Swords Above the Stars

by Roman Zlotnikov

  “How are you doing? Do you still have your ship?” asked Don Krushinka.

  “Sort of,” nodded Beer Keg. “The ship is not actually ours, but we have already taken root on it. Since I arrived in it, so much has happened ...” Beer Keg grinned and slapped Yv on the back. “I swear by Saint Sistine that it was only thanks to Lucky here that we got out alive. Unfortunately, not all of us.” He took the hat from his head. “God rest our old mate Fat Anselm’s soul to eternity.”

  Everyone stood up and took off their hats, too. Fat Anselm was known to be a good warrior and a proud don.

  “Yes,” said Beer Keg after a pause. “He always flew his sails with dignity.”

  They sat down again, and Don Krushinka asked them in a slightly condescending tone. “Well, what have you been up to all this time? Lately, I’ve heard nothing but complaints about how hard life is now for a noble don, and how nobody wants to stick their nose behind the forts in the dead zone, and they don’t sound like real warriors to me!”

  Beer Keg turned to the tavern door and waved to somebody. When the stooping black-haired Don approached the table, Beer Keg turned to Don Krushinka and said solemnly. “May I introduce you to Don Diaz, nicknamed Stubborn Bull, and the captain of the corvette ‘Blasco Ninyas’ on which we arrived a month ago from a raid on Zovros.”

  By the end of the year, Don Krushinka had already commissioned three hundred and twenty pennants. In addition, another squadron of one hundred and fifty ships had decided to try their luck on the law of ‘privateering.’ Don Krushinka honestly warned the captains that he didn’t know how their employer would react to this, but they still decided to try it anyway. Either way, they could not count on any other contracts in the near future. Eventually, Don Krushinka decided it was time to introduce his employer to the fleet. Leaving behind a Don Evron, nicknamed Old Fart, in charge of the squadron, he left for an unknown destination. The noble dons waited impatiently on Tahir. After so many years of frustration, many still could not quite believe in the reality of the future contract and feared that all their rosy optimistic hopes might evaporate like smoke.

  One evening, Beer Keg, Grey Moustache, Yv, and Stubborn Bull were killing time in the tavern, peacefully finishing off a fourth bottle of Malvasia wine, when suddenly Pip burst into the room out of breath, and behind him charged in an overdressed young Don with his sword drawn. Pip darted over to the table and huddled in the corner.

  “Ah, there you are!” yelled the young man triumphantly as he tried to climb over Beer Keg.

  Without thinking twice, the don caught him by his plaited hair, snatched his sword away, and flung the insolent man to the ground.

  “Right, get lost!”

  The young don immediately jumped back to his feet.

  “How dare you? I am Don Allemendo, nicknamed Bloody Glove! Identify yourself! I want to know who I will pierce with this sword.”

  The friends looked at each other knowingly, then Beer Keg turned back to the red-faced young man.

  “I swear by Saint Samuel, New Simaron.”

  The young man turned white, then looked embarrassed, and Beer Keg continued in a contemptuous tone.

  “A student dropout, eh? Well, who else would come up with such a stupid nickname?” He shook his finger at the young man. “Remember, puppy, no decent don ever took upon himself a nickname, which included the words blood, death, horror or the like. You have been reading cheap books about traditions that you know nothing about. All right, now get lost!” Beer Keg threw his sword back to him. “Be more careful with that toothpick, or one day you will meet someone like Lucky, and he’ll skewer you in a second.”

  The young man, who was about to break out in an angry tirade, suddenly opened his mouth wide.

  “Lucky ... I swear by the Saints ... so, you must be Don Beer Keg! I read about you in the ‘Black Raid’ and the ‘New Simaron Blazing Sun!’ He whirled his head around under the friendly laughter running around the tavern. “You must be Grey Moustache!” The guy almost choked with excitement.

  Then the door opened, and Don Krushinka appeared on the threshold. Everyone froze. Don Krushinka looked around at all the quizzical faces and solemnly declared. “Gentlemen, I present to you, your employer.”

  He stepped aside to let their employer in ahead of him.

  Total silence hung in the air for a few seconds, then someone’s astonished voice announced, “Oh, my God! It’s a woman! Even if she is wearing pants!”

  3

  Tera fumed and raged. Of course, what could be expected from a world ruled by men? She had hoped that among them there would at least be a couple who could think with their heads and not just their dicks.

  Dear God! Not even one. She remembered the filthy look in the eyes of the stinky peasants at customs, in the port, and in the tavern. What a racket started when Don Krushinka introduced her, not only as the employer but also as commander in chief!

  They didn’t care who was doing the hiring, but to be under the command of a female! What a bunch of stupid fools and braggarts. Tera snorted with disgust, remembering Sandra’s last piece of advice.

  In the evening, before flying out, they had dinner together in the castle. When the last course had been collected and dessert served, Sandra turned to Don Krushinka and said, “My dear, we need some private time. Go for a walk in the park.”

  He grinned, and after silently throwing down a cup of white Anjou, he left the table. The women were silent. Then Sandra turned to Tera.

  “What I wanted to tell you, my girl ...” she hesitated, not knowing how to delicately get down to business, then she decided to start directly, “I think before your departure you should take on a dynastic husband.”

  “What?” Tera looked at her through eyes round with astonishment.

  “Look, Sandra, what ridiculous ideas have come into your mind? What does my family life have to do with the coming war?”

  Sandra grinned at her. “Better to be safe than sorry. Just in case you involve yourself in a story similar to mine.”

  “You mean ...”

  “Oh, no!” Sandra waved her hands in protest, then broke down and laughed. “I don’t think that you will melt like butter over the first mustache you come across. I’ll tell you straight, most of the men on that side of the nebulae are only a cause for disgust. To be honest, I even found my Whiskered One disgusting at the beginning. He was loud, brash, and the smell of his breath?” Sandra winced while waving her hand in front of her nose, then she smiled. “But all this paled into insignificance when I started to feel ...” she wrinkled her forehead and wiggled her fingers around, trying to find a precise description, “security perhaps. You need to understand. In duels, I put holes through more than a dozen strong swordsmen. I went through a lot in the Navy, even mutinied against my own sister. Then, one day, I suddenly felt how pleasant it could be if there was a shoulder to lean on that would not buckle when you put all your fears, pain, and sorrow upon it.” She shook her head thoughtfully. “It is a very strange emotion, but ... addictive. It seemed to me that it’s worth even more than the crown.”

  Tera looked at her intensely.

  “So, you think that I should ensure my future?”

  “That’s it exactly, my girl”

  Tera shook her head in thought.

  “But if you say it is so addictive, then what’s the point? If I fail, no dynastic marriage will help. You chose to give up the crown and not to leave your Whiskered One.”

  Sandra shrugged.

  “Well, queens have always had lovers.”

  “But your Whiskered One did not agree to it,” laughed Tera. “What makes you think one day one will come to me and agree to it?”

  Sandra shook her head.

  “You constantly surprise me, my girl! Anybody else would be outraged, would argue that something like that would never happen to her, but you ...”

  Tera smiled.

  “I used to heed your advice.” She paused. “I think that for now, we should let th
is conversation go.”

  ***

  Now, two months later, she wondered how it was possible to experience something other than contempt and disgust for all these overdressed thugs.

  She gave Don Krushinka a real bad time, saying she was not going to pay this gang of degenerates and men so full of themselves they can’t tell the difference between their nose and their nozzle.

  Don Krushinka listened to her in silence, then grinned. “I’m not going to slip you a pig in a poke. Try them out, your majesty.”

  Tera snorted indignantly and said in a threatening tone. “Oh, you can be sure I will!”

  The trials were scheduled for Wednesday. Tera was going to arrange a demonstration of boarding. Initially, it was assumed that her ship would attack a similar class of ship from the noble dons’ squadron, and in return, they should try to board a ship from her squadron of a smaller class, but the dons were offended, so she evened up the odds.

  It was decided that the attacking ships in both cases would be stronger than the ships they were attacking. Her ship was to launch the first attack. The general mood in the squadron was upbeat. No one doubted their victory. At five forty on-board time, Tera went to the control center of her flagship. The captain of the flagship, Captain Estelle, and Don Krushinka were already waiting for her there. She went over to the main holocube, which was to be sent all the information. She scanned the excited faces of her officers, and Don Krushinka’s cunning calm face, before nodding.

  “Let’s get started.”

  Captain Estelle lifted a microphone to her lips.

  “Let’s get moving! Let’s show those smelly peasant men what a fleet of the kingdom is capable of!” With a dismissive smile, she handed the microphone to Don Krushinka.

  He grinned, bringing the microphone to his lips, and uttered in a sort of lazy tone. “Greetings to Stubborn Bull and Sharp Schmuck. Remind the crew not to forget two important things.” He winked at the captain of the flagship. “Firstly, you are being confronted by ladies, so tell the boarding party not to go on the rampage too much. Secondly, believe me, these ladies are such that if you just let your guard down for one moment, then we will not be getting hired.”

  The captain of the flagship snorted and muttered loud enough so Don Krushinka could hear. “Only where it is a question of honor could a man implicate that money was the main issue.”

  Don Krushinka laughed out loud. From the very first day, this woman had never missed a chance to show her contempt for the male sex, but that was her problem.

  Yv watched carefully as a slender destroyer with a total tonnage at least one and a half times greater than the ‘Blasco Ninyas’, slowly approached the corvette. Beer Keg, as usual, was standing at the command seat. A ridiculously bright orange ball fluttered around above the helmet of his battle suit, the loss of which would mean that its owner was out of commission.

  “If they tried to board a ship of The Enemy in such a way, their ship would already be full of trolls,” he growled.

  Stubborn Bull grinned.

  “You be careful out there, it isn’t a good idea to injure our employer’s representatives.”

  “I swear by Saint Dustan, it looks as if they could injure anybody they want themselves,” chuckled Beer Keg. He shifted his shoulders to check how tight his battle suit was. Putting on a helmet, and leaving the visor open, he slapped irritably at the ball fluttering above him and muttered, “OK, I’ll go join my guys.”

  A slight tremor ran across the deck of the control center from contact with the boarding ships, and the captain’s voice barked out on the open coms channel indicating the places the boarding party was attacking.

  Yv turned to his new apprentice. “How many?”

  The young man turned to him excitedly.

  “Two. Rather, there were three, but I lost one.”

  Yv nodded back.

  “Not bad. But there were actually five.” He turned to him and did something on the console bringing up the data on the monitor. “I could not work out where one of them went either. It is difficult with this console because the inconvenient design and small size of the keys affect your rate of reaction.”

  The apprentice stared in fascination at the columns of numbers on both monitors. On his version, he managed to punch through the approaching destroyer’s defenses twice, and the level of damage inflicted was approaching seven percent. Yv did it four times, and his level was above twenty per cent. The young man licked his lips and sighed.

  “I could never achieve that.”

  “Who knows?” Yv shrugged and put the recording of their actions on a slow playback.

  “Watch and learn.”

  He turned to the screen, showing the battle in the corridors. A dense crowd of Royal Space Marines was trying to burst inside. After they passed down the first junction in the corridors, three dons appeared behind the Marines and began to chop down the orange balls above their helmets. They managed to cut down seven before the women came to realize what was happening, and the rear ranks turned to face them. The second stick faced another surprise. The commander of the Space Marines, already convinced of the superiority of the dons fencing technique, deployed seven troops to the attack, At the very moment that they were about to strike up a fight with the three dons, the dons withdrew slightly, and just as on the first occasion, five more dons appeared into the gap between the two groups of fencers. Seven were cut down immediately, after which the position of the rest was hopeless. Stubborn Bull snorted and shook his head.

  “Dumb, just like trolls. If we wanted to, we could chop them down like cabbages.”

  Forty minutes later it was all over. Stubborn Bull was tempted to attack the destroyer, but he was afraid that excessive zeal might spoil the party. So, with a sigh, he gave the command to send the destroyed boarding team back to their boats and reported to Don Krushinka.

  “The attack was repelled. Our losses were seven balls.”

  “Enemy losses?”

  Stubborn Bull shrugged diplomatically.

  “I don’t know, sorry, but we weren’t keeping count.”

  Don Krushinka laughed and hung up. Captain Diaz shook his head.

  “What can I say, what else would you expect from them—the regular army.”

  Don Krushinka turned to the captain of the flagship, who had listened with a bemused look on her face to the report from the captain of the destroyer.

  “Well, said Don Krushinka, “shall we start the second part of the trial?”

  She nodded distractedly, but then came Tera’s calm voice.

  “No need to make a hole in the hull of my corvette. I can already see clearly how that would all end.” She paused and added acidly. “However, if the captain of my flagship is willing to risk her reputation of ...”

  The captain, crushed, remained silent. Don Krushinka felt sorry for her.

  “Do not be so upset, my lady, that is Stubborn Bull’s corvette. It has a powerful boarding party. Almost all of them are veterans. They have been fighting for half a century, and some even longer. I think even the Green Berets of the President of the Commonwealth of the American Constitution, or the British Gurkhas would be unable to cope with them.”

  “So, these are the best of the best? Nobody can overcome them?”

  Don Krushinka shrugged.

  “Well, maybe the Ushkuyniks, but that would be down to the will of God.”

  Tera paced around the control center.

  “So, why don’t you have large ships?”

  Don Krushinka grinned.

  “Too expensive. Not many people can afford to maintain large ships. Since the Armistice, there are few contracts and they are low paid. Here, perhaps, are all that remains of the noble dons. But many of these little ships can surprise an enemy two or three times bigger than themselves, including in a fire fight.”

  Tera turned sharply.

  “Is it possible to check that as well?”

  Don Krushinka bowed his head.

  “Then le
t’s check it!” Tera smiled in a predatory manner.

  “Select a ship.”

  Tera was quiet for a moment.

  “We have already set the scene with this Stubborn Bull, so let them do it.”

  Don Krushinka raised the microphone to his mouth, but Tera intervened.

  “There’s no point in warning them. Just make contact, and let’s see how they react. What do you propose we start with?”

  “Let’s begin ... with a pair of destroyers.”

  The captain of the flagship grinned mischievously and held the microphone to her mouth. Tera turned to the screen. Don Krushinka furtively wiped his forehead, fervently praying to himself that Stubborn Bull had a worthy gunner on board.

  Yv shifted, settling comfortably at his console, and explained things to his apprentice. “While we are on standby, the reflection field is off, and the force field is at quarter-power so as not to take up resources from the emitter antennas. Now, see, here in this sequence we have a contingency to provide full power to the force field.”

  He pressed down a couple of toggle switches, and the corvette jolted. The lighting in the control center blinked due to the abrupt withdrawal of power to bring the force field to full capacity. Stubborn Bull yelled something in Russian, then the corvette jumped, leaving its focal point. Yv immediately opened full fire at targets that had just been identified by the sensors. At almost the last second, following the movements deeply ingrained in him by habit, he reduced the power to the controller for the weapons battery from a half to a quarter of total power.

  The chief security officer screamed at the top of his voice. “Two incoming targets, destroyers, one at azimuth six hundred and two, vector one-five-two. Two weapons batteries of three-barreled Tufengs. Second destroyer, bearing in on azimuth one hundred seventy-seven, vector zero-five-six, three weapons batteries of three-barreled Tufengs.”

  After a minute and a half of the corvette bouncing around, shaken from inbound hits, and their own volleys, the chief security officer yelled out again.