Auberon (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 1)

by Blaze Ward

  “I was impressed with the solution you came up with for Vanek’s missile launcher,” Jessica continued. “I would like you to think of this as your reward for a job well done.”

  “Sir?” the woman asked. The voice was even tinier than the body right now, very much unlike the confident, competent engineer Jessica had seen making the presentation.

  “By now,” Jessica continued, “everyone knows we are going to raid 2218 Svati Prime. They don’t know why.”

  Jessica paused to observe. Moirrey was recovering her aplomb, slowly. Good enough.

  “We’ll have the firepower to destroy their local defenses. It’s just a small mining colony, so it’s not that important. And, please keep this secret, it is only our first stop. I plan to hit several worlds over there before heading home.”

  Moirrey nodded at her with a card–sharp look in her eyes. There was a fire brewing inside, if slowly.

  “I looked up your playwright,” Jessica said. “Even watched one of his plays, translated out of the ancient tongue. He was a master showman, Moirrey.”

  “Aye, sir,” the Yeoman replied. “One of the best the race has e’er birthed.”

  “It got me to thinking,” Jessica continued. “I would like to do something that leaves a lasting psychological scar on the Fribourg Empire.”

  “Are we going to bomb them, sir?” She got a nervous look in her eyes.

  Jessica shook her head. “No, Yeoman,” she said sharply. “That would just piss them off, and invite retaliations on our worlds. 2218 Svati Prime isn’t worth hardly anything in the grand scheme of things.”

  “I see.” Moirrey said meekly. “Sorry about that, sir.”

  “No,” Jessica said. “It was a good question, Moirrey. I was thinking about how all the world is a stage. I want you to build me something that is all flash. It doesn’t need substance. The substance is the fear it will invoke, up and down the Imperial frontier, that they might be next.”

  Moirrey leaned forward with a tight, wicked smile. Jessica knew, right then, that she had the right person.

  “Limitations, sir?” Moirrey asked.

  “Keep civilian casualties to an absolute minimum, Kermode,” Jessica said. “Preferably zero. Dead enemies are martyrs. Frightened ones have to be protected.”

  “Aye, sir,” she replied, licking her lips, warming to her topic. “It’ll be just like designing a stage set. Ye have to induce the belief, but people be willing to play ‘long.”

  “Why did you join the Navy, Moirrey? Seriously?”

  The woman lost her pixie look for a moment as her faced turned deadly serious. “There’s no money in theater, ma’am.”

  “I see,” Jessica replied simply. “But if I wanted to turn engineering into a special effects department…?”

  “Oh, ma’am,” Moirrey smiled dreamily. “We’d make the Bard jealous with envy at what we could accomplish, were minds set to mischief.”

  “Consider yours set to mischief, Yeoman. I’ll have a talk with Ozolinsh about your workload going forward.”

  “Aye, sir,” Moirrey said. “I’ll make ye proud, ma’am.”

  “I’m counting on it. Dismissed.”

  She watched Moirrey practically dance out of the room with glee. She felt like she had just let a fox loose in the hen house, but then, hadn’t that been what Kasum had done with her?

  She looked down at the desk. The fidgets seemed to have left the room with the young woman from engineering.

  Now the serious business could start.

  Ξ

  Jessica came up from a groggy sleep as her system chirped a message. She was deep in the middle of her sleep period, so it must be one she had flagged important, but not critical enough to rouse her. As if she slept much anyway.

  She touched the bedside screen to bring the message up, noted it was from Moirrey. It was entitled simply Mischief.

  Inside, she found a wealth of design images and technical specifications. Way more than she wanted to deal with at this time of night.

  Jessica replied with an acknowledgement and tried to go back to sleep.

  Would it be enough?

  Chapter XV

  Date of the Republic November 13, 392 Jumpspace approaching 2218 Svati Prime

  The Junior Varsity was in charge up on the bridge right now, because everyone important was here for the briefing.

  Unlike last time, the pilots were even paying attention.

  Jessica looked out over the collected faces of the flight crews, as well as the flight engineers and several of her bridge officers. She took a moment to look over at Jouster, the Flight Commander. Most of the pilots were paying attention.

  “According to civilian intelligence covering at least the last three standard years,” she said to the group, bouncing her unaugmented voice off the back wall, “2218 Svati Prime is protected by an Imperial fighter squadron, made up at the old one–man A–7 model b snub fighters. Fine against pirates. Useful to overwhelm a single raider. You should be able to slaughter them, even out–numbered.”

  Jouster was apparently feeling his oats this morning. “That’s if they can even launch on such short notice,” he sneered. “This is the back end of beyond. The crews here are going to be second rate.”

  Jessica fixed him with a hard eye for a second. He was smiling the sort of smile the class clown gets when he thinks he’s scored a point and wants the whole room to acknowledge his witty awesomeness. Others started to snicker, and then got a good look at the commander’s face.

  “I don’t think, Jouster,” she smiled back, “that we should necessarily assume incompetence from the kinds of fighter squadron commanders that end up on the frontiers. Or were you speaking from experience?”

  A few snickers seemed to come from the side of the room where the flight engineers were seated. The rest of the room had fallen to an awkward, stunned silence.

  Jouster looked as if he had been slapped. Probably not the first woman to have done that to him. Most likely the first who could make him sit there and take it.

  Jessica let the moment hang a bit longer, but Jouster seemed to be over his need to be heard. At least for now.

  “We’re going to drop into realspace four light hours out, well below the ecliptic plane, just long enough to observe the layout. Then we’ll hop closer. Launch order will be da Vinci in the scout, followed by the entire flight wing. Saturation wing after that, and then Necromancer, the gunship. Questions?”

  She watched the Dropship pilot, Dyson, raise his hand with a hopeful smile. “What about Cayenne?”

  “Search and Rescue only, Gaucho,” she replied. “You’ll be on the deck and ready to launch, but I’m not planning a planetary assault. This time.”

  “What about the bomb?” a female voice piped up from the engineering cluster.

  From the emphasis on the words, Jessica presumed that it was an open secret. And not one she was sure she was using. Not yet.

  “You kill the defenders first,” she said after a beat. “Rajput will come up close enough to savage their station and knock it out of use for six months. Then we’ll talk about the bomb.”

  “Why not just kill it?” one of the pilots asked from the front row.

  “Because, little miss Bitter Kitten,” Jessica replied with a feral smile. “A badly damaged station has to be repaired, and that takes time, and money, and people. Plus they have to find a new place to house a squadron while they do that.”

  She watched them soak that up for a second. She took a deep breath and cast caution to the wind.

  “I’m not fighting a military war here, people,” she said, a deadly earnest note creeping into her tone. “This is an economic and political one. My tools of diplomacy happen to be you, but make no mistake, this is about costing them a lot of time, energy, and resources. You kill a pilot, they have to train a new one. You cripple a station, they have to fix it. You raid a planet, all the others get nervous.”

  “But bombing civilians?” another pilot asked. He was a
tall, blond, viking–looking fellow, one of Jouster’s two wingmates.

  Jessica thought about the information in his file. Friedhelm Hannes Förstner. Call sign Uller. A polite young gentleman serving honorably with his enemies, whose family had made it out of the Fribourg Empire one step ahead of being arrested and disappeared for being politically unsavory.

  “Surprise, Uller, is an event that takes place in the enemy commander’s mind,” she replied, reducing the conversation to just the two of them. It was a trick Kasum had taught her. “We just may end up dropping a very large bomb on 2218 Svati Prime, but we won’t be hitting any cities with it. We will be doing something far more important.”

  She paused, watched him gulp slightly, nod at her.

  “We will be destroying their peace of mind.”

  Chapter XVI

  Imperial Founding: 170/11/14. Imperial Traffic Control. 2218 Svati Prime system

  His bags were packed, waiting patiently for him in the broom closet. All he had to do was grab them, bip down to the transit station, and catch the next shuttle down to the surface of Ao–Shun, one hour and twenty–seven minutes from now.

  Not that he was counting them.

  Heaven forbid.

  He was a good little Imperial bureaucrat, you know.

  Work, work, work.

  Tomas sipped his coffee and tried to stay awake. His shift ended in thirty–four minutes and then he had an entire three days off coming up.

  Paradise.

  Stereihofen, the capital, was in early summer right now. Pretty blond girls in barely–there swimwear, lounging on a beach. And redheads. And brunettes. And every flavor in between.

  Tomas finished his coffee and stared at the bottom of the mug. More? Or maybe just catnap on the shuttle flight down?

  Decisions, decisions.

  His control board beeped once. It was the high tone, indicating that someone had just dropped out of Jumpspace and been picked up by the Traffic Control scanners.

  Odd. He wasn’t expecting any more freighters today. The incoming arrival boards were clear for the next nineteen hours. Probably a yacht on an unscheduled run.

  Maybe some pretty little debutante come out to enjoy the beach, and maybe several of her friends. Ao–shun wasn’t so small as to be insular, but the whole planet had a population of only about five million, heavily tilted towards men.

  Tomas sighed. It was a downside of Imperial life that women weren’t considered strong enough, tough enough, to handle the kinds of heavy manual labor you got on a mining colony.

  It would be nice to live someplace where the gender ratio wasn’t three to one against. Even a safe career as an Imperial bureaucrat wasn’t automatically enough to pick up girls.

  He sighed again. The board plotted his new arrival deep back in the sensor shadow of Aeocan, the larger moon. Right at the edge of the safe range for Jumpspace.

  He didn’t have a direct line of sight to it from here either, so the signal was just a vague blob while he waited for the computers to challenge it and register the ship’s identity beacon. If he was lucky, they would spend at least half an hour over there getting their act together, finding their ass, and he could turn them over to Evgeny.

  A second beep, lower, made him curse under his breath. The ship was already moving, accelerating even, according to the scanners, so her crew was really on the ball. They would be in direct laser communication range in a few minutes, way too soon for him to ignore them and get an early start on his vacation.

  Three rapid beeps, an ascending trill, made him drop his coffee mug.

  It bounced off the board, flipped once perfectly in the air, and shattered on the floor. If there had had been anything in it, that would be all over his leg right now.

  Over the horizon, back in the shadow of the moon, that one little lost freighter had suddenly turned into three signals. As Tomas watched the board, a dozen more appeared.

  He hung with one hand over the emergency alert signal. If he opened the locked–down lid and pushed the button inside, all hell would break loose.

  It occasionally happened. Two years ago, a pirate corvette had appeared, seized a freighter, and gotten her away before the fighters could catch up.

  But that mess of radar signals over there suggested that the vessel was a carrier. He hadn’t heard of any pirates getting their hands on a carrier. That would be an absolutely chilling thought, if they did.

  Then a new sound intruded. A high–low chirp, that would repeat forever until someone turned it off. The traffic computers had finally identified the ship’s identity beacon.

  RAN Auberon.

  Oh, shit. An Aquitaine fleet raid? Here?

  Tomas crossed himself unconsciously as he flipped the switch open and pushed the button. Red emergency lights came on. The two–note emergency tone was being repeated in every room on the station, and being transmitted down to the surface.

  Tomas could imagine people skittering like ants with their hill kicked over.

  Aquitaine was here.

  Chapter XVII

  Date of the Republic November 14, 392 2218 Svati Prime

  It was always like this. Pure. Clean.

  In many ways, it was better than sex. Or chocolate.

  Jessica felt her brain ascend to a higher plane of consciousness as Auberon came out of Jumpspace and leapt into battle.

  The big board went from the fuzzy edges of prediction to hard lines as sensors began isolating and identifying everything around them.

  Ao–shun below them, a tan and blue marble. Aeocan between them and the Imperial Station orbiting geo–synched over Stereihofen. The trailing moon, Remora, above and outside them.

  “Zupan,” Jessica said, waiting for the Pilot to glance over at her. “Dead center. Nicely done, Centurion.”

  She watched the tall blond elf blush as she went back to playing her symphonies on the navigation board.

  Jessica sighed internally. She knew Kwok had never taken the time to recognize the everyday excellence of his crew.

  It was amazing what the occasional “Good job,” would do for someone’s morale.

  “Sir,” a man’s voice came from the opposite side of the bridge, “I have a firing solution.”

  Jessica turned to look at the gunner who was Tobias Brewster’s replacement. Aleksander Afolayan was a junior Centurion who had just barely joined the ship before she did. He was a dark–skinned man with bright blue eyes a ready laugh.

  “Confirm, please. Barn owl under the pole?” she asked.

  “Affirmative, sir,” he replied quickly. “From here, we can snap a single stealth missile low, get a gravity slingshot, and most likely catch the station completely blindside.”

  “Very good, Afolayan,” she said. “Hold until the other noise will mask us unleashing that bird. And then fire at will.”

  “Aye, sir,” he smiled.

  Jessica thumbed a button to talk to the whole vessel. “Flight Deck, this is the bridge,” she intoned. “Crash launch the wing now. Jež, take us up and over the top of the moon. Flag Centurion, squadron to conform to our movement as planned, CR–264 in the lead, Rajput trailing. All guns hot, all enemies hostile.”

  A chorus of voices filled the air. Iskra sent a scrolling marquee, as always. Jessica leaned back and tried to relax. With any luck, they had such total surprise that this would almost be a training exercise.

  They would certainly never catch the Empire so completely asleep again, so they needed to make the most of it.

  Below, the entire vessel shivered with the combined bump as Auberon began spewing out fighters and a single gunship.

  And a single, sneaky missile.

  War had just come to the frontier.

  Chapter XVIII

  Date of the Republic November 14, 392 2218 Svati Prime

  Space was filled with fighters, silently racing downrange.

  Jouster took the lead as the wing organized, his team in the lead. The second wing, under Marta Eka, Southbound, took up station a
bove and behind his. Farther back and on the flank, the Saturation & Scouting Wing, two big S–11 Orca Assault Bombers, and a little P–4 Outrider probe fighter. And behind them all, one Kartikeya–class gunship, Necromancer, ready to wreak utter havoc.

  It was a weird mix of craft. Technically, Jouster and his group was outgunned by the twelve old Imperial melee fighters over there, right up to the moment that the S–11’s started flinging short–range missiles into the mix.

  He couldn’t imagine that the Imperials were going to be on the ball enough to get all the pilots scrambled fast enough to matter against his Flight, let alone what they would be facing when the big ships came over the horizon.

  “da Vinci,” Jouster called out over the Flight comm, “what’s the status over there?”

  “Fox in the henhouse, Jouster,” came the reply. The probe pilot, da Vinci, also known as Senior Flight Centurion Ainsley Barret, had probably hacked into their secure channels by now. She did things like that.

  Her little craft was completely outclassed by anything the Imperials could throw up, but having her here with a dedicated sensor pod instead of missiles gave him a tactical edge worth half a squadron, all by herself. “Somebody over there hasn’t even encrypted. Planetary Governor himself is broadcasting orders in the clear on channel fourteen.”

  “Roger that. Break. Saturation Wing and Necromancer, launch your first wave of missiles now.”

  Jouster smiled as his sensors picked up the first two Imperials fighters finally launching over there, headed the wrong way and furiously trying to accelerate so they could loop around and engage them. “Might as well see if we can score a hit on the launch bay and put them entirely out of action early.”

  Ξ

  Jouster looked down at his scanner and tried not to laugh. The Imperials had managed to get six fighters up before a missile had gotten through the defense array and triggered a set of secondary and tertiary explosions, blowing out the module that held the Imperial fighter squadron. Nobody else was coming out to play.

  “Team, this is Jouster,” he called over the comm, “Six on Six, go to melee. da Vinci, keep an eye out for anybody coming to help.”