Packmule

by Blaze Ward

  If they ended up colonizing this rock for the rest of their lives, for instance.

  Effie led him to a gate that the crew had built in when they’d added all the wires, sensors, and strobe lights to scare off cats. Outside the fence, a trail ran all the way around the property. Bok checked that his comm was on, but he could see the farmhouse and the stack of containers from here, just about a kilometer distant, not far from the shore of the lake on a nice promontory that stuck a little ways out into the water.

  Effie headed clockwise, towards the higher end of the lake.

  The whole valley was a self-contained watershed and ecosystem. Birds could get in, but larger creatures had to really want to cross one of the high passes, and none of those routes were soft or pleasant. The high end of the valley butted up against the grandfather of all the other mountains that formed the bowl around here, a long-extinct stratovolcano that had long ago kicked out all sorts of stuff to make the valley below so fertile.

  If the weather was likely to get a little better in the summer, Bok would have eventually wanted to plant grapes. He added that to the list of plants he needed to find. With ten thousand years, something grape-like might have evolved to local conditions. The trees were strange enough variants of things he knew from back home, maybe evolved originally from Douglas-fir or sequoia, but they cut and burned just fine.

  Effie pulled Avalanche up short and dismounted. Bok stayed a-horseback and drew the pulse rifle from the saddle holster. Canine species might hunt, but tended to run away when confronted with bigger creatures they didn’t know.

  Cats, on the other hand, would hunt you if they thought they could get away with it. Jaguarondi might be a small puma, according to the records he remembered. Dark and sleek, but not a full-sized beast, if he was lucky. Not a threat to a group of cattle that would kick and stomp, but the new calves he was expecting would be at risk.

  And he wasn’t about to allow wild cats anywhere near the station. If the cost was being overrun with rats and rabbits, he would just have to come up with something to poison the former and ignore the latter.

  Rabbits made a wonderful alarm. If you had them around, there were no medium- to large-sized predators running around. Bok hadn’t seen birds big enough to be a threat to humans or calves.

  He could always jury-rig an air-defense turret with a stun cannon if he needed to chase eagles off.

  “Here,” Effie said, pointing to a spot on the ground.

  To clear pasture for fencing, and get enough wood for everything they needed to build, the crew had opened a corridor forty meters wide. There were still patches of trees inside the fence, but part of the reason Bok had chosen this spot was the series of connected meadows, probably cleared by regular wildfires caused by lightning.

  In the future, cattle and humans would alter the local biosystems instead.

  Effie realized Bok was holding a rifle, so she pulled a pulse pistol from her hip as she looked at him.

  “Problem?” she asked carefully.

  “Jaguarondi’s probably too small to attack us,” Bok noted. “Don’t know if we’ve gotten into his range with fence-building, or he’s decided to move into ours. Don’t plan on being a friendly neighbor about it.”

  Bok turned the roan’s head uphill and pushed her into motion. Effie mounted a moment later and joined them.

  It wasn’t tropical jungle up here, so the going wasn’t that rough. Overhead, a green canopy that was about an even mix of deciduous and evergreen. A lot of what he wanted to call Douglas fir mixed in with oaks and maples, if he understood the leaf patterns.

  There was a stand of sequoia not far from here that Bok planned to leave alone. At least seventy-five of the ancient monsters reaching for the sky, at least by their size today.

  Bok knew there were enough deer and such that game trails would exist. Didn’t take long to find one and inspect it.

  “Eyes up, just in case,” he said as he dismounted, rifle still in hand.

  Bok figured that the roan would spook if she smelled a cat getting close, but it might be sitting in the trees. There were a few with branches low enough and big enough that a cat could hide in them.

  And the cat had come through here at some point. Bok found a partial print that was too big to be a housecat, and too small to be a lion. About the size of a dog, maybe.

  Just the one print, and going away. Cat had stepped in a puddle, so maybe at a dead run. And sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around for Bok to track him.

  Bok sighed and mounted up. This time he let the roan head downhill, as was her preference, and nodded Effie into motion.

  “We’ll have to modify the sensors,” he thought aloud. “And probably bait a trap with some fresh kill. First, we’ll need to build a turret that we can control from the farmhouse.”

  “Stunner?” Effie asked.

  “Negative,” Bok decided. “Any predator that comes down to the wire after carrion gets killed. If we end up wiping out all the things keeping the deer in check, we’ll just have to start farming them, too.”

  “Venison’s good meat,” she noted.

  Bok nodded. This was his valley. His planet, at least until Avelina carried through with her threat to claim the entire place as an Imperial world and get herself made Duke of it.

  Or Buran showed up to challenge his claim.

  Raider (September 29, 402)

  Phil caught himself referring to the group today as the varsity squad. That suggested that the team he had been using were junior varsity. It was possibly accurate, but still rather insulting. They had done a fantastic job, growing into new responsibilities as he stretched this small crew thinner and thinner.

  But today, he had everyone back. Heather in her normal slot forward on the Emergency Bridge. Siobhan piloting here on the bridge and bickering good-naturedly with Evan in the Science Officer station again.

  The only person really missing was Bok Battenhouse, the Boatswain, but Kam was still a better engineer, plus Galin and Markus were aboard today, watching everything and taking notes.

  He hadn’t even had to order Siobhan and Heather back into uniform. Both had gotten up today and returned to active service. Or they were playing roles, and tomorrow would go back to being pirates. He figured the latter was more likely, but wasn’t going to push.

  Next year, they were going to probably have issues, when the RAN required them to act like grown-ups again.

  “Sixty seconds to Emergence,” Siobhan called on all channels.

  “Sciences?” Phil said aloud.

  “Fore and Aft systems both active and ready for passive scan, Commander,” Evan replied.

  “Engineering?” Phil continued.

  “Secondary JumpSails are holding well enough,” Kam replied. “We’ll be able to run if we have to.”

  Good. This had been a very short jump, exactly for that reason. A full day spent out at the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, just listening to every electronic chirp and looking for planets and other objects moving.

  At Trusski, RAN Ballard had gotten the glory by forward-spotting from the shadows of a moon. At Laptev, Phil’s crew had proven themselves just as good.

  Here, it was likely to be even more hairy.

  If this truly was Mansi, and they only had a pretty good, gut feeling still, the locals were likely to be much more paranoid. Doubly so if anyone had come through lately and warned them of pirates loose in the Altai sector or shared tales of Jessica Keller’s devastating raids along the inner part of the frontier, along this side of M’Hanii.

  But paranoia bred stress, and that was a significant chunk of his purpose. Keller would have had to withdraw, having lost CS-405 without explanation after Severnaya Zemlya. She would need time to move the Forward Base to a new hiding place. Time that would have let Buran recover some of his footing.

  Hopefully that deathless bastard was pouring resources into the Altai sector to look for Phil’s pirates. Not enough to actually find him, but enough that they had to come fro
m somewhere else, meaning Keller might stumble into an unguarded system with a warpack set to fight a major fleet action.

  Goths finding an unlocked, postern gate.

  Phil just wished there was a way to easily get her a message. Right now, that would involve a sixty-day sail back to Osynth B’Udan, just to find someone who could direct him back to the front lines with Mendocino or Duncan.

  “All hands, stand by,” Siobhan said in her best radio voice. “Emergence.”

  Phil felt it in his bones today, but just watching the stress suddenly rise in Siobhan and Evan’s backs told him they had arrived. He gave them thirty seconds to absorb everything before he spoke.

  “Evan. Status?” Phil asked in a command voice. He still had the interior lines open, so everyone was listening. Not standard procedure, but today it felt appropriate.

  “Well in the shadow of moon Three,” Evan said.

  The gas giant behind them was tentatively listed as Mansi-D, assuming this was the right system. Its moons were numbered down from largest to smallest. Number One was volcanic, spewing the occasional lava plume into orbit, as it was too close to the primary for comfort and got squished constantly by moving gravity fields on all sides. Two was an icemoon much further away from the gas giant, with the possibility of a major, liquid ocean underneath, depending on how one interpreted the data.

  Three was a rock. Pretty big as moons went, perhaps thirty-five hundred kilometers in diameter. It was tidally locked with the primary, always presenting the same face inward, with what looked like a thin-but-measurable atmosphere mostly made up of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, from what Evan was forwarding to his station.

  “Siobhan?” Phil asked.

  “Dead center on target zone and holding,” his Pilot replied, still sounding too much like Lady Blackbeard for this deck.

  CS-405 was between Three and D. Hiding from any sensors over on Mansi-B, itself down on the warmer, inner edge of this system’s habitable zone. The ship would slowly orbit in retrograde to the moon below them, hiding behind the rock as it orbited the primary. A full orbit would take about three days, but they weren’t going to be here that long.

  “Maintain shadow holding,” Phil ordered. “Evan, anything below us on the ground looking up?”

  “Negative,” the Science Officer said after a tense moment. “I can see beacons on the surface, and a few in orbit above us, but they appear to be navigational in nature, sir. All are emitting a matching signal, so I would guess you could use them to triangulate your location in three dimensions with reasonable accuracy. Nobody is painting us with a sensor that I can detect.”

  “Assume passives and mark them for destruction on a later pass, as necessary,” Phil said.

  If he could sneak in and out a few more times, that would be lovely, but blowing things up remained high on his list, because anything he killed had to be replaced by that stupid robot.

  It wasn’t a butterfly’s wings causing a hurricane, but every bit of entropy he could deliver was one less that Keller had to, or opened the door for her and Fribourg one millimeter farther.

  Phil listened for five, tense minutes as all hands went about their business. He kept quiet and let the experts handle things at this point. Everybody had been briefed on the needs from their stations, and they were among the very best, or they wouldn’t be here in the first place.

  Finally, the little clock on his screen ticked down to zero. Time for higher-risk adventure to start.

  “Pilot, stand by to broach,” Phil ordered in his big, serious voice. “Science Officer, you have Tactical.”

  Normally, Heather was the Tactical officer, but today she was just Second in Command. Evan Brinich would have control of things as he needed for the most delicate task ahead.

  “Pilot,” Evan called, never looking up from his boards. “Prepare to bring our tail around a little more, roughly eight degrees as we climb out.”

  “Roger that,” Siobhan replied seriously, all merriment and teasing from their two voices gone.

  Phil hadn’t seen a Hammerhead over there in their earlier scans, but he had no idea what a secret prison on a hidden planet might have for defenses. And there was only so much you could see from thirty light-hours away.

  “Execute your broach,” Evan commanded.

  On Phil’s screens, CS-405 edged below the south pole of Three and was suddenly inundated by a mass of signals traffic from Mansi-B, the prison world.

  They were behind Mansi-B in orbit, with that world moving farther away from them every day. About a quarter orbit separated them right now, so the signals were a little stale, but not much. Less than an hour old.

  No active ships in orbit.

  Not just no warships, but no ships of any kind. Nothing at all here, with the other navigational hazard well away from the planet. Just eight stations defining a perfect cube, at forty-five north and forty-five south latitude, geosynchronous with the ground, ninety degrees apart. Phil doubted that Evan would be able to spot the kremlin on the ground from here, but he didn’t need to know where it was. There was nothing his force could do against a heavily-defended planet, and those eight stations were each big enough that they probably had serious firepower aboard them.

  But at the same time, they couldn’t move. There were no ships visible that could come over here if they did spot him. That either meant they were on the planetary surface, where The Eldest would never have left them, being too valuable, or they were so small that they could dock inside one of the stations.

  Anything that tiny he could splatter with CS-405’s pulse beams if they got too close.

  All that meant was that Phil only had to worry about external visitors, coming on some schedule he could not predict.

  A freighter full of new prisoners he might be able to intercept, if he was in exactly the perfect position at the right moment, which he doubted. Alternatively, he would be facing something too big to challenge, from a single Hammerhead all the way up to a Megalodon carrying a newly captured cruiser to deposit in orbit over there.

  No, if this was really Mansi, as Lan had described the place, all Phil and his people could do would be to confirm it, and then run like hell for home without the locals knowing they had been scouted. Fribourg would need to bring a fleet big enough to take the system and hold it long enough to locate and evacuate all Imperial prisoners.

  Idly, Phil wondered if that sort of thing might get him knighted, like Arlo and Kermode had been. He was still facing the possibility of a hostile Court Martial at Ladaux, for having his primary JumpSail destroyed and the secondary so badly mangled while escaping that they were required to limp along even slower than Queen Anne’s Revenge or Packmule.

  Anything he could do to balance that ledger out a little before he went home to his fate would be worth doing.

  “Pilot, secure from broach,” Evan called, breaking Phil out of his reverie and bringing him back to the present.

  He hadn’t been daydreaming, so much as planning the next six stages of his campaign. Too much hinged on the data Evan had gathered today, and how soon it could be turned into information.

  Around them, CS-405 slid silently back below the horizon of Three, as seen from Mansi-B.

  “Stand by for a hard ping on the ground,” Evan said.

  This had to wait until last. They might trigger something on the ground by scanning everything. And the reflection might bounce enough energy off the surface of Mansi-D that someone paying attention might see something and grow curious.

  CS-405 needed to be long gone before anyone came to investigate.

  “Executing,” Evan called loudly to the room and the whole ship.

  Two hard pulses of energy, aimed straight down, covering an area around three thousand kilometers across, so hopefully none of the energy bled around the horizon to be picked up closer to the inhabited parts of the system.

  “Secured from scanning,” Evan pressed a button on his board and leaned back a little. “Pilot, take us into Jump.”
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br />   Siobhan pressed 405 sideways into JumpSpace before Evan had finished speaking, the tiny escort leaping away for the safe depths of interstellar space.

  “Commander, you have the bridge,” Evan said formally. “Ship is in JumpSpace.”

  “All hands, secure from General Quarters,” Phil replied. “Stand down and return to normal crew rotations.”

  Meaning, Phil was back down to the junior varsity team, which was getting to be good enough that they might give the main players a run for it, given a few more months of being First Violinists. But Heather and Siobhan could turn over their stations and get some food and a nap.

  They would need to be ready for the next phase of planning.

  Bandits (October 1, 402)

  Heather had blown up a map of the third moon and printed it on a meter-square piece of paper, where it hung on the wall of Packmule’s bridge as a reminder of what to look forward to, as she killed time on her watch, until Andre woke up.

  The timing of the scouting run had been random luck, but it hadn’t worked out too bad. The surface of the moon was a battered pizza dough where bubbles had popped while cooking, leaving a few hills, a number of weirdly-flat craters, and several rocky seas made up of what Evan had guessed were volcanic plains left over from planetary formation. They hadn’t noted any active volcanoes during their pass, but there had to be something, since the atmosphere, however thin it was, was being actively replenished faster than the gas giant overhead could strip molecules away.

  Evan had noted three places where they might find things on the surface, but one of them had been right at the terminator of his scan, so there might be more beyond it.

  What was there was interesting enough to warrant a raid.

  Unlike Aquitaine, Fribourg maintained a rigid ship scaling system. A-type were individually-piloted star fighters, while B-type were multi-crew bombers and gunships, still operating from a mothership carrier. They were both easily distinguished from larger vessels by lacking any jump capabilities.