The Chronicles of Henry Harper

by Jacen Aster

  Sair'ah stabbed a finger at her. “Exactly! And we're helping them gather more slaves. It's not right.”

  Naylara shrugged again. “I don't like it any more than you do, sweetness, and neither does Keral, but it's not like we can do anything about it. You already know that, Sair'ah. People disappear for even protesting over it.”

  Sair'ah seethed but seemed to drop it. Until, that is, Henry gathered his nerve to ask what he felt was an important question. “Ah, pardon, but do these ‘laborers’ ever have children? And if they do, what happens to them?”

  Henry suddenly held the attention of a room full of uncomfortable looking officers, but none of them seemed ready to speak up. Naylara, Sair'ah, and Keral all looked at each other, seeming not to know what to say. Finally, unexpectedly, it was the taciturn Bla'halk that spoke from where he was nursing a drink in a corner. “It happens. And it's not usually an accident. Those children disappear until they go up on the blocks themselves. Nasty thing about it, though, is it's obvious what's happening. They always show up docile as can be, the most valuable of all because they've been indoctrinated to believe they are supposed to be servants.”

  Naylara's face showed her disgust when she added, “They make up virtually all of the nastier bits of ‘labor’ too, and I don't mean cleaning sewers. ‘Exotic’ brothels, strip clubs, and all the other ‘red light’ entertainment, as you Humans call it.”

  Henry was appalled. “What! Why? And how do they get away with it? I thought you said there were rules in place for fair treatment.”

  No one seemed to want to meet his eyes. Finally, Bla'halk snorted at their unwillingness to answer and caustically spoke into the silence. “Ah, but they don't exist, now do they? Not prisoners of war, are they? They weren't captured, don't have an Eletheen ID, they're just ghosts. No need for the collars either. So to anyone looking in from the outside, they are just free Eletheen who choose to serve and work in such professions.”

  Sair'ah growled and punched the bulkhead next to her before lurching to her feet and towards the lounge's hatch.

  She was stopped by the most unlikely of voices.

  “And why can't we do anything? We could use our privateer credentials to stage a slave revolt or something, right?”

  The comment sprang from the lips of none other than the ever-nervous Dr. Resala Wril, who himself looked quite startled and amazed that he had given voice to it.

  Getting over her shock first, Naylara waved her crewmate off. “Oh, and where exactly would you have us do that?”

  Dr. Wril seemed to wilt, but just when everyone started ignoring him again, he spit out what was likely the first thing that came to mind. “Recise IV!” He looked even more startled at this suggestion, then sagged as everyone looked at him like he was insane.

  Naylara looked shocked before turning apoplectic. “Recise IV! Oh sure, let's just attack a major bloody processing area! Sure. We'd get in. And then end up on the block ourselves! In case you've forgotten, that station is isolated, armed to the damn teeth, and, oh yeah, THERE ARE TWO DAMN CRUISERS GUARDING THE JUMP RING, YOU INSIPED NITWIT!”

  Dr. Wril drooped, but asked quietly, “So we just lay down and continue to do nothing?”

  Sad, angry faces and slouched shoulders were the only answer around the lounge. Finally, Aerb'uk, silent thus far, spoke. “Well, we obviously can't do anything about those already in chains, but I guess we can stop raiding. That's gotta be worth something, right? I mean, we’re the most successful privateers in the raid fleet. Plus, it's not as though we need to raid anymore. We are, all of us, rich as kings by now. Might as well retire into something a bit more peaceful.”

  Sair'ah sneered. “Right, that'll be so much comfort to the tens of thousands we've personally put on the slave block. 'Oh, but at least we won't put anyone else there.’”

  Naylara had had enough. She surged halfway to her feet, twisting to face Sair'ah fully, and slammed her hands down violently amongst her armor. “WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE US DO THEN, HUH? GET OURSELVES KILLED SO THAT THEY WILL FEEL BETTER?”

  Sair'ah shrank away from Naylara’s uncharacteristic outburst. “No! But we have to do something!”

  The room grew quiet as they all silently agreed but were unable to grasp what they could do. Henry, outsider as he was to this discussion, had gone quiet but contemplative. Finally, he spoke up. “Raiding Recise IV isn't impossible. Risky, but not impossible.”

  Naylara turned angry eyes on him, ready to lash out, but the captain laid his hand firmly on her shoulder and squeezed, silencing her.

  “Henry? What are you talking about?”

  Henry thought carefully about his answer for several moments, then laid it out. “Well, I'm not a tactical officer or anything, but given how good you lot are at raiding you could take the station itself, right? And arm the prisoners? I mean, if you do that, it's really only the two cruisers in system stopping you from making a clean get away, isn't it?”

  “True.”

  “Captain!” Naylara squeaked.

  “He's right. I already have an idea for the station, but I said nothing because the cruisers would simply destroy us on the way out.”

  The rest of the senior officers looked poleaxed by the captain's statement, but their attention swiveled back to Henry when he started speaking again. “I think I can disable the cruisers, maybe even capture them, if we can get in contact with an old friend of mine.”

  Bla'halk snorted. “Right, pull the other one. Unless your old friend has a damn fleet, that's not gonna happen.”

  Henry surprised them by grinning. “Technically, she probably does, but no she wouldn't let us borrow it. No, what we want is a prototype EW/ECM VIM.”

  Most just looked confused, and it was Sair'ah who flatly asked, “What?”

  Henry stirred, then settled into his seat.

  “Oh great, now he's in technobabble mode,” someone muttered, but the captain made a silencing motion and waved Henry on.

  “Well, I don't know how many of you know this.” Someone snorted but Henry talked right over it. “But pretty much all modern Electronic Warfare and Electronic Counter Measure suites for the last five years or so have been modeled off the Valkyrie A.I. Project.”

  “Wait, what? ECMs are A.I.?” That was Captain Keral, looking worried at the idea.

  Henry shook his head. “No, they are failed A.I., sort of. No one quite knew how Valkyrie got the way she is, so there were a lot of attempts made before they were actually able to duplicate the feat. This led to a large number of super-advanced VIM that were almost A.I.s in their complexity and capacity. Someone got the bright idea to use those to manage EW and ECM suites as a way to counter A.I. attacks. While an A.I. will always overcome a VIM in time, these VIM were advanced enough that no A.I. could crack them fast enough to matter in combat. Thus, they became the new standard for EW and ECM suites. Even the one here on the Sunny is based on one of those experimental VIMs.”

  While several of the crew looked interested, Naylara just looked irritated. “Get to the point.”

  Henry rolled his eyes. “Fine. The point is that I know some of the people in the A.I. project. The best VIM, near-A.I., never made it out of the program. The programmers were afraid that those VIM were close enough to A.I. that they might spontaneously develop into full sentience later on, so they decided not to risk it.” Henry took a deep breath and plowed on. “If I can convince them to get me one of those VIMs, and you can get me on both of those cruisers, I could replace their EW/ECM platforms with the new VIM. With all the proper manufacturer tags, I can just mark it as an upgrade and the existing package won't block it. Once our VIM is in control, we can remotely access those cruisers and shut them down, or even vent the atmosphere or something else similarly nasty.”

  Sair'ah looked much calmer, contemplative, obviously having fallen into her command mode. Reluctantly, she said, “Okay, I can see that, I think. But how do we get you onto the cruisers in the first place?”

  When Henry shrugged, s
he sighed and opened her mouth to dismiss the idea, looking like it pained her to do so.

  “We get invited aboard,” Captain Keral said.

  She turned to him in surprise. “What?”

  The captain sighed. “We get a dinner invitation from Rear Admiral Mayala every time we stop at Recise IV.”

  It was Naylara that spoke up in response to that bombshell, clearly startled. “What? Why?”

  Aerb'uk chuckled and spoke up before the captain could. “Because she's, ah, promiscuous, and bored out of her mind since being relegated to a dead-end position. Oh, and she has a thing for rogues. She invites all the more successful privateers to ‘dinner.’ Regardless of gender even.”

  The whole room looked incredulous. Finally, Naylara spoke up disbelievingly and obviously upset. “So we whore the captain out to get Henry on board?”

  Bla'halk cracked up. “Oh, oh that's priceless.”

  Naylara did not look amused. In fact, she looked like she was about to lunge over her worktable and rip Bla'halk's throat out.

  The captain grimaced. “But in essence, at least half correct. The invitation is always for the senior officers as a whole, so I could bring Sair'ah and Henry as guests. I know her well enough that when I bring a Human aboard, and explain that he's the engineer responsible for many of our recent successes, she will shift gears and try to poach him. He can ask to see the ship, and while poking around, slip in the EW/ECM package. He claims he's interested but needs to finish out his contract with us, which will be up soon. I stay behind to ‘keep her company’ and the rest of you go stage the station takeover.”

  Naylara growled possessively and switched her glare to her lover. Keral just gave a half grin and added, “Then I knock her out. Before she gets frisky, dear, I promise. I can use a portable to ‘attack’ the ship's ECM, which will then hand me full access. From there, I can issue orders to the ship for the environmental controls to change the air mixture. Knock everyone out over a few minutes and seize the ship entirely.”

  “What about the other cruiser?” Sair'ah asked. “How are you going to get Henry aboard that one for this trick?”

  He shook his head. “We don't. Once I take control of the command ship, I simply fire a full broadside into its un-shielded companion. Caught off guard like that, it shouldn't have a chance.”

  Naylara looked at him like he was insane. “You're risking it all on them not noticing anything? And a single broadside taking them out?”

  The captain nodded. “It doesn't need to take them out, just cripple them enough that a ship being crewed by a single person can fight them. I could never fight it at capacity alone, but even if the initial strike only cripples the other cruiser, I can focus on the weapons and let them have it.”

  Everyone was quiet for a few minutes as they took in the plan. Finally, Sair'ah spoke up, breaking the silence that had taken hold of the compartment. “Alright, it can work, maybe, but how do we take the station itself? For that matter, where do we go with the slaves? We've got to get them out of the system first and foremost, then somehow get them home as well.”

  The captain smirked. “As to that, I have a plan. Here's how we do it....”

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  Henry waited with mischievous anticipation on the Sunny's small bridge. His clear humor, visible despite his best attempts to suppress it, was setting the rest of the bridge crew on edge as they rounded the far side of the farthest planet in this remote system. Technically in the deadlands, it had been years since anyone bothered to come here. The mining operations that were once the system's only point of interest had not survived the decades of commerce raiding.

  Keral appeared, whether by artifice or nature, as a pool of calm among the nervous crew. As the rendezvous grew nearer he addressed Henry. “You're sure they will be here?”

  Henry negligently waved a hand in his direction, not taking his eyes off the sensor officer. The poor woman was beginning to freak out from being the center of his attention. “They'll be waiting for us, as promised. Don't worry.”

  Sair'ah spoke up from her place next to the captain. “I still don't see how you're so confident they'll make it this far. If we were meeting them at the far edge of the deadlands, I'd understand, but they must have crossed at least half of it to meet us so close to Rasine Lei's space. How are you so certain they made it past the other privateers?”

  Henry chuckled. "For one thing, they were able to avoid most of the normal routes. For another, I'd love to have seen some poor bastard try to take them."

  Keral visibly hesitated at that, seeming just a touch uncertain for the first time. "Um...Henry? What, exactly, do you mean by that?"

  Henry finally glanced away from the sensor officer to give him a small smirk. "Don't worry about it."

  Keral eyed him, looking like he wanted to press the issue, but backed down with a sigh. "Fine. They should be visible any moment now."

  If anything, Henry's smirk grew wider as he turned back to the sensor officer.

  Moments later, the rest of the crew got their first clue as to what he was waiting for. As they rounded the planet, putting sensors on the far side for the first time, the sensor officer, already on a hair trigger, half leapt from her seat and squeaked. "What the hell is that?"

  Before anyone could panic, Henry raised his voice. "Relax. That's just our contact."

  Sair'ah, looking at her command readouts, somehow managed to visibly pale through her fur. "Your contact? What the hell, Henry? That's a damn cruiser."

  Henry laughed. "Not quite. She's nowhere near big enough to be a proper cruiser. Though the Chimera is better armed than most ships that are." Indeed, Henry had little doubt that it was the Chimera's monstrously large energy profile that had prompted the reaction.

  Keral perked up at the name, looking uncharacteristically shocked. "Wait, the Chimera? Isn't that...."

  "The prototype ship on which Valkyrie was, more or less, born? Why, yes. Yes it is. And Valkyrie is still very much on board. Hence, the pair of Amaril Corp escort frigates that your sensor officer now appears to be freaking out over. Well, freaking out more over, at least."

  That grabbed their attention again, and indeed, as they had moved farther around the planet, a pair of four hundred meter long Heavy Frigates had also come into view. Most of the crew were duplicating Sair'ah's remarkable feat with their coloring.

  Keral's voice was more exasperated than anything. "Henry, when you said you knew someone from the Valkyrie project...."

  "Valkyrie is an old friend. So are Rana and a few others from the original Chimera team. Sadly, only Valkyrie herself could be here today. It would have been nice to catch up with everyone." He paused before pointedly adding, “At any rate, you might want to open a comm channel, before someone over there gets twitchy.”

  It was remarkable how fast the crew could move, with proper motivation.

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  Henry shook his head as the Eletheen frigate Albazan trailed behind the Sunny Victory, which was itself towing a dozen prize barges this time. He turned to Naylara, the only other crewman not busy handling some part of the operation. “I still can't believe he talked an Eletheen frigate into his little scheme.”

  She gave a fang-filled grin. “I'm more shocked that they honored our message of parley. Guess they thought they could afford to talk since no ship our size could escape a frigate close in like that.”

  “Probably, and once they heard the plan, I guess it made enough sense that they decided to chance it. It's not like Captain Keral picked the Albazan at random. Its captain is known to be one of the most vicious anti-raider ships in the deadlands, and this is a huge chance to do some damage. Once he had Keral's guarantees, at least.”

  Naylara just shook her head and stood, stretching out in the manner of the predator she was. “Jump's coming. Best find your fancy clothes and get ready for your randy hostess.” She frowned a bit at that, obviously still not entirely happy with the arrangements. She quickly shrugge
d it off, however, and cuffed Henry on the shoulder as she walked out of the observation bubble.

  Henry stared for a few minutes more before he followed her.

  ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

  Henry looked around the shuttle. It was just him, Keral, and Sair'ah now. Transition of the captured ship and crew to the Recise IV station had gone smoothly, and the dinner invitation had followed. It was even quicker than they had anticipated, doubtless due to the sheer magnitude of someone having captured a frigate. Something that apparently hadn't happened in twelve years.

  They headed off to meet the admiral almost before the last prize barge was tucked away into the massive orbital station for processing. Henry had never been there and the sheer scale of what they were attempting was still settling in. He had envisioned that Recise IV was settled...but it wasn't. It was a barren hot-world. All the processing, as well as the auctions, took place on a truly enormous space station. Easily three kilometers long and half that wide, the only saving grace for this operation was, ironically, that two thirds of its interior space was dedicated to impregnable external defenses. It carried only a comparatively small crew of guards, outnumbered a hundred to one by the prisoners they were planning to arm.

  The shuttle docked and Captain Keral gave a last tense nod to each of them before seeming to relax utterly, falling into an act that would have seen him rich beyond dreams of avarice if he'd only but applied his talents to the silver screen. The ever self-assured Sair'ah had no need to act and sauntered out after him. Muttering imprecations to himself for opening his fool mouth, Henry took a deep breath, mustered his courage, and followed them out, falling back on skills hard earned in his youth and maturity alike. Pretend like you are supposed to be there and they will not question you.

  Henry stepped out of the shuttle and immediately spotted the admiral...hanging off the captain's arm? He blinked and nearly lost his veneer of calm as he took in what he was seeing. Rather than a uniform of any kind, as her honor guard all around her wore, the admiral was in civilian dress, if you could call it that. The slinky black number she wore was ankle length, but split to the hip on both sides, clearly showing the entirety of her legs with every movement. Were those her panties she just flashed? The bust line was no more modest, and the strapless, plunging back even less so. Good grief. Naylara would probably have ripped her throat out by now if she were here. No, wait. The admiral just planted Keral's arm firmly in her chest, Naylara wouldn't kill her that quickly. No, it'd be slow. Very slow.