by Michael Orr
Viktor wanted to say ’latent death wish’, but he’d have to earn that kind of familiarity.
“I’d’ve requested it sooner, sir. If I’d known about it. This’z what I had in mind when I joined EarthFleet.”
Lieutenant Commander Herrick Courne looked up at him coldly. Like Viktor, Courne was average looking, though mid-thirties and something of the machine. Was it a permanent coldness, or just toward noobs?
“Had what in mind, Ensign?”
“Dynamic response, sir.” It’d taken Viktor a long time to coin that one. He watched the commander’s gears work. Still those flinty eyes.
“Kinda catchy. I’ll hafta remember it.”
“I just wanna be accurate, sir.”
“Tell me what anti-piracy means t’you, Ensign.”
“That’s what I’m hoping to learn, sir. I expect an ensign’s understanding is incomplete at best.”
Courne studied him for several silent heartbeats. “You’re pretty slick, Mister Ionescu.”
“Sir?”
“Lotsa prepared answers. You’ve spent a lotta time on your delivery.”
“There was precious little information in the database for me ta study, sir. I didn’t see a better way to proceed.”
Courne exhaled through his nostrils. Noisily. “I have a challenge for ya, Viktor. On a boat like this ya get to know everyone on a first-name basis. Can you temper your wit, ’n dress down your spit-n-polish enough to become part’a this crew? A talking head, I don’t need.”
“I didn’t think I’d get the invitation right off, sir. But that’s what I’m looking for. I’m not built for a task force’s formality.”
“Good.” Courne lightened up noticeably. “Leave it in yesterday. Today, I need you t’replace my late third-shift tactical officer. And he was well liked.”
“I got that from Jake, sir. Sorry he was lost.”
Courne nodded. “You any good at improv?”
“I like ta think I’m quick on my feet, sir.”
“I’ll need you t’be.” The skipper stood and extended a handshake. “We never know how long until our next action. While ya can, I want you studying our operations full time. Get a feel for what we do and what they do. I’ve given you full access ta ship’s logs.”
“Gladly, sir.” Viktor smiled, shaking Courne’s hand and trying to appear casual.
“And I’m confirming your promotion ta acting sublieutenant,” Courne added. “Ensigns make me lose sleep.”
MOSCOW MEGAPLEX – EARTH – FEB 29, 2352
Nazanin had been avoiding Bastien’s calls; but this time, after endless raging internal debates, she sucked in a breath and took the leap.
“Hi.” She smiled nervously into the holo. Bastien Thierry was actually kinda hot, with his red-gold hair loose around his neck and heavy blue eyes that commanded attention. His light skin wasn’t exactly her taste, but...
“Hey!” Bastien beamed. He hadn’t expected an answer this time, either. But now that he was face-to-face with the definition of ‘exquisite’, he could only half-breathe.
There wasn’t a trace of masculinity in Nazanin Sukho: a heart-shaped face with a soft, meek chin and smooth jawline; a gentle, almost childlike nose reaching up between big beautiful eyes of a color he’d never seen in irises before. He wondered if they were customs. Some women still bothered with such things.
Above that mesmerizing gaze, a peppery pair of eyebrows poised to strike. And topping it all off like whipped cream was a thick, luxurious mid-length cut of pure white hair done up with a dramatic swipe of fork-tine bangs.
Just like her images. He inhaled. “You okay?”
The gorgeousness on the other end turned coy. “Yeah. I just needed some time ta sort myself out.”
She paused, and Bastien tuned in to her reservations, allowing her to set the pace. Whatever she needed. There was no reason for this to be difficult. In fact, anything less than ‘pleasant’ was unacceptable. He would see to that if she gave him the chance.
Her eyes swept back up to his as if some final stumbling block had just resolved. Her upper lip twitched.
“Ever been ta Moscow?”
5
* * *
EFS TIRADE – ALLIANCE SPACE – MAR 1, 2352
Acting Sublieutenant Ionescu rubbed his bleary eyes and leaned back from the holo. He’d been reading through Tirade’s logs for hours and only just realized the latest entry had become a meaningless smear of text. It might’ve been Vogon poetry for all he’d gleaned.
“Moron,” he whispered. “s’Not about how much ya can read; it’s about whatcha learn.” He scrolled back to find the last entry he could clearly recollect, losing more than ninety minutes’ apparent progress. “What’d we learn today, children?” he soured, pulling up a blank screen for new notes.
Courne had been keeping an eye on his new officer’s progress through the database. The kid was tough on himself, going through log entries for the past month in his first shift. But was he paying attention?
He called for Viktor early the next day, catching him fresh.
Courne sipped on a near-empty cup of coffee as Viktor settled into a seat. “So, now what does anti-piracy mean t’you, Mister Ionescu?”
“So far, sir, it looks like there’re two approaches: intimidation or surprise. I didn’t see ’em chest-thumping much. Either you scare the pants off ’em and they break, or they never even see you coming. But again, that’s only the last month. I haven’t gotten beyond that.”
“Anything you’d do differently, lieutenant?”
“I’m just absorbing right now, sir. I wouldn’t presum–”
“Viktor, leave Abascus with the task force.”
“Yessir.” Viktor forced himself to regroup. There was a point to this. “I mainly ha–”
#Captain to the bridge,# snarled the comm, and Courne opened the channel:
“Report.”
“Contact, Skipper. Not Chufhu.” The first lieutenant’s voice was calm and cool; a proper spokesman for an experienced crew.
Courne’s eyes drew Viktor out of his chair. “Seems we have work t’do.”
“Aye, sir.” Viktor swallowed, following his new captain down to the bridge.
Tirade’s CIC was populated by men staffing holopanels in a semicircle around the captain’s chair. Courne himself had a holo tree that he passed through to take station.
The corvette’s bridge was unexpectedly spacious and offered abundant room for sightseers, so Viktor slid up a spare mag-lock chair beside the on-duty tactical officer to get a first look at his new station.
“Sitrep,” Courne demanded as he scanned his tree.
“We’re trackin’ a slo-space target outta five-one, Skipper.” Tac indicated the fifth planet’s innermost moon.
“Lag time?”
“Twenty-four minutes, sir.”
“s’A big headstart,” Courne exhaled. “Let’s see if we can find ’im.”
Viktor waited on pins and needles as Tirade jumped to the projected intersect point. Tactical scanned for traces of the ship, but there was nothing.
“Wouldn’t they ’ave jumped, sir?” Viktor asked.
“They coulda jumped right from the moon,” explained the first lieutenant. “Only a local would bother with slo-space.”
Tirade made another jump, this time toward the system’s main populated planet. The haze of slipstream bled away and Tirade emerged in the midst of an idling freight convoy.
“Well whaddya know...” Courne’s hands flashed across his screen tree, checking statuses throughout the convoy and looking for traces of recent engine activity.
“Got sump’m, sir,” Tactical announced. Viktor studied the screen, searching for whatever his first-shift counterpart was seeing. He couldn’t be sure with his naked eye, but one of the ships toward the outer edge of the convoy appeared to be coasting more than the others, still slowing to match the group’s velocity.
Courne was all over it. “Comm, gimme the lead ship.”<
br />
The bridge’s holoviewer lit up with the exotic red features of a Chufh alpha. The figure was already speaking, which made the translation even more jumbled.
“...provisioning fleet. Why are you here?” The Chufh sounded more confused than perturbed. Its trilateral, geometric body and red-orange tiger stripes held Viktor’s rapt attention as Courne made Tirade’s case.
“These vessels are registered with Grinda,” the alpha argued. “None are from Alatt’s moon.”
“Your Excellency, we would ask you to verify the identity and status of this vessel...” Courne projected the questionable ship along with its convoy position.
The Chufh seemed to glare at him, but one of his other sides activated something beyond the range of Tirade’s holo. As soon as the scan started up, the distant ship broke rank and bolted for open space.
Courne nodded to his first to get Tirade underway while he handled the politics. The Chufh was still glaring at him.
“You are in pursuit?” it asked expectantly.
“We’re much obliged for your assistance, Excellency.” Courne nodded, and the holo broke off.
“Don’t mind us,” he said to the empty air, bringing chuckles, but Tirade was rapidly closing on the bandit and attention was tight.
As an observer, Viktor had the leisure to sort recent events into a coherent chronology in his mind and clear space for more. No reason to be caught off guard when his turn came. And from what he’d gathered reading ship’s logs, this was fairly routine.
Tirade held back far enough to be able to ignore the bandit’s jinks and zigs.
“Either they don’t have stardrive, or they want us ta think they don’t,” Courne said directly to Viktor, who nodded. Now he knew this had to be routine if the skipper had time for a bit of tutoring.
Comm hailed the bandit: “Unidentified vessel, stand down. No charges have been brought against you. This is a standard registration check. I say again, stand down.”
The bandit ignored him, but uselessly. There was no way they could outrun Tirade in their secondhand freighter. Their efforts to blend in with Chufhu convoys forced them to sacrifice anything that would’ve given them an edge.
Tirade took station above and behind, watching the ship work itself into a pointless frenzy. After several minutes, the bandit finally lost heart and slowed down.
“No traces of stardrive buildup, Cap’n,” Tactical reported. “Not playin’ possum.”
“Alright. Ticker...” Courne preferred his first’s nickname, “get a boarding crew down there. If they’re cooperative, get as much info as you can and we’ll let ’em go. Otherwise...”
Ticker nodded and left the bridge, calling out a stream of crewmen’s names over his own comm.
“Stay sharp, gentlemen.” Courne eyed Tactical and his hovering noob officer. It was Tac’s job to monitor the bandit and make sure nothing unexpected happened — especially now that human lives were on the line.
Tirade maneuvered into docking position and the boarding party broke airlock. Seven full minutes of back and forth carried over the bridge’s omnicom as Ticker leaned on the pirates. It wasn’t until he promised immunity that they revealed the presence of a stronghold back at the moon...one Tirade wouldn’t be able to handle on her own.
“You’ve got some kinda timing, Mister Ionescu,” Courne told him. This was now a multi-ship operation, and Viktor licked his lips with interest.
After letting the bandit go its way with a warning not to contact their base, Tirade took up station at the moon’s lagrange point. Here, the corvette could power down propulsion and remain in place, minimizing its energy signature to appear on scanners like part of the background radiation. Now it was just a matter of waiting for bigger guns.
6
* * *
MOSCOW MEGAPLEX – EARTH – MAR 1, 2352
Bastien boarded a trans-at flight with his senses awhirl. This would be more than a weekend with the most gorgeous stranger in the world. Nazanin had shared her reasoning with him, and together they agreed to make this as natural for the baby as possible.
Twenty-five minutes later, he stepped out of the Moscow spaceport into late winter, bewitched by the frigid bite of Earth’s northernmost full-scale megaplex. A low, pale sun dozed in hazy twilight, glinting across snowbright parks and sparkling towers to lend everything an old-world glow.
He rode the tube to an open-air park Nazanin suggested, discovering it to be a fairyland of ice-laden trees and rolling snow-covered glades, all of it punctuated by frozen water fountains that reached into the sky like geysers trapped in time.
Dammmmn...” he whispered, his breath coiling into the ice-glittering air. Nazanin’s directions led to a footbridge arcing over an ice-sheet that would eventually thaw into a summertime lake. And at the bridge’s apex, like some magical nymph conjuring all this otherworldly glory, stood Nazanin Sukho in stark, perfect white.
EFS TIRADE – ALLIANCE SPACE – MAR 2, 2352
“There’s more ta battle tactics than the use’a ship’s weapons.” Courne was explaining the finer points of independent ops to Viktor as Tirade’s stakeout dragged on.
“It’s good that you’re studying our approaches to engagements, but there’re other, more global factors you hafta take into account depending on where ya find yourself. For instance, the Chufhu.
“These guys’re fastidious,” he went on. “They only reluctantly accept our help, and they detest space junk. If we start turnin’ their nice, tidy pocket of the Alliance into a scrapheap they come unglued and we get a call from Commodore Siridan. I’m sure it goes without saying that the less the Admiralty has to intervene, the more latitude we’re given.”
Viktor hoped he didn’t look as much like a child as he felt. Info he’d previously screened out as tertiary was suddenly the first order of business: know your context.
“I guess I overlooked local politics, sir.”
“Not t’worry, Lieutenant. It’s only your third day.”
Back at his log reviews, acting-sublieutenant-going-on-first-year-cadet Ionescu correlated known sociopolitical factors as part of his assessment.
The results were maddening.
Seeing an opportunity to make points with the Alliance, EarthFleet had negotiated for years trying to get access to outer edge pirate sanctuaries. Unfortunately, when it finally did come, the invite carried exasperating conditions — sometimes even a prohibition on actions within habitable zones.
“Job security,” Viktor spat. They could’ve eradicated piracy in the sector within weeks if the Chufhu weren’t such obsessive-compulsive pricks. Anti-piracy seemed to be more a show of good faith than an effort to safeguard inter-system trade.
“Is that your final assessment, Lieutenant?” asked Courne in a follow-up debrief.
“Nothing’s ever final, sir. I understand that things can change.”
“Think it’s futile?”
“No, sir. Every pirate we neutralize makes the sector that much safer. I’m just...coming ta grips with an overarching agenda I wasn’t aware of.”
Courne nodded. “You could become the senior officer aboard at any moment, and you’ll need that background to interpret your orders and plan actionable courses.”
“And avoid getting this crew court-martialed, sir?”
Courne smiled a little. “Your cynicism’s showing, Vik.”
The next day, all eyes on Tirade watched eagerly as two frigates rolled in toward the moon. They dwarfed the corvette, their thug-like hulls brutally lantern-jawed and bristling with weapons. Viktor had often watched the distant frigates escorting Abascus, but up close they inspired martial awe. He tingled as they took station to either side of Tirade, sandwiching the vette between their protective bulks as the ad hoc task force bore down on the pirate stronghold.
Now, streaks of pale blue engine wash streamed from the moon as bandits scattered for open space.
The Terran group responded with blockading fire, sending up walls of flak like a cage to
corral the fleeing ships.
The pirates huddled within the caging fire, threatened by hull breaches on all sides. Only the foolhardy tried their luck, one or two of them breaking free and running for the system’s other moons and asteroids while their less fortunate comrades cowered inside the maelstrom.
The escapees would be left to Tirade after the engagement; but right now Viktor was tickled to join the sweeper crews clearing the captured stronghold.
His turtle dropship plotted its way into the moon, prowling through caverns and tunnels stacked high with spare parts and partial hulls. Occasional potshots rang against the turtle’s armored hull, but the base was essentially vacant. They landed at the far end of a large cavern that showed signs of heavy skid traffic on its rocky floor.
“Time’s a-wastin’ gents,” the detail's lead lieutenant motioned for the debark lineup.
Viktor’s adrenalized fingers fumbled with his air supply for the fifth time before he leapt out into the moon’s low gravity. Aiming himself with toe-taps, he bounded like a beach ball toward a huge airlocked barricade embedded in the cavern wall where his lead was headed. His helmet HUD measured the metal wall at roughly fifty-six meters wide and twenty-two meters high. God only knew what would be lurking behind it.
A sergeant wearing heavy scanner gear bounced up beside the lieutenant in charge, aiming his hardware at the barricade in slow, sweeping motions.
“No bios,” he confirmed after a silent minute of testing.
“Drop it,” the LT ordered.
Viktor stood by, carefully studying the demo guys as they positioned their charges to avoid bringing down the cavern roof. He made a mental note to get certified on it.
“Cover!” LT shouted into his comm, but nobody did anything in particular. Not into making a fool of himself, Viktor stood fast like the others.
Tiny squibs fizzed around the barricade’s perimeter, then there was a pause. Viktor held his breath.
A few seconds more and the metal barricade liquefied, flooding down into a silvery pool on the floor. It immediately hardened into clumps small enough to step over.