Rika Rising
Page 10
The commandant’s face took on a pained expression, but he nodded in agreement. “OK, I can accept that. We were occupied for a long time…loyalties are muddy at best.”
“Good,” Rika nodded. “I trust you two to keep this under wraps.”
MAGNUS
STELLAR DATE: 05.26.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Fury Lance, Belgium
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
“OK, David, what do you have for me?” Rika asked as she strode into the conference room where the P-Cog waited.
The man was seated at the far side of the table, the cooling fins atop his head glinting in the light. He rose and saluted before responding.
“Not just me, ma’am. Niki and Piper were huge helps. It was a team effort.”
Rika chuckled at the AI’s comment. It was well known in the Marauders that David’s brain was a formidable weapon. He’d been instrumental in both avoiding and winning a number of conflicts.
Like the mechs, he’d been modified by the former Genevian military during the war. In his case, they’d identified his impressive mental capabilities, and enhanced them with a variety of augmentations that required additional cooling—hence what people referred to as the ‘shark fins’ on his head.
When the ISF had upgraded the mechs to Mark 4 models, they’d offered to improve the conditions for David and the other Marauders who had been heavily modded during the war.
While P-Cogs like David had taken upgrades related to function and comfort, they’d all retained their cranial cooling fins. They didn’t really need them anymore, but the general consensus was that if the mechs still had bolt-on limbs, P-Cogs and other support personnel could show support with their hardware.
Rika sat, and David followed suit before activating the holodisplay.
“Of course, the issue we’ve been dealing with is who owns what in the battalion. The arrangement you worked out with General Mill stipulated that all mechs own themselves, free and clear. I’ve put together a mountain of documentation to back this up, and there’s no way anyone could claim that the Marauders organization has any claim to the mechs or any hardware that is a part of your standard loadouts.”
“I feel a ‘but’ coming,” Rika muttered.
“A sea of buts.” David gave a rueful laugh. “OK, so here’s where it’s tricky. Not everyone’s contract was done up at the same time, or by the same teams. A ‘standard loadout’ varies a lot, and the Mark 4 upgrades the ISF gave you—as part of a contract with the Marauders—muddy that further. We’ve found a fair bit of verbiage that makes it flexible, and I’ve crafted a document that states that ‘standard’ is any loadout used in multiple engagements—on a mech-by-mech basis.”
“OK.” Rika nodded, waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Seems reasonable.”
“Yeah, so far, so good,” the P-Cog replied. “The AIs are all free and clear as well, of course. They own themselves and all their hardware. It’s the ships and the employment contracts that are the sticking points. I’ve looked for loopholes in this, but it’s iron-clad. The ships are all the property of the Marauder organization. Hull, engines, and hab. Not only that, but if you resign your commission, you’re required to turn all company equipment over to the next-highest ranking senior officer in your command. If none such are present, you’re responsible for delivering them to a Marauder officer of flag rank.”
“Right.” Rika felt a sense of growing frustration. “I know all this.”
David nodded. “Sorry, I’m just establishing what we know to be fact, versus what we’ve been able to rule out as a non-issue, or something we can work around. But I restate this to explain a bitty bit of wiggle room I found buried deep in the regs.”
“Oh? Sounds like a loophole.” Rika straightened. “I like loopholes.”
“Yeah, I think this qualifies as such,” David said. “Marauder ships and assets can be delivered to a flag officer of a multi-star alliance with which the Marauders have a Type-9A through 11C contract.”
“Shit…” Rika shook her head in wonder. “And we just so happen to have a flag officer of a multi-star alliance with which the Marauders have a Type 11A contract. So I just need to resign my commission and then hand the ships over to Admiral Carson?”
“Right,” David pulled up the regulation on the holodisplay. “You can see that this particular element of the regs is not in newer contracts, just a smattering of older ones. The version of the regs you signed, Rika, doesn’t allow for this.”
“Of course not,” she muttered. “That’d be too easy.”
“In fact, of the Marauders currently present in Genevia, only one has signed a contract linked to this version of the regs—a Marauder who has stubbornly refused to sign new versions of the company regs for one reason or another.”
The date of the regs and the words ‘stubbornly refused’ cemented who that single Marauder would be.
“Barne.”
“But Barne’s not an officer,” Rika pointed out. “And he’d have to be a colonel to match the rank requirements to take over the fleet and then turn it over to Carson.”
“Let’s skip over Barne as a colonel for a moment.” David winked as he spoke. “Which is hard, I know, but I want to explain fully what that gets us.”
“I’m all ears,” Rika replied.
“OK, so, the Scipio Alliance, of which the ISF is a member, has a stipulation that flag admirals can assign member state resources for use by other member states, should both parties be willing. Legally, you can’t be ‘willing’, but our hypothetical Colonel Barne could be.”
“And the Marauders qualify as a member state?” Rika asked.
“Soooort of,” David wobbled his hand back and forth. “Technically, the Marauders signed on to the Scipio Alliance via their contracts with Septhia and Thebes, both of which signed onto Scipio. Almost all Marauders are citizens of those two nations, and thus subject to the Alliance.”
Rika couldn’t help but laugh at what was, in essence, a simple solution. “So basically, the Marauders are part of the Scipio Alliance by dint of all the leadership being citizens of nations that are part of the alliance. And Admiral Carson has the authority to transfer assets between nation states, so long as the states are willing.”
“Even if they’re not, in some cases,” David added. “Not that we need to enumerate those right now. The problem, of course, is that there’s no member state for him to transfer the assets to.”
“Does he have to transfer?” Rika asked. “Can’t he co-opt the assets and then place them under his command? Carson’s good people. I wouldn’t mind having him as my CO.”
Niki sighed.
Rika snorted. “ ‘Autonomous arm’ that makes us sounds strangely disembodied.”
“Uh…no.”
“But someone back at Scipio forced this little clause into the Alliance’s founding documents,” David continued
, giving Rika a bemused glance. “They state that the ISF cannot transfer assets to itself. I guess they were paranoid that Tangel would just seize everything willy-nilly.”
“Damn!” Rika shook her head. “I think I see where this is going.”
“Right. There needs to be a member state that Carson can transfer to, and there needs to be someone running that member state that you can trust, Rika.”
“OK,” Rika held up her hands. “Let me walk through all of this. First, Barne needs to become a full-bird colonel…somehow. Then I need to resign my commission and transfer command to him. Following that, I have to become high-muckity-muck of Genevia, and then join the Scipio Alliance, and then have Carson pass command of the Marauders over to me.”
David nodded. “In a nutshell, yeah.”
“I have to put it out there—what if I just hop through a jump gate back to the Ontario System and tell General Julia that New Genevia is going to buy my battalion’s equipment? Or hell, we just send it all back. We captured a ton of ships, we can just swap all our ISF upgrades to them and send the Marauder ships back.”
“Well…” David stroked his chin. “Teeechnically, if you send the ships back, you have to go with them. But I can see that being let slide. So long as we could confirm delivery. But keep in mind that’s a huge undertaking. It would take months to swap all the ISF shields and weaponry to new ships, then put jump gate mirrors on the ships we’re sending back, then send them, remove the mirrors, and jump back.”
“I’d have to tell that to myself, too,” Rika muttered. “Keeping the Lance is important. It’s our heart.”
“Not exactly how we see it, ma’am,” David gave her a knowing look. “Regarding going back to Ontario to get dispensation from General Julia, that’s an option, but we’re not sure she’s there. When the ISF lost their QuanComm Network up at Khardine, the Ontario System was cut off. The Septhian president has a functional connection to the galactic network, but he’s not at Ontario right now.”
“Gah!” Rika leant back in her chair and ran a hand through her hair. “All this just to stay within the letter of the law. Makes a girl wish she wasn’t so strait-laced.”
Niki asked with a laugh.
“Funny.”
“Doing this the right way is important.” David’s voice was calm and level. “At some point, the rest of the Marauders are going to come home. There’s a chance that the brass is going to want a seat at the table, and if they can claim you stole your fleet—or that you were operating under them the whole time because you never properly relinquished your command—you’ll be giving them leverage to control you.”
“See, Niki?” Rika asked. “I am strait-laced. A tyrant would just off them if they tried to pull that shit, but here I am, jumping through hoops to avoid a political fight, years in the future.”
“Or it could be on our doorstep in a few short months,” David said. “We’re only a six months’ journey from Ontario.”
“OK,” Rika squared her shoulders. “So we’ll do all that. But how do we make Barne a colonel and then transfer the command to him?”
“We’re still working on that,” the P-Cog said. “I’m still chasing down some options. One of them is for you and Lieutenant Colonel Heather to be dead, or incapacitated, but that’s not ideal. I’m running through simulated legal battles if you were to be out of the system for an extended period of time. It’s possible at that point that a master sergeant could assume the rank of a colonel to effect command of a fleet.”
“Sounds messy,” Rika replied.
“Acting president,” Rika corrected, shaking her head in mock dismay. “I should have more actively quashed that queen nonsense when I had a chance.”
“OK, so, how do I legally go about becoming acting president?” Rika asked.
“You know,” David mused. “You’d think that with the millions of nations that have been established over the years, there’d be a playbook for this sort of thing, but there’s not—or at least, not one that I’m aware of.”
“Can we just reconvene the prior government in some fashion?” Rika asked.
“Sure,” the P-Cog nodded. “Not only can we, but there’s precedent. There was a civil war a few hundred years back, and the government was forced out, but eventually re-took Genevia and then reconvened. Since we have the former president, we could pull that off.”
“Except our president doesn’t want to be president.”
David pursed his lips. “Right.”
“Sooooo…”
“Well….” He paused, giving Rika an apologetic look. “You know how the Genevian Alliance evolved out of the old Kunta Triumvirate, of course.”
“I do,” Rika replied. “And before that, the Asmovians.”
“Yes, exactly. Well, when new nations emerge, sometimes a lot of vestiges of the past come along with them. Er…let me take a step back. Something that’s easy to forget about Kunta is that they were called a triumvirate, but in their later years, they were ruled by just one person: a magnus.”
A disconcerting feeling started up in Rika’s stomach, but she signaled for the P-Cog to continue.
“Well, when the democrats won out and the Triumvirate was laid to rest, they didn’t exactly throw out the old laws, they just said that a democratically elected president overruled a magnus.”
“Well, yeah, but we don’t have all day,” David replied. “Either way, the Genevian Constitution still supports the role of magnus.”
“What’s the criteria to become magnus?” Rika asked, wondering how she’d feel about the title. Somehow it felt even more pretentious than ‘queen’.
“Shockingly, it’s pretty simple. You just have to command the dominant Genevian military in the system and be Genevian.”
“Well, crap…” Rika muttered. “The Marauders aren’t a Genevian military, legally speaking. We’re mercenaries officially operating out of other nations.”
“Once we sort out how to make Barne a colonel,” Rika added.
PICKING PIECES
STELLAR DATE: 05.27.8950 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: City of Jague, Belgium
REGION: Genevia System, New Genevian Alliance
Leslie climbed through the wreckage inside the Pandora Tower, making her way to the location the inspection team had flagged.
She’d spent most of her time around the support struts that had been destroyed, but one of the inspectors had found evidence in deris halfway across the building that she hoped would finally provide a clue.
Caleb had told her that he did not set the bomb on the alternate route. He’d said the same to Jague’s detectives up on the Lance, so Leslie was inclined to believe him—especially because his antimatter bomb would have taken out the alternate route as well as the primary.
She took a moment to consider that Pandora Tower wouldn’t just have been damaged and held up by a-grav columns, but completely vaporized. That led her to thinking about how close they’d come to being killed the day before. Not just a few Marauders in an engagement—which was something they always held in mind—but all of M Company would have died in the blast. It would have been devastating.
Barne had left with Caleb not long after Rika returned to the Fury Lance, but he’d reached out to Leslie several times to make sure she was alright. It was uncharacteristic for him, and a little unnerving to boot, but she understo
od the impetus.
Walking through the tower was a surreal experience. The hall she was moving through appeared undamaged, other than a thin crack running along one wall.
The next corridor, however, was all but shredded.
Ejecta from the explosions had careened through the area, blasting holes in the walls for over sixty meters. It was to the end of one of the paths of destruction that the inspectors’ marker led her.
Three men and a woman stood around a chunk of carbon-plas column that was wedged between the ceiling and some poor person’s desk.
Lieutenant Kirk, the chief bomb inspector for the city of Jague, gave her a sober nod as she approached. “Captain Leslie, I think we finally have some real evidence.”
“About time, too,” one of the other men said. “So far, all we’ve found was a bit of residue from the initial explosion.”
“I’ll be glad to put this mystery to bed,” she replied. “As I’m sure will all of you.”
Her words were met with solemn nods. Buildings like the Pandora Tower should be very hard to bring down. Being a kilometer tall, they were designed to handle incredible wind forces, earthquakes, and even low-yield nuclear explosions.
The tower was supported by six main struts arranged in a hexagon, with cross connections stretched between them at regular intervals. It was designed to flex and move, but still remain rigid enough to halt movement long before it reached a collapse point. The structure was designed to survive losing three of the struts, so long as all three weren’t adjacent—which is exactly what had happened in the explosion. Even so, there were backup a-grav generators that should have held the tower up, but they had been destroyed as well.
It annoyed Leslie to no end that someone could have coordinated such a well-planned and executed operation, and no one had spotted anything out of the ordinary.
The issue that had thus far stumped the investigatory team was that the amount of force required to shred a carbon-plas support column was immense. Enough that the blast should have torn apart half the building, flinging it in all directions.