises on behalf of the Republic of Sekos.”

“Very well, then.” The orange-haired captain throttled the urge to sigh again; wouldn’t do to let it out in front of her audience. “Have one of your officers ready with details to liase with me and my Marine SO. If he can persuade us that this problem of yours merits our attention, I’ll see what I can do. That’s all I’ll commit to for now. Will that be sufficient?”

The people around the table in the dirtside office looked at each other, a few whispers (inaudible - they’d put the transmission on mute) seen going around. Then they looked at her again, and Bellerive nodded. “As you will, Captain. We expect to hear again from you soon. Clear.”

No sooner had the screen cleared than she went ahead and let out that sigh. The villain himself asks for my help. What have you gotten yourself into this time, AA?



Two hours later, she was wearily rubbing her eyes. “Recap the situation for us, Ash,” she said, turning to her XO. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

“Some time this morning, terrorists infiltrated the Quasar Industries rare earths processor on the outskirts of Pynchet, the capital city of the planet Duval. At 1136 hours local time, during a visit by General Manager Jennifer Lain, Quasar’s seniormost representative in the Sekos system, the gunmen produced weapons and seized the facility. Several security personnel were killed or captured, and Lain and a number of other management types were taken hostage. Most of the workers were allowed to leave, but a few remained in the plant; we believe they’ve thrown in their lot with the terrorists. Further, they’ve rigged the building with a couple hundred kilograms of blasting compound, and are threatening to set it off if the security forces attempt to engage them.”

“The leader,” he continued, “is a senior supervisor at the factory named Felipe Arrastia. Apparently his wife died in prison a decade or so back, and his son was killed in the May Massacre. Most of his cell fit a similar profile, actually. The psych report the government has on him didn’t indicate any abnormalities in particular - he seems like a rather quiet sort, in fact - but he could have been hiding it really well. Right now, though, we can’t assume he’s in fact unwilling to inflict a lot of death and destruction for his cause.”

“The terrorists number perhaps fifteen to twenty, and are all quite heavily armed, with military-grade rifles and at least one plasma lance. It’s unclear how good they actually are with those guns, though. Of course, they’ve still sitting on top of a lot of explosive, and they’ve got respirators to thwart any attempt at incap gas attacks, too. Whoever they are, these guys planned this out well.”

They looked at the display of the plant grounds again. Assaulting the compound through any one of several avenues would be simple enough; they could even airdrop out a shuttle straight through the roof into the building if so desired. Only it wouldn’t do a bit of good; as soon as the hostiles realised they were under attack - or if they had a dead man’s switch - the entire facility and everyone into it would be blown into entrails and debris.

“Truth be told,” Koniecpolski murmured, not taking his eyes off the plot, “I don’t think we’re going to resolve this with the use of force.”

Archer watched him as he made a few marks on his tablet, studying his tight face. “You have something on your mind, Major,” she said after a while. “May as well spill it.”

He jerked his head up at her, then shook it. “Alright, Captain. I’ll be honest: I don’t like people who take hostages and threaten to blow them up, as a rule. But,” his voice carried the tang of curdled milk, “I like doing the dirty work of people like Skilleton and the junta around here even less.”

“Indeed?” She tilted her head, then smiled thinly. “As it happens, I feel the same way. And since, as you’ve just said, we won’t be able to do what they want anyway, I think we can all agree to do it my way instead.”

“And that would be?” Jaitley was suddenly wary.

“I’m going down there in person. I intend to meet with Mr. Arrastia and come to an arrangement with him.”

The objections came at once. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Captain,” the XO said firmly. Koniecpolski was harsher: “Are you out of your mind?”

She met their indignant expressions with a calm blue gaze. “I appreciate your concern, gentlemen, but I’ve made up my mind. I want a shuttle and a Marine squad prepped to go within the hour.”

The major dropped a heavy fist on the table. “Did you forget what happened at Mazic already? Or do you intend to lose the other arm as well?”

“No, I haven’t and I don’t.” He started to say something more, but she raised her hand. “I admit I didn’t display the best judgement back in Algre, Major, but this is necessary. I need to go down there and negotiate with them personally; or how do you think it’ll look if I hide behind one of my subordinates for something like this? Besides, I assure you, Arrastia and his men won’t be a threat to me.”

“We may sympathize with them, Captain,” Jaitley cut in, “but ‘sympathize’ isn’t the same thing as ‘stable’ or ‘safe.’ What makes you so confident?”

“It’s simple.” She looked at Koniecpolski, fighting down a grin as his eyes widened. “Because you’re coming with me, Janusz.”



The shuttle they’d borrowed from the Duval planetary authorities carried Archer, Koniecpolski and two squads of Marines - an intact First Squad, plus what had become Second Squad after the rest of the platoon had been recombined from three battered squads into two full ones. It brought its passengers through a screaming atmospheric reentry to the site of the siege, settling gently on a nearby pad occupied by the figures in urban camo of the Special Intervention Battalion.

The opening hatch made a low hydraulic noise, and Archer had to briefly lift a hand to block out the bright rays of the late afternoon sun. Lowering her gaze, she followed the Major and the lead fireteam down the ramp, the soft taps of her boots on the metal contrasting with the heavy thumping made by the power-armored Marines. They quickly and efficiently formed a perimeter outside the entrance, and she stepped forward to meet the man awaiting them.

“Captain.” Colonel Christos Zorbas was exactly as she’d remembered him from the conference: a rather short, narrow figure between his elite bodyguards, with a face that reminded her a little too much of an Old Earth weasel. It was easy for her to imagine him with rounded glasses resting atop his long nose in an ancient era.

Of course, as she’d known from even the brief dossier on him that NavInt had supplied her, appearances could be deceiving.

Her eyes flickered to his grey-green uniform. It bore quite an impressive collection of awards and decorations, although at that it was nowhere near the cacophony of colors she’d seen festooning the outfits of the more senior military rulers, and she wondered if any of them had any particular meaning. Her own white service uniform had itself an extensive collection of ribbons from her various tours of duty, but she’d brought along only a single medal: the Star of Perseus that had been pinned to her chest after Saghalien.

“Colonel,” she said, carefully masking her distaste as they shook hands. “I take it the arrangements for my entry have already been made?”

“Yes,” he said, a little stiffly, turning to lead her to the factory entrance. “It is most unfortunate that we have been forced to this, really. I believe I speak for most when I say it would be much preferable to be able to move in and wipe out every single one of these violent anarchists. We ought to be sending a clear message to their kind, not tacitly endorsing their murderous methods.”

She remained quiet, but her face hardened, and she had to carefully force her fists to unclench. Yeah, they’re murderous, alright. And how many people have you killed, Colonel? And can you honestly say it was for a more worthwhile cause than theirs?

The party walked past the entry checkpoint. It was normally secured with a heavy iron gate and twin guard posts with automated MGs perched atop the roofs, already a higher level of security than she’d expected from a civilian facility. Now the gate was open, but the entrance had been  barricaded and covered with a crew-served heavy tribarrel and a cannon-armed IFV.

From there it was just a little further on, down the access road - surprisingly pleasing to the eye, she noted, with the pine trees on either side of the paved surface - to to the Security Directorate’s perimeter. Armed soldiers and terrorists stared at each other uneasily over a distance of forty meters, weapons not quite pointed away from the people on the other side.

“You’ll be going on ahead,” Zorbas said, coming to a stop. “We’ve arranged for you to bring two of your Marines along, with their weapons.” He turned to face her, eyes narrow. “The Republic of Sekos would like to remind you that under no circumstances are you to imply that any demands for ransom, safe passage or amnesty will be met. The only acceptable outcome is for Felipe Arrastia and his men to free all the hostages, disarm their bombs, and surrender to face trial before the courts. Is that clear?”

“Of course,” she said, without so much as a nod. Then she turned away, walking towards the foreboding shape of the main complex with Major Koniecpolski and the newly-promoted Sergeant Wu one step behind her.
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.16: 2015-01-184)
Post by: SafariJohn on January 18, 2015, 08:05:10 AM
NO!!!!! It's even worse than before! Damn you CLIFFHANGERS!!!!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.16: 2015-01-184)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on January 19, 2015, 02:40:20 PM
*ends on a cliffhanger*
I hate you...
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.16: 2015-01-184)
Post by: SafariJohn on January 19, 2015, 03:37:43 PM
Readers are a fickle bunch. (http://cdn-frm-us.wargaming.net/4.3/style_emoticons/wot/Smile-tongue.gif)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.16: 2015-01-184)
Post by: Histidine on January 20, 2015, 05:50:42 AM
Anyone else having problems with forgetting that Artemis's right arm is in a sling? I remembered right up until the part where she expresses her frustration by shoving both her hands in her pockets. Yeah. (and it'd look really silly if done on only one side, too.) Fixed now.

Also added another scene to the chapter (it's the second one now) because I forgot it had to be there.

NO!!!!! It's even worse than before! Damn you CLIFFHANGERS!!!!
*ends on a cliffhanger*
I hate you...
Huh. Considering that'd I'd already ended at least three chapters before this (5, 10, 13) with cliffhangers, so I figured you guys would be used to it by now. In fact, I was worried it was starting to become cliche  ::)

Dirty little secret:
Spoiler
I actually had chapter 17 already fully written at the time I posted 16, but I didn't have time to proofread and format it. Also I wanted to have something to post this weekend. :D
(Torches and pitchforks are that way --->)

For most of the fic I tried to keep a few chapters fully written in advance of publication at any one time, but I used up my buffer somewhere around ch. 12 or so.
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.16: 2015-01-184)
Post by: SafariJohn on January 20, 2015, 09:08:08 AM
NO!!!!! It's even worse than before! Damn you CLIFFHANGERS!!!!
*ends on a cliffhanger*
I hate you...
Huh. Considering that'd I'd already ended at least three chapters before this (5, 10, 13) with cliffhangers, so I figured you guys would be used to it by now. In fact, I was worried it was starting to become cliche  ::)

Readers are a fickle bunch. (http://cdn-frm-us.wargaming.net/4.3/style_emoticons/wot/Smile-tongue.gif)
I'ma ninja!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.17: 2015-01-25)
Post by: Histidine on January 25, 2015, 02:53:51 AM
You like cliffhangers? Here, have MORE cliffhangers!



Chapter 17
Spoiler
The place was eerily silent with all the machinery shut down and idle about, Artemis thought as they entered the main processing area. She quickly scanned her surroundings, noting the gunmen maintaining a careful watch from seemingly every angle, both on the floor and the catwalks above. Many of them were wearing face coverings of one kind or another, and the others were too far away to get a good look at them. Yet even from this distance, their body language communicated their mistrust without any room for doubt.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Captain,” Koniecpolski whispered over the comm.

She started to reply, but then they came to a stop in front of the taupe-haired man they’d come to meet, standing between a pair of conveyor belts. Two guards stood behind and on either side of him, faces grim, flechette guns at the ready with spare magazines hanging from their utility vests. Their gazes met - his grey, her teal - and she could sense the tension in his narrow body.

“So, the League officer comes to do her master’s bidding,” Felipe Arrastia half-growled. “How much is old man Skilleton paying you for your services?”

“You don’t have to be rude, Mr. Arrastia.” She lifted her hand, bringing it to her chest as she bowed slightly. “I’m Captain Artemis Archer, League Navy. I’d like for us to talk and resolve this unfortunate situation without bloodshed.”

“Words,” he muttered. “I’m sure, of course, you wouldn’t be happy if you could just cut all our throats and walk away.” His eyes drifted briefly to her right arm, still in its sling, and his expression was a little less sour when he looked at her again. “Fine, suppose I believe you. Has the government agreed to our demands, then?”

“No. In fact, I’d say they reject your right to make any demands to begin with.”

He scoffed. “Of course. We have nothing to talk about, in that case. Why are you even here?”

“You know full well they’re weren’t ever going to get rid of Quasar, or let you walk away from this.”

“So we did.” His eyes were hard as diamonds. “We knew our lives were forfeit the moment we made our move. The only question is how many of those who have wronged us, those who have inflicted so much misery on the people of this world, will we take with us.” He looked up at the blue sky, clear through the skylight overhead. “I wouldn’t expect a cushy core worlder like you to understand, but… some things are worth dying for.”

She spread her arms. “You don’t have to take that as a given. Nobody needs to die today, if only you and I can come to a fair and just agreement.”

“Spare us your sweet-talk, Captain,” he growled. “We’re in no mood to hear it. Not when all your words are in the service of those who have brutalised us all our lives. Not after everything we’ve lost.”

“Like Enrique?”

The name startled him for a moment. Anger bloomed on his face, and he tightened his grip on his rifle as the guards’ weapons snapped up to cover her. “How dare you? What do you know about him? How dare you speak his name?”

“I’m not going to say I know what it’s like to lose a son,” she said quickly, holding up her hand. “But I understand why this is personal for you… and for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for your loss. I truly am.”

He glared at her for a few fulminating seconds, jaw clenched, then slowly lowered his gun, the other two terrorists doing the same. “I… thank you for your expression of concern. Even if I’m not prepared to completely grant your sincerity just yet. But it makes no difference. It will take more than your sympathy to dissuade us from our path.”

“Listen,” she said gently. “I know you want revenge; you want to make a statement. But Sekos needs more than that; it needs genuine, lasting change. It needs to become a place where nobody has to die as your son did. Blowing yourself and a few score other people up won’t make that happen.”

“And yet you ask us to surrender without a fight?” His voice was harsh, bitter. “You think if we lay down our arms and renounce the use of violence, the generals and managers will see the error of their ways and fall to their knees in guilt?”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that. I’m… working something out, but first I need to see your hostages. Will you take me to them?”

He paused for a while, examining her even expression, briefly glancing at one of the men beside him. “Fine,” he said after a while. “But if you try anything, you’ll die with them. And leave your Marines here.”

Koniecpolski started to object, but Archer was already waving him down. “Very well, sir,” she said, nodding. “Lead on.”



A hundred and fifty kilometers above, Commander Ashok Jaitley stared uneasily at his display, his hand sweeping a wide arc as he panned the view of the siege.

The captain hadn’t told him all the full details of her plan, but he knew just what it was she was trying to accomplish. Which in turn gave him an idea of how… forcefully the Sekos system authorities would object if they found out. And with the better part of a battalion of security troops surrounding her and the two squads of Marines she’d taken…

He rubbed his mustache, a habit his wife had tried for years to dissuade in vain. He couldn’t reach her now, not since she’d gone into the building and under the umbrella of the jammer Arrastia’s men had set up. But the Valiant was his to command (for now), and even if he couldn’t do anything to help her directly, he could exert some force of his own in the right places.

“Commander Battuta.”

“Yes, sir?” the astrogator looked up from her console at him.

“Undock us from the station. Then put us in an orbit that’s clear of any fixed guns but with line of sight to Pynchet for the next four hours.” He looked at the nearby tactical console. “And Commander Diamond… order the gun crews to load the HVDs with O2S rounds. And key in bombardment trajectories for the list of targets I’ve sent to you.”

Ross Diamond jerked up from the simulation he was working on. “Um… sir, may I ask why?”

“You may,” he said, a wintry smile forming on his face. “If I understood the Captain right, she’s about to do something that might make Quasar and the local government very angry with her. Angry enough, in fact, that they’ll likely try to do something unpleasant. Under the circumstances, I think it would be… prudent… to take out an insurance policy.”

“I… uh.” He shook his head. “Alright, consider it done. You’re really serious about this, Commander.”

“Naturally.” Jaitley turned back to the main display, brown eyes twinkling. “She’s our captain. We have to look out for her.”



“General Manager Lain, I presume?”

The blonde woman looked up from her kneeling position on the basement floor, her hands roughly bound with microfilament string behind her back. Half a dozen other people were in similar positions elsewhere in the room, a few angry guards watching over them. “That’s me,” she said, then shivered. Her hoarse voice sounded alien even to her… especially to her.

“I’m Captain Artemis Archer, Persean League Navy,” the white-uniformed figure before her said. Odd… why was her arm in a sling? “You are well? You haven’t been mistreated?”

“N-no,” she croaked. “I’m fine.” Then, shaking herself, she stared at the other woman. “What are you doing here? Did they send you to get me out?”

“In a manner of speaking. I’m trying to persuade Arrastia and his men to not shoot or blow up anyone. But it won’t be easy; you have to work with me.”

“Okay,” Lain mouthed, looking past her new visitor at the scowling Felipe Arrastia beyond. “What do you need?”

“You’re the senior Quasar Industries representative in the Marenos subsector, correct? Anything that happens here goes through you?”

“Yeah.” Surely you already knew that, she thought, but declined to bring it up. She was in no position right now to second-guess anyone else, especially if that person was trying to secure her freedom. God, her hands hurt.

“Is there any chance someone else - someone higher up - could run an multi-hundred kilocred operation in the subsector without your knowledge? Would they be able to keep it concealed from you?”

“I…” The manager shook her head. “It’s not outright impossible... but it would be very difficult and inefficient. We’ve spent two decades setting up here. They’d have to start from scratch... bring in their own people, their own supply channels, their own connections… I can’t imagine what they might be doing that would be worth it.”

Archer nodded, then turned around. “Mr. Arrastia, I need a private word with General Manager Lain. Just you, me, her and anyone else you want to bring along, and it needs to be somewhere absolutely no-one else can hear us. Can that be arranged?”

“Well… yes. This way, please.”

One of the bodyguards stepped forward, and Lain whimpered as he dragged her to her feet. Then his gun muzzle was on her back, and she meekly fell in behind Arrastia, Captain Archer and the other bodyguard following close behind.

They went down a long corridor, down a dark flight of stairs, around a corner and into a small, musty storage area lined with partly filled metal racks. A dampening field generator hummed in one corner, its shiny metallic sheen contrasting with the thin layer of dust that had settled on almost everything else.

She was allowed to settle into a hard wooden chair directly under one of the two lights in the room, facing her captors. “Comfortable?” the captain asked, and she nodded.

“Alright. I’m going to ask a few questions, and I need you to be completely open with me. Clear?”

“Um… of course.”

Artemis took a deep breath, then stared the prisoner in the eye. “What do you know about the connection between Quasar Industries and the pirate groups in the Marenos subsector?”

Everyone else in the room jerked upright instantly. “I…” Lain started, then stiffened, her eyes wide. “I… what do you mean? What are you saying – I don’t –”

The muscles in Artemis Archer’s left arm had been honed by the regular task of holding a drawn bow steady, and they had not atrophied appreciably in two weeks of rest. Now the limb shot out and grabbed her collar. “Listen closely, Jennifer Lain,” the League officer said in a low almost-hiss. “Mr. Arrastia here,” her head motioned at the grim-faced terrorist leader standing beside her, “has an axe to grind, and he looks like he’ll be perfectly happy to use your neck as the millstone. Lie to me, or try to evade my questions, and I’m out of here and leaving you to his tender mercies.” She let go, and the prisoner slumped back, gasping for air. “Now, what will it be?”

“I’ll… I’ll talk,” she wheezed.

“Good.” Archer took a step back, arms folded. “We already know that CEO Kenneth Skilleton has been using Quasar assets to sponsor the pirates in Marenos, providing them with funds and weapons. Did you know as well?”

Lain’s eyes seemed for a moment to bulge. “Are… are you serious?” The other woman took a step forward, and Jennifer shook her head frantically. “No, no… I swear, I didn’t know,” she pleaded. “He never told me anything… I never imagined something like this could happen...”

She hung her head. “But it’s true, isn’t it? That’s how they’re taking over all these systems.”

“You really didn’t know?” Artemis’s brow furrowed. “Even after what you said about how impractical it would be to run a completely independent operation of this magnitude?”

“I… wait.” She looked up, shivering. “I… did notice some odd things in the accounts. Weapons, ships and credits seeming to go to strange places, or occasionally disappearing outright. I tried looking into it, but couldn’t puzzle it out. Whoever was doing it had covered their tracks quite well. I bucked it up to the internal audit office, but...”

“It’s on the books, then? It could be evidence in a possible criminal trial?”

Lain nodded jerkily. “I… I think so. It’d be rather circumstantial as it is, but if you follow the trails up more closely than I did, you might find something that could unravel all of it. I can’t be sure, but…”

“It’ll do.” The captain tilted her head. “If you were to get out of here and go outside, could you remotely access and download the files we need?”

“Some of it. I’d need physical access to go deep enough, though; we obviously keep the sensitive stuff isolated. Once I get back to work, I should be able to get everything you need.”

“Can we trust you?”

“If we can’t, you’ll just have to rely on what I can get without leaving your sight,” the General Manager sighed. “Or come back with a fleet big enough to enforce a search warrant.”

“I see.” The two women looked at each other for a while, then the orange-haired one turned to Arrastia. “Alright, I think I have my plan now.”

“You have my ear.”

She paused for a while, as if gathering her thoughts. “Here’s the deal. First, you and your men surrender yourselves into League custody –”

“What?!”

“-and we take you back to League territory,” Archer went on, driving over his shouts. “It’s unlikely that they’ll try extradition proceedings, but if they do I promise I’ll do my best to stop them. In return,” she motioned with her hand at the hostage, “Miss Lain here gets the evidence we need to nail Skilleton to the wall in court. With that, we should be able to force Quasar to withdraw from the system, or at least implement reforms. You get to change your world for the better, the hostages get to live, we end the piracy problem in Marenos, everyone’s happy.”

“You can’t possibly think we’d agree to this,” Arrastia hissed. “How can we trust her? For that matter, why should we trust you? And even if she does get the evidence, what makes you so sure it’ll be enough? How do you know that pig Skilleton won’t squirm his slimy way out of this?” He shook his head forcefully. “No. I’m almost tempted to believe you, but we’re not going to stake our chances on something like this.”

“Sir, you can’t possibly –”

“Enough, Captain. Even if I wanted to, I could never convince my people to go along with this. There’s no point discussing this any further.”

“Wait,” Lain called out, and the others in the room turned to face her. “There’s… there’s something else. There was one thing Skilleton did that doesn’t involve any obscure paper trails. Actually, I already destroyed the evidence of that one, but I can still testify to it. It won’t be enough for a criminal conviction, but in the public sphere…”

“Explain,” Arrastia said firmly.

She closed her eyes briefly, exhaling slowly. “The May Massacre… Skilleton ordered it. He wanted the unions and their members broken into submission. I was the one who relayed his orders to the government.”

It was as if the light had fallen out of its socket and shattered to a million pieces on the floor.

“You… you…”

For three seconds, then five, he seemed frozen in place. Then he took three long strides towards her and seized her by the neck, dragging her up and off the chair, ignoring Archer’s shocked exclamation. “Murderer,” he snarled, face contorted in fury.

He shoved her back into the chair, and she could only stare fearfully up at him as he levelled his rifle, muzzle squarely facing the bridge of her nose. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t kill you right now.”

She wanted to say something - anything - but the words wouldn’t form, instead forming a thick lump in her throat. She could see his finger slipping into the trigger guard, twitching, just a slight jerk away from sending a bullet through her head…

Then the barrel abruptly jerked upwards, and there was Archer, standing in front of her, holding the gun up towards the ceiling with her one good arm. “Arrastia, please!” the captain implored, even as the guards brought their own weapons up to track her. “You can’t just blow someone away in a fit of rage! You’re better than that!”

“Out of the way, captain,” he said bitingly. “You don’t know me. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do to this woman, whose hands are red with the blood of the innocent.”

“Killing her won’t bring them back - won’t bring him back!” Her voice was urgent, almost pleading. “It won’t even make you feel better! All you’ll do is turn yourself into something you don’t want to be!”

He stared harshly at her, fangs bared, and she met his bitter eyes unflinchingly. “You’re right,” she said slowly. “I don’t know you, and I can’t presume to know what you’d do in a situation like this… or even what I’d do. But you do know yourself… and your son.” She looked away now, regretfully, for a moment. “Tell me… is this what he would have wanted? Can you truthfully say this is what you’d have liked him to see?”

Bleak hatred burned in his gaze, but also a flicker of understanding, and she slowly lowered the gun into a rest position. That done, she stepped aside, letting captor and captive face each other again.

“Mr. Arrastia,” Lain said in a halting voice. “I… I’m sorry. What I did that day… it haunts me every night. I know nothing I can do can change the past, but if there’s any way I can help set things right, I want to do it.” Her irises were shimmering in the light now. “Please.”

He looked at the woman he’d wanted so badly to kill just a minute before, then at a pale-faced Archer; she met his eyes, and nodded slowly at him. Back to Lain, for several more seconds. Finally, he exhaled slowly, his arms drooping to his sides. “You win, Captain,” he said softly. “We’ll do it your way.”



It wasn’t that easy, of course. They still had to convince the rest of his cell to go along with the seemingly outrageous plan, and more than one member had protested vehemently indeed at their new orders. For a few minutes, it seemed as if they were on the brink of impeaching him - or hanging him for treason. Fortunately, Arrastia’s authority and Archer’s deft diplomacy had let them function as quite formidable a good cop, bad cop team, and within half an hour they’d not only thwarted a mutiny but succeeded in bringing everyone around to the idea (even if some grumbling remained).

The comm jammer was disengaged, and the Valiant’s Marines marched in double file to secure the new prisoners. The weapons were set aside, the bombs deactivated and the hostages freed, and in a few minutes everyone was walking out the front entrance, Archer at the lead with Koniecpolski leading an honor guard close behind.

Colonel Zorbas was waiting at the front gate with quite an impressive escort of his own, standing at parade rest against the backdrop of the now-orange sky. “Very well done, Captain,” he said, nodding pleasantly as she came to a halt two meters before him. “You’ve convinced the terrorists of the futility of their methods and delivered them straight into our hands. The Republic of Sekos thanks you for your assistance.”

“You’re welcome.”

“An air-car is already waiting to take you to the Presidential Palace where you will receive the proper accolades for your services.” He motioned one of the security sections forward. “We’ll be taking charge of the captured terrorists and rescued hostages now.”

“Sorry, Colonel, but I have my own arrangements for these people,” Archer said. “The Persean League Navy has agreed to take custody of them during the negotiations, and will be transporting them to League space for proper handling.”

Zorbas startled, then stared grimly at her. “I’m afraid I can’t permit that, Captain,” he said frostily. “These terrorists are wanted for their crimes in Sekos. We must insist that they be turned over to the local authorities to face justice.”

Turning these people over to your “justice” is the last thing I want to do. “Quasar Industries and the Sekos Security Directorate requested that I resolve the situation, and I did. This is a necessary part of the resolution. The plant is safe and intact, and no-one has been killed. You have no cause for complaint.”

“Don’t be obstinate.” He eyed her sideways. “Are you really so eager to let a group of terrorists get off unpunished for kidnapping and attempted murder? For that matter, what do you want with the Quasar employees? One would think you were taking them captive yourself.”

“I don’t approve of what Arrastia and his followers have done either, but a deal is a deal. As for the hostages, General Manager Jennifer Lain has agreed to help us with an investigation into pirate activity in the Marenos subsector, and will be accompanying us. You’re welcome to have the rest of the freed hostages, of course.”

“Miss Lain is critical to Quasar’s business operations and CEO Skilleton insists that she return to her duties as soon as possible.”

Archer smiled thinly. “We’re sorry, but the League Navy requires her services even more and I, too, must insist on keeping her with us for a while. We would be happy to compensate Quasar for any financial losses suffered as a result, of course.”

The colonel started to say something more, than shook his head. “I see how it is, then. I was warned that such difficulties might arise, and have prepared accordingly.”

His hand whipped down to his hip, then up again, and she jerked back at the sight of a mag-pistol in her face. The Security Directorate troopers also raised their weapons, and the League Marines did the same almost instantly.

“You solved one crisis without violence, Captain Archer,” Zorbas said. “Now you have a chance to do it a second time. Will you surrender the terrorists and General Manager Lain as required, or shall we do this the painful, unpleasant way?”

“What do you think you’re doing, Colonel?” she rasped.

“Me, captain? It is you who apparently think you can get away with abduction of innocent people and helping kidnappers and murderers to escape justice. We are simply enforcing the law of our planet, as is our right as a sovereign star nation under interstellar law.” He drew his lips back in a shark’s pseudo-smile. “Be reasonable, Captain. I’m sure you can see there is only one correct solution to this situation you find yourself in.”

She glanced at Koniecpolski and his Marines, staring down three times their number in paramilitary units. Then at Felipe Arrastia, head high, staring defiantly at the representatives of the regime he had rebelled against. Turning back, she took a deep breath, and stared Christos Zorbas squarely in the face.

“You see my arm here, Colonel?” she said, her left hand flashing briefly on her right shoulder. “I didn’t get it from falling out of a tree, you know. I’ve faced genuinely frightening, even terrifying situations, events that left their scars and their nightmares with me to this day. Next to those, your pitiful attempt to intimidate me with a show of force doesn’t even register. In that light,” her eyes glittered with cold fury, “I suggest you tell your men to put their guns down before someone gets hurt.”

They stared at each other coldly for several ticking seconds, with all silent except the low breeze and the uneasy shuffling of several of the combatants. It seemed he was just about to open his mouth, to give the order to open fire, when the wristcomp hanging from her immobilised right arm chirped with an incoming transmission.

“Captain, I’ve got a communication for you,” Commander Jaitley’s voice came through her earbug. “Put this on public video.”

She hesitated for only a moment, then pressed a few buttons, and the flickering images of two people appeared in the air: Jaitley himself, and Director-General Michèle Bellerive.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Zorbas snapped.

“I couldn’t help but overhear your little tête-à-tête, Colonel, Captain,” the Valiant’s XO said pleasantly. “Since today seems to be a good day for dealmaking, I’m coming to you - and Mrs. Bellerive - with a proposition of my own.”

“Talk,” the head of the Security Directorate said sharply.

“Alright. First, the demand: Captain Artemis Archer and whoever else she choose to bring with her get to board their shuttle. It leaves Duval and docks with the PLS Valiant, unloading her entire entourage, before returning to the planet. Our ship departs the Sekos system without incident, everyone goes home happy - for now, at least.”

“I see. And your incentive would be?”

“Simply this. If the captain or her people are harmed in any way, or any of your ships fire upon or even approach within five hundred kilometers of the Valiant, we’ll destroy every government building in Pynchet with kinetic strikes.” Zorbas and Bellerive both gaped at him, and he smiled thinly. “We’ll start with the Presidential Palace, then move on to the Security Directorate. After that… I think we can just pick items at random from the list. Should keep things interesting.”

“Our fleet will destroy you,” Bellerive snarled, leaning heavily on her desk. “We outmass your little cruiser at least five to one. We’ll crush you like a gnat. Your survivors will be hung from the city centre’s trees as an object lesson to others.”

“You might,” Jaitley agreed. “I suspect, though that we might take quite a few of you with us. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ve already sent out a transmission letting the Navy know what’s going on here. If anything happens to the Valiant, the next League visitors to your little tin-pot dictatorship will be a battlecruiser task force. I don’t think you need me to explain to you that the experience will be, as the Colonel so charmingly put it, painful and unpleasant.”

He leaned back in his chair, meeting two furious stares unflinchingly, and there was no longer a smile on his face. Softly: “What will it be?”



“Commanding officer is aboard,” the bosun announced as Archer swung through the docking tube to land neatly on the deck.

“Welcome back, Captain,” Jaitley said, stepping forward to greet her. “I’m glad you and the others made it back in one piece.”

“Thanks to you.” She shook his hand, clasping it firmly. “And thanks for having more foresight than I did back there. I’ll see to it Command rewards you for everything you’ve done on this tour.”

He grinned. “Just doing my job, Captain.” Then, turning to one of the other new arrivals: “And this would be General Manager Lain, I take it? Welcome abroad.”

“Thank you,” the blonde said. “I’d like to exchange pleasantries, but I think your captain is in a hurry. Do you have a computer console we can use?”

“Of course. Right this way, please…”

Half a minute later she was bending over a terminal in an office, entering login credentials for a VPN. “Alright, I just need the internal account books, dated eight months ago and newer… and the internal investigation records… there. It’ll just take a few minutes, Captain, and then we can be on our way.”

“What do you plan on doing afterwards, Captain?” Jaitley queried. “I don’t think we’ll be serving any arrest warrants while that guy’s camping on Duval.”

“Maybe not. But if word gets out on why he’s making such an awfully long stay here, that’ll finish him in the public eye. And it’ll stop doing him any good once a Navy fleet arrives. If he tries to leave-”

Her wristcomp started chiming again, and she took the comm with a sigh. “Yes, Ross?”

“Captain,” Commander Diamond’s face communicated the concern his tone did not, “I thought you’d want to know that the QIS Overseer and its escorts are making a beeline for Jump Point Alpha at maximum burn.”
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (ch.17: 2015-01-25)
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on January 25, 2015, 01:37:34 PM
Hmmm, an Apogee and her escorts versus an Eagle...
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on January 31, 2015, 07:45:47 AM
Okay, last chapter. I hope we can end this well  :)


Chapter 18
Spoiler
“For heaven’s sake, what’s he screaming about this time?” Cheah hissed.

“Apparently the League wants to arrest him on false charges of piracy and mass murder.” Matayev didn’t even pretend to pay attention to the ranting, panicky CEO on his comm display. “We’re supposed to run back to Central where they can’t reach him.”

The exec scowled at her own display. “Well, that Eagle doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. It’s still tailing us.”

“It’s not fast enough to catch us, though.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, gazing at the plot. Both his fleet and the pursuing League cruiser and escort were moving at three million kilometers an hour, headed straight for the alpha jump point of the Sekos system. The pursuers could keep up, but they couldn’t get any closer unless one of the fleeing ships suffered an engine mischief (though unless it was the Overseer itself, Skilleton would probably demand that it be left behind), or it otherwise had to stop. So there should be no problem, except...

“They’ll catch us as soon as we have to stop to refuel,” she said. “We don’t have enough range to make it back without.”

“I know that,” he sighed. “We’ll either have to turn him over then no matter how much he protests, or try to stop them.”

“Do we? Because if not, we may as well go ahead and turn that jerk in now.”

He sighed. “I don’t know, Gerry. It seems like the most sensible thing to do, but if that’s the option we take, you and I are going to end up on the street once HQ finds out. But an act of war against the League will likely look even worse on our CVs - assuming we survive the encounter at all. Which means that, contrary to our esteemed employer’s demands, we’re not going to turn around and open fire on the Valiant if it does catch us.” He muttered a curse under his breath, then went on. “We’ll wait till they back us into a corner before yielding. That makes us seem like at least we tried to do our jobs.”

“Sounds good.” She glared at the display, watching the five green icons leading the two amber ones on a slow chase across the great expanse. “I’ll be damned if we risk our lives bailing Mr. Bigshot out of whatever crime he’s committed, anyway - and you can tell him I said so. He can shoot me if he doesn’t like it.”



“Fifteen minutes to jump point,” Sequeira reported. “The Quasar fleet will arrive five minutes before we do.”

Sybitz remained silent, staring grimly at the primary display. Four times already she’d listened in on Archer hailing the people they were running after, demanding they heave to and surrender CEO Skilleton. Three times they’d been met with the silence of the cosmos. The one exception had been the first time, which involved five minutes of Kenneth Skilleton cursing the League captain out, threatening her, her extended family and the Navy, in between entirely unconvincing protestations of his innocence.

“And what,” Dragunova sighed, “does she plan to do if they lay an ambush for us on the other side?”

“Eh.” Sybitz shrugged. “We can’t beat them in a stand-up fight, that’s for sure. But by the same token, none of them are fast enough to catch us, any more than we’re catching them right now. If we react quickly, we should have no problem disengaging from any trap they may be laying for us.”

“Right. But if we can’t fight them, why are we chasing them at all?”

“Because they won’t fight. For starters,” she pressed one index finger against another, “if they blow up a League Navy ship, they’ll likely see their business kicked out of the League for a long, long time - at minimum. If the Perseans are really *** off, well, let’s just say every officer involved in the attack is a dead man walking.”

“More to the point, though, even if Skilleton orders them to do it anyway, I fully expect they’ll refuse.” She smiled thinly. “If Mr. Bigshot CEO had spent some time studying us pirates instead of just bossing us around, he’d know a thing or two about how to inspire loyalty in your subordinates. Sure, a lot of pirate bosses are ruthless, murderous ***. But they also know not to abuse their positions - not too much, at least - and they know how to lead from the front. Most of all, they know why the time-hallowed pirate tradition of sharing the profits between the crew exists and practice it rigorously. And I’ll eat your biggest gun, Tina, if Skilleton does any of those things.”

Here Sybitz leaned forward, hands clasped, gazing intently at the plot. “If he thinks the whip hand will get his people to lay down their lives for him, he’ll learn just how wrong he was. Very quickly, and possibly permanently.”



“Jumping… now!”

In the span of a little under ten seconds, the QIS Skylark and its companions faded out of normal space, and the star-studded darkness in the distance became the deep blue puffs of hyperspace.

Matayev’s fingers drummed restlessly on his command chair. Transitions between n-space and h-space always carried a certain hazard, as the energy bleed and lingering spacetime distortions left the jumping ship greatly nearsighted for up to a couple of minutes. The same effect did help mask a ship’s identity from anyone awaiting it as well, but not as effectively or as for long. Combined with the natural chokepoint functionality of jump points in general, anyone making a jump in hostile territory was taking a risk.

In practice, pirate attacks in this manner were rare. Jump points were naturally high-traffic regions, which made them terrible places to hide from the law, and the would-be ambushee might well turn out to be a heavily armed military fleet. But Marenos was never very well-policed even before the recent piracy upsurge, and under certain circumstances, such as -

“Scanning,” came the tenor voice of the tactical officer… which then rose sharply. “Multiple contacts! Bearing three five two by zero zero seven, range 350 km and closing!”

“What?!” Matayev’s head jerked sideways to the man, then to his own display, and felt a sudden chill as his scanners placed one of the contacts clearly in the 300-kilotonne range.

“Transponder signal received,” the lieutenant reported, in a slightly shaky voice. “It’s identifying itself as the DMS Doomfist, Dominator-class.”



“Holk!” A scarlet-faced CEO stared at his display. “Why are you here? What are you playing at with taking over all these systems?”

The pirate warlord smiled thinly. “To answer your second question first, my good man, I am establishing myself as the ruler of the Marenos subsector. That much should have been obvious enough, I think. As for the first, I was waiting for you.” He tilted his head. “You see, I happen to have an offer that you can’t refuse. Your options are as follows: One, you surrender your ships intact and yourself to me. Two, I beat your ships into scrap, take them and you as well.” With visible fangs: “You have fifteen seconds to decide.”

“Holk, you *** traitor!”

“You shouldn’t be wasting your time on insults, you know. Ten seconds.”

“All those credits and weapons… you were planning this all along…!”

“Yes, yes, very deductive of you; what of it? Four.”

“If you think I’m going to surrender to a *** two-bit warlord like you-”

Holk smirked. “One.”

“Enough! I’m turning your ship into scrap metal! I’ll burn your sorry pirate corpse and dump your ashes into pig ***! I’ll teach you to *** with me!”

“Option two it is, then,” Holk said with a dramatic sigh. “Disappointing, but hardly surprising. I suppose I will have to indulge you, then. See you soon, Mr. Skilleton.”

The screen went blank.



“Situation?” Matayev said harshly.

“The Omen and the Broadswords are leading their advance down the center,” Captain Tess Wood answered, the tension stretching her mezzo-soprano. “The Sunder and Tridents are just behind them, and the Dominator and Condor are bringing up the rear. Cruiser’s probably gonna burn charge into us at the critical moment, though.”

“And Skilleton wants us to run up ahead and shield him from the bad guys.” The commander didn’t know whether to snort, sigh or scream. “Fine, we’ll put the Wolves outward to catch their lead units in a fork. The Skylark will move forward and down and help you with the big boys. It won’t be easy, but we should be able to make it work.”

Wood glanced aside, muttering something, before turning back to face him squarely. “Alright. It’s our best shot, even if it doesn’t look good. See you on the other side, Ren.”

“You too. Skylark, clear.”

He shut off the comm window, then stared at the red droplets of blood running down his plot. “Why are they bunching up like that?” he heard Cheah mutter. “You’d think they’d be trying to flank us.”

“I don’t know,” Matayev admitted. “But I don’t think it really matters in the end; they’re entering our anti-fighter envelope right about… now.”



As the fighters came swooping in, each Wolf sent sixteen Swarmer missiles at them, two for each Broadsword. Tactical and heavy burst lasers were reaching out as well, burning through the thin fighter armor and gutting their internals, and the pulse weapons were lashing at the Omen’s shield. Suren Matayev tensed in his seat as the SRMs, and the Hurricane MIRV that had joined them, closed with the enemy formation…

...only to jerk halfway out of his seat as the Broadswords fanned out and back, and the Omen triggered its EMP emitter. Highly charged bolts flashed out from the frigate’s hull, melting the missiles’ electronics into slag and turning the entire swarm into so many harmlessly unguided projectiles, and those few that survived the electric storm were easily shredded with well-aimed bursts of machine gun fire.

What happened next could only be described as a slaughter. The Quasar frigates did their best, but their lasers just weren’t enough to keep the low-tech fighters from swarming over them, dicing shields into overload with their machine guns, their own missiles tearing into the hulls of their Expansion-epoch opponents. A pinprick, each individual hit might have been, but few ships in the Sector were built to survive a hundred or a thousand such wounds. The Wolves didn’t even stand a chance.

But Matayev registered their deaths only peripherally. He was already preoccupied with his own problems.

The Sunder was closing in, long cyan tongues of its heavy graviton beams lashing at his hull. Quad heavy needlers answered with raking volleys as the Skylark jetted forward, blasters in hand. Shields came up, and the destroyer’s supercharge autopulse laser lashed out in a violent hail of energy bolts that crackled and sparkled on the Falcon’s shield.

The Skylark was not equipped to win a flux war with the likes of this foe, but it had other tricks of its own. Two Salamanders shot out, zipping past a flailing streak of machine gun fire, and while the tail gun knocked out one before it could connect, the other missile struck home and shorted out his target’s engines in an electromagnetic flare. The commander’s teeth flashed white as he closed in to batter the Sunder’s shields down and wreck its flimsy hull.

“Commander!” Geraldine Cheah cried out suddenly. “The Doomfist is burning in!”



The Dominator’s shield wasn’t particularly efficient, but it did suffice for parrying the lethal bolts of the Overseer’s plasma cannon. Six sabot pods disgorged their loads in a staggered pattern, creating a seemingly endless rain of high-velocity projectiles against the Apogee’s defenses. Wood had dropped her shield after the first one to eliminate any risk of an overload, and the armor deflected most of the initial kinetic projectiles quite efficiently, but they’d done their job nevertheless - the four Hellbore rounds mingling with the swarm flew through the space where the shields should have been, and shattered wide swathes of armor. More sabots tore into the open wounds, tearing through flesh and steel alike inside the smaller cruiser’s bow.

Blue light enveloped the Overseer again, catching the ferocious claws of autocannon fire. The high-tech main gun fired again, each plasma bolt that struck home becoming a torrent of flux into the Dominator’s capacitors, and the Hurricane launcher added its own fury to the stresses on the heavy warship’s shields. Before long, it would have the choice of venting or overloading, and the Quasar fleet would have some breathing room then.

The telltale purple-white streams gushed from the Dominator’s vents, and Wood’s ship took the opportunity to get some of its own back, sending up thick baubles of molten metal across the heavier vessel’s bow armor. Then it lowered its own shield, easing the load on its own overstrained capacitors as some of the Broadswords turned their attention to the biggest target they could find.

Two seconds later, its captain realised her mistake.

Amidst the chaotic back-and-forth, the Tridents had run the gauntlet into the enemy’s midst, their shields and the distraction of an incoming Pilum volley keeping them from death by PD laser. Two of the three had popped up beside and behind the Overseer, and they launched their Atropos torpedos at close range.

Burst lasers got one on each side, but the other zipped out of their turret arcs, and there was neither gun nor shield to stop them. They detonated simultaneously, sending chunks of hull and bulkhead spalling deep into the ship, and the hull lit up with the bright blue fury of fully charged capacitor banks exploding. Then the Omen pulled up alongside them, blasting highly energetic discharges into the Apogee’s circuits, paralyzing the entire port side of the ship.

The third Trident went for Matayev’s ship, and his helmsman swerved just in time to catch the torpedo his lasers had failed to stop on the shield instead of the hull. The distraction had cost him time, allowed the lamed Sunder to restart its engines, and he cursed as it sidestepped him to go after the vulnerable Overseer. Pulse laser bolts and graviton streams pummeled the belatedly re-raised shields into shutdown, and if the four Harpoon missiles that followed lacked the lethal punch of the Atroposi, they quite sufficed to further bleed the wounded beast. Especially the one that struck the plasma cannon mount and blew out the power feed to its magnetic drivers.

“Back off, Tess! Tess! You there?!”

He felt the sweat trickling into his eyes as he watched the QIS Overseer dying before his eyes. Only his ship was still combat effective, and that would change in fairly short order once they turned their attention to him - as the Sunder was already doing. The Buffalo they’d brought along didn’t count; he may as well have shot their crew himself as sent them up against warships of any kind, much less the ones he faced now. And Captain Wood and her bridge officers were out of contact… or dead.

His whole body was shaking with the sense of imminent doom, and there was nothing he could think of to do that would save either his friends’ ships, or his own.

At least he’d had time to vent his capacitors, readying it for a fresh charge into the teeth of danger. If he accepted the destruction of his ship as a given and sought only to do as much damage as possible before he went down, he could…

“Hyper footprint!” someone barked sharply, and he felt his heart lurch. The amber icons he had forgotten all about five minutes ago appeared on his plot once more.



“My god.”

It took Archer several seconds to realise it was she who had uttered the words. The situational display that had greeted her at the jump point exit was a completely unexpected one: the gutted, maimed QIS Overseer, the still-hot wreckage of its two escort frigates, and multiple hostile ships and fighters swarming about the sole surviving escort. She didn’t have any way of knowing for sure who the mystery attackers were, but she had little reason to believe they were friendly… and deep down inside she already knew there was only one group in the subsector would have dared launch such an audacious move.

“The Dominator is hailing us, ma’am,” Gray announced, and Archer pressed the receive button without a word. The face that appeared on her viewscreen was one she recognised from the briefing she’d first received so many months ago, and though she showed no outward sign of it, every nerve in her body was taut.

“Ah, the esteemed Captain Artemis Archer, in the flesh,” Manza Holk said in an unexpectedly pleasant voice. “I suppose you can surmise who I am.”

“Manza Holk, of the Black Hatchet,” she said, her own tone just a little terser than she’d anticipated. “I didn’t expect to run into you here.”

“Not quite, Captain.” He smiled. “It’s now Manza Holk, Dominion of Marenos.”

“Dominion.” She glared. “So that’s what this whole conquest thing is about. I see you’ve been busy.”

He let out an understated sigh. “As have you, Captain. You’ve caused me a lot of trouble - frankly, if I knew just how much, I would have invested some actual effort into killing you. But that’s all in the past,” he went on, reclining in his chair. “For now, what can I do for you, captain?”

“You can start by turning Kenneth Skilleton over to us,” she said. “And then you can take your fleets and go home to Vaas before we kick you out.”

“Such threats, my lady! Surely you know I wouldn’t have made it to my present position if I was going to back down so easily.” Head tilted now, eyes dancing with amusement. “As for our mutual friend from Quasar, I’d like to help you, but I’m afraid I have my own plans for him.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And those would be?”

“Please, captain! Do I look like some comic book villain, blabbing all my plans to my enemies just before I feed them to the sharks?” He snorted derisively. “Maybe I’ll hold him for ransom. Or perhaps I intend to have him executed before the people of the subsector to start off my reign. Who can say?”

“You really think you can get away with this warlord thing?”

“Warlord? Come now, Miss Archer. What I’m doing is no different from what any number of much-respected leaders throughout human history, including in our very Sector, have done. In fact, the only difference between you and me is that your League prefers to do it with a pile of credits instead of a fleet.”

“Those two things are not equivalent and you know it!”

“I do believe the historians will say otherwise once I have triumphed. That is what they have always done, after all.”

“And you also believe the League will let you get away with this? Or the Hegemony?”

Holk barked a short, sharp laugh. “Oh, that’s a good joke, alright. Your weak, vacillating League Assembly - no offence, Captain - takes a month of debate to decide on the color of its own socks. Once I present them with my fait accompli, they’ll see no option but to give in and accept their new not-so-friendly neighbours.” He glanced away thoughtfully. “The Hegemony might act differently, but as things stand, why should they? The Dominion will be a thorn in your side, not theirs. In short, there is simply no-one out there with both the will and the power to stop me.”

Archer stared coldly at him for several seconds, left fingers clenching, then exhaled slowly, closing her eyes. Recollections of everything she’d seen in the subsector flashed through her mind - a pleasant commissioner on Catal, a desperate rebel on Duval, a lonely orphan boy in Mazic, even a jovial pirate skipper in Calpe orbit - and she came to a decision.

“Well, well,” she said with a thin smile, eyes open again. “It seems like you’ve thought this through very well indeed. There’s just one flaw in your plan.”

“And what would that be?”

She leaned forward, her left hand forming a fist on the armrest, and stared him in the eye. “All I have to do is kill you here, and your little pocket empire falls apart before it even begins.”

“My, what audacity!” He smirked. “You may be right, but I’d advise against making the attempt. They say political power flows from the barrel of a gun, and I made sure to bring along the biggest guns I could get - rather bigger than yours, I’d suggest. It would be quite tragic if a capable woman like yourself were to perish fighting for a futile cause, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’ve faced down impossible odds for causes everyone else thought was futile before, Holk. I’m not going to stop now - not when so much is at stake.”

He leaned back in his chair, sighing. “How melodramatic. Very well, my lady. If you’re so insistent on dying at my hands - as Skilleton here did, though for rather less noble reasons - I suppose it would be most ungracious of me to decline you.”

The DMS Doomfist turned to face its new foe, weapons gleaming in the violet light of the jump point, and Manza Holk’s face flashed with a cold keenness.

En garde, Captain.”



“I can’t believe you’re actually fighting that guy,” Sybitz muttered. “If I didn’t like you so much, I’d be running the other way right now and you’d get to run this fool’s errand on your own.”

“Bin it, Adela,” Archer snapped. “Listen, I’m going to fence with the Dominator and keep him diverted from you and the Quasar survivors. I want you to go and mop up everyone who doesn’t come after us. Can you do that?”

The ex-pirate glanced at the tactical display, where several fighters, a frigate and a destroyer were all engaging the one light cruiser still fighting. “Always asking for the impossible, aren’t you? Fine, we’ll go whump on your new friends.”

“Good. And… be careful.”

“Be careful, yourself.” Sybtiz smiled. “Don’t forget, you still owe me a month’s pay. A&R, out.”



Once again the Doomfist opened the engagement with a volley of sabots, a stream of missiles riding with a four-shot Hellbore salvo. But this time the target had anticipated something like this, and her maneuvering jets flipped her 90 degrees portwise around her long axis. The high-explosive cannon shells passed by on either side, and those of the kinetic projectiles that did not similarly miss ricocheted harmlessly off the Valiant’s angled armor as her course took her on a barrel roll that any atmospheric fighter would have envied.

She quickly levelled off again, and where the mighty Hellbores had gone wide, her own smaller HVDs struck the Dominator’s armor dead center. The EMP effect dazzled the larger ship’s sensors and targeting systems, and its next cannon barrage missed even wider than the first. Then the Eagle was circling it, lashing at it again and again beyond its range, like a picador of old against a bull.



Some of the Broadswords dancing about the Skylark noticed the Lasher-class frigate bearing down on them and turned their attention to it. Others were distracted or remained focused on the Falcon, machine guns chewing at the broad shield as it tried frantically to hit them with its heavy weapons, a man swatting flies with a sledgehammer.

It scarcely mattered which course they took.

The Armed & Reckless dove into the fray, and where the cruiser’s blasters had missed more often than not, the frigate’s machine guns and Vulcan cannons ripped the attacking fighters apart in sharp, precise bursts. The rapid-fire weapons perforated and shredded their thin armor with ruthless ease, and the pirate fighter pilot who could outwit Valentina Ilyinichna Dragunova’s gunnery had never been born.

Some of them, caught a little less off balance than their fellows, tried to fight back. But the Lasher’s shields were deactivated, and their low-caliber MGs had no hope of doing any real damage to even frigate armor. Most of them had exhausted their Swarmers on the Quasar fleet, and the few launches they could muster were intercepted quickly and efficiently by the same PD guns that were cutting them down like so much ripe wheat. One particularly unlikely pirate even ended up flying in front of the Reckless and getting blown apart by a few well-placed 25mm shells from the assault guns.

“That’s right, boys” Dragunova snarled as another well-timed trigger of the port Vulcan knocked out yet another fighter, the ship continuing her deadly dance of destruction. “Run home to your mommies and cry some more!”



Manza Holk gritted his teeth. The sudden intervention of the Valiant and its escort had turned what should have been a mop-up into a dangerously even battle, and he’d already taken more losses than he’d bargained on. Fighters were always expendable on some level, of course, but they weren’t free… and they wouldn’t be the last of his force to go down if anything further went wrong.

What he needed was to take his own ship over there and finish that Falcon so he could wrap up the capture of his former employer and leave. The frigate could run or die for all he cared; torpedo-armed or not, it could make no difference once the larger ships were dealt with. But he dared not expose his back to the League cruiser that now seemed to be taunting him, pricking the Doomfist with its HVDs, flickering its shield to contemptuously catch his own cannon rounds.

“Go to sequenced fire, Rigo. And have Trisula form a tetrahedron with us. It’s time we clipped this eagle’s wings.”



“Unbelievable,” Matayev whispered, to himself as much as to anyone else, as the shield came up once more to stop the flashing autopulse bolts. “That Lasher just took apart the entire squadron!”

His console beeped with the comm chime of a squadron network signal, and a woman’s crisp brown face appeared on his screen. “Adela Sybitz, of the Armed & Reckless,” she said. “How’s your ship?”

“Suren Matayev, commander of the QIS Skylark.” He didn’t even try to keep the immense relief out of his expression. “I think you just saved all our lives. Thanks.”

“Anytime, big boy. Now could you return the favor and help us deal with the two other baddies with us? We’re not equipped to handle that kind of threat.”

“Of course.” His grin somehow managed to combine gratitude with a predatory sentiment. “I think it’s time we got some of our own back.”

The Omen was duelling with the Lasher, trying to get behind it where its EMP emitter and PD lasers would do something beyond disappearing into the other ship’s flux capacitors. That was when the Falcon engaged its thrusters and lunged straight for the high-tech ship, sending a flurry of Salamanders before it.

Against threats from two directions, the pirate skipper would have been just skilled enough to disengage and escape mostly unscathed. With three and a still-recharging emitter, he stood no chance at all; two EMP missiles struck home and knocked out his engines as he tried desperately to outmaneuver his opponents. Three blaster bolts send the frigate into overload a couple of seconds later, and another two broke it in half like a child’s toy.

That leaves just the Sunder. Which, to its credit, was still putting up a good fight; its energy weapons brought the Skylark’s still-strained shields to the brink of overload, and six Harpoon missile streaked in to gouge its opponent’s armor along the starboard prong. Damage control alarms shrieked throughout the ship, and Matayev felt as if it was his own body that had taken the blows - he didn’t even want to think about how many of his people had just died - but unlike the Overseer, his ship was still alive and functional. The light cruiser swiftly turned to present its mostly-intact port to the enemy while it vented, and the smaller ship was already backing away slowly, knowing what four heavy blasters on continuous fire could do to it now.

He was about to give the command to close in and finish the destroyer off when another, different warning signal buzzed from his console. He jerked his head up to the squadron net display, and felt his elation draining along with the blood on his face at the flashes of red on the screen.



“Back out further!” Archer barked, even as Helmsman Divila was already engaging the Valiant’s reverse thrusters. Her tense fingers gripped the armrest in a white-knuckled hold, the flux warning indicators flashing in the corner of her vision and the center of her mind.

She couldn’t drop her shields as long as she stayed in effective Hellbore range, not with the way it was sequencing its shots. Even if the torque was throwing the Dominator’s aim off with each shot, it would only take a few good hits to batter her ship badly once her shield went down. No matter how many times she lanced the beast with her own guns, it didn’t seem to stop, and even the couple of Harpoon hits she’d managed to land barely slowed it down. Another five minutes of this and...

“Tridents incoming,” Diamond said sharply, as the point defense lasers stopped another Pilum volley. “They’re fanning out in a triangle.”

Archer felt the cold sweat beading on the back of her neck, her breaths harsh in the confines of her helmet. If she had adequate flux reserves when they came in for the attack, she could shrug their torpedoes off and still be able to fend off the heavy cruiser’s advances until help arrived. What would happen if she didn’t scarcely bore thinking about. And if Holk had any idea whatsoever what he was doing, he wouldn’t order them to strike until-

Doomfist burning in!”

She practically leapt out of her chair, gripping her command station. “Maneuvering jets! Climb now!”

The Eagle leapt up, spinning a hundred and eighty degrees on her long axis and driving vertically relative to the plane of their engagement, and only the desynchronisation this caused in the enemy’s carefully timed attack maneuver saved her from certain destruction. The torpedo bombers dove in at once, even as the Doomfist angrily flung sabots and autocannon shells at its evading prey, and six Atropos torpedoes flew out as streaks of yellow towards their target, at so many angles she could never hope to stop them all.

Still, she tried her best. PD lasers knocked out three short of their targets, and another vanished in an actinic flash on the shield. Said shield was quickly dropped to prevent an overload, and a fifth Atropos ripped a huge but survivable gash on the ventral port bow section.

The sixth snaked past laser and shield alike and detonated in the Valiant’s port main thruster.

Four ratings in the engineering department died instantly as a plasma conduit ruptured no more than eight meters from them. Another three suffered severe burns, and several others were cut up by a hail of flying shrapnel. The damage to the engine caused the starboard thruster to flame out as well, leaving the ship to drift helplessly as the Dominator ended its burn drive and came turning to bring its main guns to bear.

Ross Diamond slammed his hand down on the emergency vent button, but even as the accumulated flux began gushing out into the surrounding hyperspace, the enemy had locked on and gone to maximum rate of fire. Huge high-explosive rounds struck the League ship over and over like the fist of an enraged giant, shattering even the toughest armor the engineers of the Core Epoch could shape, and sending jagged chunks of bulkhead spalling through rooms and corridors to slice through any crewman unlucky enough to get in their way.

The entire left deckhead of the bridge caved in, air rushing out through the breach, and the lights went with it. Darkness shrouded the Valiant’s officers for a second before they were illuminated in emergency red. Cries of pain went up all around, one of which was abruptly cut off almost before it started, and Artemis Archer barely heard her own scream.

“Orders, Captain?” Diamond called out.

She could not respond. She could only sit still, breathing heavily, pulse racing. “Captain!” he shouted again, even as he knew there was command she could give that would do any good. Not while they were immobilized, waiting to be picked off like apples from a tree.

With violently trembling hands she punched in the command for a comm link to Engineering, her heart pounding in her ears. “Captain to Engineering,” she said, fighting to keep the quaver out of her voice. “Rolls, come in! Rolls!”



“No!”

All three people on the bridge of the ISS Armed & Reckless were watching the same thing on their respective screens: the vivid imagery of the PLS Valiant incapacitated by the torpedo attack, the Hellbores beginning to tear into it.. All of them could do the math, and knew that only their own ship could possibly intervene in time to save the League cruiser, especially with the Sunder still threatening the Skylark’s rear. That if the Eagle went down, they would have no choice but to retreat in the face of the still-superior opposition, ending everything they’d done up to now in failure. And yet, they could only intervene at great, possibly lethal risk to themselves.

“We have to help them,” Sequeira said in a low, almost timid voice.

“Are you nuts?” Dragunova glared at him. “What do you think that Dominator is going to do to us if we give it the chance?”

“I know you don’t much like the League or Captain Archer, but look at it this way - if she dies, we don’t get paid.”

“If we die, we don’t get paid either and it doesn’t even matter if we do!”

They both turned to look at Sybitz. “Skipper?” the ex-smuggler said, his expression clearly that of one seeking guidance from above.

For what seemed like forever Adela Sybitz had been staring with burning eyes at her screen, watching the murderous explosions rippling across the Valiant. Men and women died as hull plates shattered and ammunition stores and capacitor banks ruptured, and she saw the face of a captain who had so often risked her life for others. A captain who had saved the life of a boy so much like the brother she couldn’t.

“We’re going in,” she said coldly.

“Skipper,” Dragunova began, “I must object –”

“Drive straight for the front of the Doomfist. As soon as we’re in point-blank range, launch both torpedoes, half-second delay.”

Sequeira’s eyes widened. “Skipper, I don’t think that’s –”

“Do it!” Sybitz roared.

Her two most trusted companions hesitated for a moment, as if they were about to refuse. But then the moment passed, finely-honed team instinct taking over. The frigate was already taking off, sprinting as fast as her engines could take her without spontaneously exploding, and they closed the distance in a streak of orange fire. Fifteen kilometers… ten… five...

By now the Eagle’s vent had ended, its shield coming up again, buying some valuable respite, but it could only be a temporary relief. She trailed atmosphere and debris, bleeding horribly from her wounds, and Sybitz felt her nerves turned to steel.

Machine guns and Vulcan cannons opened up on the still-unshielded Lasher, followed belatedly by autocannons, and rounds of various sizes pelted and splintered the thin armor. Her shield was still down, seemingly relying on faith and fury to protect her through the hail of lead, and then she reached her destination. One red torpedo went away, then the other, and the Armed & Reckless broke off almost as swiftly as she had charged.

With the initial boost of their parent ship and their own overpowered engines, the Reapers bore down on their targets like the fists of Satan himself. Point defense weapons spat metal in a desperate bid to stop them, but they were too fast to track effectively, and their plating held against the few stray hits.

The first torpedo flashed in a violent burst of heat against the shield, and the flux feedback shorted out half a dozen capacitors deep within the ship and sent the entire grid into overload. That left the second Reaper free to strike home on the Doomfist’s bow, carving out a massive crater in the damaged armor with the fury of a miniature star.



“Ugh!”

Manza Holk snarled as his ship shuddered and reeled from the blow they’d just taken. Air flowed out in streams from the gaping wound in its bow, the blast doors thankfully sealing off the affected area. Half his sensors were gone, overloaded capacitors were sparking all over the ship, and the only reason the functional loss of three of his six missile pods wasn’t more infuriating was because they’d all emptied their loads anyway.

For the first time in many cycles, he felt genuine, untempered rage boiling within. He’d worked so long and so hard for this, to prove himself worthy as a master of all that he surveyed. Yet now this League interloper who had no right to even be here, much less challenge him, was thwarting his best laid plans at every turn. Was she now going to steal his moment of triumph, to humiliate him on the field of battle?

No. That was unacceptable even for Holk the pirate, much less Holk the ascendant ruler of Marenos. Whatever else happened, Captain Artemis Archer could not be permitted to live through this day.

He carefully throttled his anger, forcing the lava back into the earth it sprang form, and looked steadily at the rendered image of the Valiant’s shattered form. Yes, she’d hurt him badly… but he’d hurt her even worse. A few more good hits, and he would carry the day in the end, after all.

“As soon as our overload ends, burn drive to close range against the Eagle,” he commanded, cold anger dripping from his voice. “She’s been a thorn in our side for long enough. Fire everything... and kill her.”



“...come in! Rolls! Please respond!”

The desperation in her captain’s voice roused Commander Rollyn Bracket from where she lay dazed on the deck. It was dark, the only light in the room coming from a small, crackling fire in the corner and a few electronic devices that miraculously still worked. Several other bodies were scattered about, unconscious… or dead. The faceplate of her skinsuit was cracked and splotched with red, and she felt a distinct wetness running down her face. And why does everything looks so flat?

She tried to push herself off the ground with her arms, but only one would respond, and she gasped in horror as she realised why. Frantically she looked around, straining the one eye that still seemed to work, but to no avail.

“Engineering, please respond!” the terrified soprano was in her ears again. “Captain to engineering…”

“I’m… I’m here,” she began, then cried out in pain at the stabbing pain in her lungs. Just how many ribs had she broken? Shaking her head, fighting back the tears, she tried again: “T-This is Bracket. You… you needed me captain?”

“Oh, thank god,” Archer exhaled in relief. “We need the engines back, Rolls. The Doomfist is pounding us, and if we can’t move soon…”

“Just… just give me a moment,” the engineer wheezed, forcing herself upright and to her feet. “I just need… I just need… oh god, I can’t find my arm…”

“Rolls, please, hurry...” the voice was a whisper now. “The ship needs you… I need you…”

With a groan Bracket stumbled over to a console in the wall, flashing red with warning messages. Her mind was a haze of red pain, but she saw, and understood.

The main reaction feed had been destroyed in the explosion, sealed off automatically when it vented several hundred standard cubic meters of burning plasma into a cargo hold full of supplies instead of the ship’s exhaust pipe. The automatic shunt had somehow failed as well, but there was an electromechanical switch thankfully in the same room, mounted in the wall several meters away, that would hopefully do it.

Another explosion rocked the ship, and she fell over with a sharp cry. It took several seconds to pull herself back up, stifling a sob, and then she hobbled slowly in the needed direction, counting off slowly to keep her mind off the agony that seemed to grow with each step. Three… one… four… one… five… nine… two… six… five… three… five...

The switch was right in front of her now, and she reached up with her right arm and pulled down.

It wouldn’t budge.

Shaking violently, she pulled harder and harder, even as the fire burned in her ribs. Come on, old girl…  let me save you… we have to help each other… She raised a foot and pressed it against the wall, then the other, bring her entire body weight to bear on the problem. Her arm strained, her muscles howled in protest…

And the switch gave way.



She did it!

Artemis Archer felt the chains of despair fall away from her heart as the ship’s engines came to life again, active readouts flashing on her monitor. They could move again - they had a chance, after all.

But only one chance, she reminded herself, as the display showed the enemy cruiser’s overload wear off and its guns return to life again. If it decided to close, there would be no running away from it, not in the shape her vessel was in. It was do or die, now - only one of them would walk away from this.

“Prepare to level off and flush racks,” she said, her voice harsh, eyes hard as diamonds. “Stand by to execute on my mark.”

“Aye, ma’am,” Diamond acknowledged, and as his hands flew over his console he could feel her fury in his soul as well. All they had to do was wait for the enemy to make the only move possible, and…

“Now!”



The Dominator kicked in its burn drive and bore down like a charging rhino, Hellbores firing as quickly as they could bear. Half a dozen 51-centimeter cannon rounds streaked through space at the PLS Valiant, ready to smash her shield flat and break her once and for all.

Until she went to maximum thrust and sped up and out of the line of fire, the devastatingly powerful shells flying past behind her. She did what was still known among atmospheric pilots as an Immelmann, facing down her foe once more, and a full dozen Harpoons flew off their racks in a screaming hail while hypervelocity penetrators and phase beams crossed the distance between them to tear into their hated foe.

EMP arcs flashed along the hard, tan bow, shorting out already half-blind targeting systems and turning point defense weapons into so much deadweight. The missiles converged on their target, swarming through the scattershot MG fire coming to meet them, and tore into the cruiser’s breached armor as one.

Explosions rippled across a hundred meters of hull, secondaries gutting countless ship compartments, and then the DMS Doomfist was blown into dust and ashes as its fusion chamber let go.
[close]


Epilogue
Spoiler
Captain Artemis Archer, Persean League Navy stood in her civvies, gazing out from her 27th floor hotel room at the morning sun. Carda’s bright G4 rays reflected on the shimmering city spires, a symbol of the subsector’s potential with its shackles gone.

She rubbed her right shoulder uneasily. The doctors had done a good job of fixing her joint, but it’d only been three days ago, and she still wasn’t quite used to having her arm back and free again; the very first day she’d broken a glass in quite a spectacular fashion. It was still a little sore, too.

But for all that - her expression turned morose - at least it could be fixed. All too many of her people were beyond fixing.

She’d lost twenty-one of her crew in that fateful final battle, in addition to Kauffman on Mazic and sixteen other Marines on Port Ikonia - a full fifth of those who’d set out with her to Marenos three months ago. Several thousand more civilians and security personnel had perished in the various battles around the subsector, and she could only wonder how many livelihoods had been buried in the wreckage. There’d been no shortage of time to count, no paucity of nightmares awaiting her in the dark since the PLS Valiant had limped into port as a mangled half-wreck three weeks ago.

It’s alright. It’s over now. It’s over…

A chime sounded behind her, and she turned around. “Come in,” she called out, then startled at the sight of the tall, dark figure who appeared as the door slid open. Her right hand came up in an awkward, crooked salute, even as she cursed herself for doing it so badly. If her Academy instructors found out...

The man chuckled. “At ease, Captain,” Rear Admiral Bernard Slater said gently. “If anything, I should be the one saluting you. There’s no way we can fully reward you for everything you’ve accomplished out here, but I promise we’ll try our best.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said in a low voice, lowering her hand. “They say you’ve brought the crisis to an end.”

“Decisively. The three task groups of TF22 converged on Vaas eleven days ago and annihilated the pirates’ nest in an afternoon of stand-up fighting. The occupation forces in the captured systems are similarly being rolled up, and the couple that we still haven’t gotten around to yet are already negotiating a withdrawal. For all intents and purposes, not just the Dominion but the pirate threat in the Marenos subsector is finished. And it’s all thanks to you.”

She flushed. “I can’t possibly dream of taking all the credit, Admiral. It was only possible because I had a splendid crew, and...” though it galled her to admit it, “the help of the Armed & Reckless.

“Ah, yes,” he murmured, the corners of his wide mouth twitching. “Miss Adela Sybitz and her merry band of pirates. It’s too bad she seems to have disappeared; she seems like quite the character. I would very much have liked to meet her.”

Wince. “You don’t, Admiral. Trust me on this.”

He grinned, then shook his head before going on. “As for Quasar Industries, we’ve discovered a whole treasure trove with the help of your friend General Manager Lain, and half the suits in the local division are turning state’s evidence in a desperate attempt to save their own skins. CEO Skilleton is in custody and will be turned over to the local governments for trial.” His face was hard, now. “I expect they’ll draw lots on who gets to hang him first.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of capital punishment, sir.”

“I don’t. But sometimes, it becomes awfully tempting to make an object lesson of those who abuse their lofty positions to trample upon others.” The admiral looked away for a moment, breathing slowly, then turned back to her. “Anyway, we’ve also made it abundantly clear to the Quasar board that we will brook no retaliation of any kind against you and your crew, or the people of Marenos. The League has ways of making its displeasure… acutely known.”

“And Sekos? What do we do with them?”

“That’s an open problem, yes.” He frowned. “They weren’t involved in Skilleton’s piracy thing - I think they wouldn’t have been happy if they’d found out - so the most we can accuse them off is being yet another bunch of totalitarian thugs. There are some who’ve been calling for the Navy to hammer them flat, but most of us realise how easy it is to make things even worse that way. Still, we should be able to turn the cranks hard enough on them to dissuade them from any more mass shootings, at least. And without their Quasar sugar daddies backing them up now, let's just say they'll soon be running up against the limits of the jackboot in dealing with dissidents.”

“What about Mr. Arrastia and his men… and for that matter, Mir?”

“Felipe Arrastia and his followers have requested asylum in the League. We’re still processing their applications, but I don’t foresee any trouble. As for that kid of yours,” he smiled, and she felt her cheeks heat up again, “don’t worry. He’s already an official League citizen, and we’ll find a good foster home for him.”

The admiral snapped to attention and saluted her. “All things considered, it’s not the best possible outcome, but no-one could have done better than you did. Good work, AA. We’ll make sure the contributions of you and your crew are properly recognized as soon as we get back. Your ship’s taking you home for a well-deserved rest in two days.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, her eyes suddenly misty. “I… I’m just glad to be going home.”

“Of course. Goodbye, Captain, and see you back at Fleet Command.”

Slater dropped his arm and started to turn away, then abruptly stopped and faced her again. “One more thing, Captain,” he said, his voice suddenly tense. “I… reviewed the logs of your battle with the Doomfist. Specifically, some behaviors you exhibited near the end.” His eyes narrowed. “I think you’ve been... keeping secrets from us.”

Archer gasped. “Admiral, I…”

“No, don’t apologize. It’s not your error… it’s ours.” He stared at the floor for a few moments, before forcing himself to look his former tactical officer in the eye. “If there’s anyone who knew what you went through, who should have thought to check up on you, it was me. I should have, and I didn’t. The Navy failed you, and I failed you, AA. I’m sorry.”

“Admiral… Uncle Bernard…”

“Listen,” he said softly, putting her hands on her shoulders. “We may have let you suffer in silence all this while, but not any longer. No more secrets. As soon as we get back, you’re going to get a psychiatrist and you’re going to work with him to deal with your inner demons. Understood?”

“I…” She shook herself, then nodded. “Understood, sir.”

“Good girl.” He smiled again. “Well then, I’m sure you still have plenty of sightseeing to do for the next two days. Enjoy yourself, Captain.”



Two days later Artemis was staring wistfully out another window, this time not at a cityscape but at the panorama of the stars in the distance. The port lounge was empty except for her, as she stood in silence with a travel bag slung over her shoulder, only a few inches of plastiglass separating her from the void.

How long would it be before she could sail those stars again? She knew that after what Slater had said to her that day, it would be a long time indeed before they’d even consider putting her back on a ship. She’d be stuck in one desk job or another while the shrinks worked on her, left to reminiscence about all the adventures she’d had, the memories that she was now about to leave behind. Meanwhile the Valiant would go to some other captain, someone who’d never truly know what the old bird had gone through here in Marenos. The stars of the Sector would continue their slow drift around the galaxy, planets in tow, shining brightly as ever...

“Hey,” a soft feminine voice behind her broke her reverie, and she turned around, eyes widening as she came face to face with a smiling Adela Sybitz.

“How did you get in here?”

The pirate shrugged. “Trade secret. Anyway, I heard you were going away, so I thought I’d show up to say goodbye and such.” She sighed softly. “We made a pretty good team, you know. I’m really going to miss you.”

“That makes one of us,” Archer said tartly. Then she looked away, shuffling uneasily on her feet. “Actually, back there in the battle against Holk… I guess you did save my life a second time. And my crew and my ship, too. So… thank you, again.” Turning back, glaring: “And if we ever catch you in an act of piracy again, we’ll blow your ship right out of space. Got that?”

“You’re so tsundere, AA.” Sybitz grinned, jabbing the older woman in the shoulder. “Relax. I couldn’t rob these people after everything I’ve done for them. Actually, I have a couple of ideas of what I’m going to do after this. Something I’ll be comfortable telling my grandkids about. Maybe we’ll meet again someday - without you having cause to kill me on the spot, that is.”

“...Maybe.”

They were standing side by side now, looking out into the vast beyond. The sun was rising over the edge of the planet Hévíz now, glowing a brilliant yellow, the heralding of a dawn after the long night.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Adela said softly.

“Yeah.” Artemis whispered, eyes shimmering. “It is.”
[close]


Author's notes
Spoiler
Thanks for reading all this way, everyone! I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did :) Please, don't be afraid to leave any suggestions for improvement.

I plan to do a sequel eventually, but I have other projects that I've put off for too long already, so it'll have to wait. Nevertheless, I hope to have more writing for you sometime!
[close]
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Scuttlebutt on January 31, 2015, 12:33:40 PM
Here's a request: make an epub version! But that's only because I like reading stuff like this as far away as possible from my screen with Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) lol. I just finished Ch. 1 and this seems like my cup of tea. Thanks for all the hard work.

PS. Soooo glad I got into this late and already finished. I don't know how you guys can handle the suspense of waiting. Waiting for SS to finish is bad enough lol.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: SafariJohn on January 31, 2015, 02:40:38 PM
PS. Soooo glad I got into this late and already finished. I don't know how you guys can handle the suspense of waiting. Waiting for SS to finish is bad enough lol.

The secret is lots of practice. ;)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on February 01, 2015, 06:38:48 AM
Here's a request: make an epub version! But that's only because I like reading stuff like this as far away as possible from my screen with Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) lol.
Hmm. I tried, but I canna get the formatting to work  :(

Well, here's an .odt (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6mpy3hm0qqs2y8n/TheMarenosCrisis.odt?dl=0) and a .pdf (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2kbtoye2c0ff1uo/TheMarenosCrisis.pdf?dl=0) anyway, maybe they'll work for you.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Scuttlebutt on February 02, 2015, 02:43:44 PM
Thanks! I just finished it and it read like it was inspired by David Weber's On Basilisk Station. Heh, maybe dev can package this along with SS once it ships like how Egosoft packaged decent fanfictions back in X2: The Threat.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: MShadowy on February 03, 2015, 06:49:00 PM
Beautiful.  Nice job wrapping it up, very well written =)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on February 04, 2015, 07:10:27 AM
Went back and fixed a whole lotta typos with the help of Scuttlebutt. I wonder how many people noticed "dove into the fry" (man, I'll never live that one down) or "Try-Tachyon" (giggle).

Beautiful.  Nice job wrapping it up, very well written =)
Thanks!

Thanks! I just finished it and it read like it was inspired by David Weber's On Basilisk Station.
You're not the first to notice an Honorverse connection (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8254.msg142399#msg142399)  :) Though I should probably note that while the basic premise is actually rather similar (female starship captain with way too much on her plate manages to get it done anyway, builds a rapport with the locals, uncovers a foreign plot to subvert the local system, and saves the day in a final space battle despite being massively outgunned), I didn't have Basilisk specifically in mind when I wrote this.
Yeah, Weber's a big influence on this one, although I sure hope I didn't pick up too many of his pizza ordering skills (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=635193) lol.



Okay, the real reason I made this post was to announce that I've done a series of short missions based on the story:

(http://i.imgur.com/0w9qF8s.png)
Awesome flag of the Persean League by David, found in Starsector/graphics/factions

The Marenos Crisis - Missions
a.k.a. "Gameplay and Story Segregation: A Case Study"
Download (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0t5r3xdi71ffz8/Marenos_missions_1.1.zip?dl=0)

Four missions based on the events of this fanfic, plus one about the prequel A Battle's Lesson (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8223.0). See if you can do better than the original characters did.
(Let me know if you can save the Mule in "Enemy Mine," 'cause I sure can't!)

Thanks go to Tartiflette for the wormhole "planet," and Dark.Revenant whose arcade mission provided a handy guide for understanding ship spawning functionality!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Tartiflette on February 04, 2015, 07:51:01 AM
Well, while the premise made me think about Honor, the development was much more like "Path of the Fury" (much MUCH better than any Honor Harrington book, and I loved most of them), spiced up with the same Manpower corporation.

If I may have a critic on the writing, I'd say it's a liiiitle bit too descriptive. By that I mean you keep interrupting the action with detailed description of what is happening. This leave not much room for imagination and break the flow of the reading. It looks like a script for a John Woo movie, were every action freeze in bullet time and even a blink need superlatives to describe how the sparkles of the last shot reflected in the captain's cold azure gaze, as her eyelashes graciously accompanied the movement of her hair waving from the recoil of the silver plated 18mm hand-made centuries old gun... I completely exaggerate  ;D but the point is sometimes we just don't need that much details to get the image. Especially for those like me that are used to read a lot, to whom these description are hardly completely new. Now this is a minor complain, and I'm certainly not saying never describe anything. It's just that you almost did it every time, witch made me skip over some bits in the last parts.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: SafariJohn on February 04, 2015, 08:49:16 AM
witch made me skip over some bits

A witch made you skip over some bits!? Man, that was free money! ;)

Not necessarily disagreeing or agreeing with Tartiflette, but I read a variety of stories both in subject and quality as well, and I found your writing to be quite good. Not perfect, perhaps not great, but definitely good.
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Tartiflette on February 04, 2015, 09:38:16 AM
It only a minor complain really, just something that bothered me after a while. I'm talking these kind of descriptions:
The switch was right in front of her now, and she reached up with her right arm and pulled down clockwise.

It wouldn’t budge.

Shaking violently, she pulled harder and harder, even as the fire burned in her ribs. The captain’s counting on me… I can’t fail now… I can’t let her down… She raised a foot and pressed it against the wall, then the other, bring her entire body weight to bear on the problem. Her arm strained, her muscles howled in protest…

And the switch gave way.

It's the third time in the paragraph we get a description of her having trouble to locate and repair the problem because of her injuries (This first sentence is IMO complete overkill). The way the story is told isn't not really leaving a doubt about the outcome, and I completely skipped this part but for the 2 short sentences. Besides, the whole "I can't fail the captain" is kinda cliché; a "I must do it or we all gonna die" would have been more natural (once again, it's my opinion). Anyway it's quite good already, but I also feel it's this close to be great!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on February 05, 2015, 05:45:21 AM
- Ugh. Note to self: proofread more when changing stuff. That "clockwise" is from a previous draft where the switch was a valve, and makes no sense now. (See also: being cold while half a light minute away from a class F star, hee hee)

- I don't think that quoted excerpt specifically is a problem, but you may be right about me overdoing that scene in general with repeatedly pointing out how badly she's injured and hurting.
Though I'm surprised your chosen example wasn't along the lines of "Oh, what did the HVDs do to the target this time? No, no, let me guess." ;D

On that note, are the gestures, expressions and other physical movements the characters make during dialogue fine, or also excessive?

- For battle scenes in future fics I think I'll tend towards writing scenes closer to the character POVs, with less omniscient narration - although my current plans involve a lot less combat anyway.

were every action freeze in bullet time and even a blink need superlatives to describe how the sparkles of the last shot reflected in the captain's cold azure gaze, as her eyelashes graciously accompanied the movement of her hair waving from the recoil of the silver plated 18mm hand-made centuries old gun... I completely exaggerate  ;D
That... that's actually beautifully poetic (even if half of it doesn't make sense) and I want to write something like it every chance I get!  :D
(I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I know full well things like that should only be used once per work)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Tartiflette on February 05, 2015, 07:16:25 AM
On that note, are the gestures, expressions and other physical movements the characters make during dialogue fine, or also excessive?

The problem isn't their quality of amplitude, it's their omnipresence. Even when Archer would brush her hair while thinking you would either precise their color or length or texture while it's no longer relevant. In battles, every shot project sparkles, illuminate some hull or another, make shield generator scream etc. The first time is good, and when drama needs it it's also cool, but not everything needs to be grandiose. As I said: when used everywhere it feels like we are reading Matrix's script with every action in bullet time.

So, do continue, but maybe just leave more room for the imagination. (But others might disagree, then don't mind me)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on December 05, 2015, 02:29:54 AM
Mission pack updated for 0.7.1a. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m0t5r3xdi71ffz8/Marenos_missions_1.1.zip?dl=0)
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: c0nr4d1c4l on June 26, 2017, 07:43:26 PM
This was really good! Makes me want to join the League!
Title: Re: The Marenos Crisis (complete: 2015-01-31)
Post by: Histidine on June 27, 2017, 04:09:09 AM
Thanks :)

Man, the story feels really out of place now with the new Starsector versions. Two things in particular:

- It was written back when the game was planned to have 1,000 (http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=437.msg3874#msg3874) star systems, which seems like sheer absurdity in the current implementation. So you have our heroes cruising around a huge multi-star cluster of independent worlds, when in the "current" setting more than two entirely independent star systems would be considered highly unusual.

- I portrayed the Persean League as much nicer than David ended up doing. Like a modern industrialised-world representative federal democracy, instead of the loose military alliance most notable for the dysfunction of its member polities (Mazalot being the most notorious offender) it canonically is. The sequel fic Crossfire deals in part with a darker side of the League, but here too it depicts the sins of a unified state or EU-style supranational entity, not the "can't agree on what to have for breakfast" gaggle we have (the faction description even indicates League members sometimes go to war with each other, srsly).

Speaking of which, I really ought to sit down and make myself write new chapters for Crossfire. Don't even have the excuse of not knowing what things I want to happen in the story any more :-X