Sydney Chambers

by B. T. Jaybush

  “Captain, they all know that what they’re facing is dangerous as hell. What they do has always been dangerous as hell. They do it, and they’ve come here today to keep doing it, because it has to be done. And because you and your ship being here gives them the hope that they can finally make a difference against the damn pirates.”

  Sydney stared at Rudolph for a long moment trying to adjust her thinking to what she was hearing. When she finally spoke her voice was deathly quiet.

  “They do know that they’re all likely to die when Vattermann throws his fleet against the station.”

  Rudolph nodded slowly. “They know,” he told her, his voice as quiet as hers had been. “They’re all counting on you to change the odds in their favor.”

  Then a frown settled on the manager’s face. “You just said when, not if. You know something that I don’t?”

  Sydney exhaled loudly and allowed a grimace to settle on her face. “I know Hans Vattermann,” she said after a moment. “The man is not only an egomaniac, he is driven to control everything that he sees. The only thing he ever failed to control is me.”

  Rudolph nodded at the reference. “You mean that whole court martial thing.”

  “Yes.” The captain drew a deep breath then let it out with a sigh. “I suspect that Vattermann would have eventually attacked Outpost Station in any event, but my being tasked with defending the station is more than he will be able to abide. He will come for me and for control of Outpost Station. Soon, if he’s not already underway.”

  Sydney allowed the ensuing silence to steep for several moments before sighing once more, then lifting sad eyes to meet the station manager’s own troubled gaze. “Well then,” she finally said, breaking the stillness. “Let’s meet this militia.”

  2

  Members of the 16 Cygni militia waited in a conference room one level down from Rudolph’s office. A plaque next to the double-door entry listed the room’s occupancy maximum at a hundred and as Sydney followed Manager Rudolph into the good-sized room she estimated it to be occupied by about that number, all of them standing in knots of buzzing conversation, oblivious to the newcomers. Sydney walked in only far enough to clear the way for Cami Frye, following in her wake, to close the doors behind them. Rudolph immediately made his way to a raised dais near to the entry, seized a hefty-looking gavel and pounded it several times on the surface of the podium.

  “OK, folks, time for everyone to find a seat and listen up,” the Manager called out over the din. “Come on, come on, let’s not take all day. We’ve all got lots to do and since the main attraction is finally here we might as well get to it.”

  It took another five minutes for the roomful of volunteer soldiers to find seats and settle in, ready to listen. When they were all seated and mostly quiet Rudolph gestured Sydney to come closer to him, gave the gavel one final bang and then switched on a microphone that arced up from the top of the podium.

  “Glad you could all make it to our little shindig,” Rudolph said, the microphone amplifying his words enough that he no longer had to bellow to be easily heard. “I know you’re all eager to meet our guest today, since we’ve waited a long time for the Confederacy to get around to sending her. This,” he said, and waved a hand in Sydney’s direction, “is Captain Sydney Chambers of the TSM Cahan Morrigan. I daresay the captain is as eager to meet all of you as you are to get her measure.”

  To her surprise there was a short burst of applause from the group, which Rudolph waited out before saying, “Captain Chambers,” and motioning her to take the dais. Sydney nodded to the manager before stepping up to the microphone, then paused to take a good look at the eager faces in front of her before speaking.

  There seemed to be a roughly equal number of men and women present — unusual for a local militia group, from what Sydney understood of Confederacy-wide statistics, but possibly more reflective of conditions at 16 Cygni than anything else. There was nothing even remotely close to uniformity in their dress; overalls were as common as ship suits and a few were clad in typical office wear. Some even sported sweat suits. Nor was there any pattern of ethnicity — as small as the group was, Sydney could see faces that reflected most of the genealogical lines that humanity had managed to spawn and send to the stars.

  That it was an unquestionably diverse group she could see for herself; of the reliability and fighting trim that the group could muster she had only Manager Rudolph’s estimation. All too soon, she knew, she would discover the veracity of that estimation for herself.

  “Well,” she finally said, letting the room amplification do the work of spreading her words. “For good or for bad, you folks are not the militarily precise group I thought that I might see here today.”

  Sydney’s words were followed by a few seconds of silence; she was beginning to wonder if she’d already insulted the group beyond redemption when a wag in the front row settled her nerves with a welcome ice-breaker.

  “Yeah, our dress uniforms are all at the cleaners.”

  The barb drew more laughter than it strictly deserved, much of it filled with nervousness, but as the roar receded to a mere tittering the tension in the room had palpably ebbed. Sydney grabbed the chance to reinforce the feeling of relief.

  “You know,” she said, her voice pitched to clearly show how firmly her tongue was planted in her cheek, “I think you guys are actually in your uniforms.”

  This time the laughter was more spontaneous and warm. Sydney waited until it had mostly run its course before adding, her tone now quite serious:

  “Let me tell you something else,” she told the group, casting her eyes around the room as the last of the laughter subsided. “Uniforms be damned. I like what I see here — a group of tough-minded men and women who don’t need a uniform to tell them that they’re the heart and soul of 16 Cygni.”

  There was no outward response to her words but a glance at the eyes of those closest to the podium told Sydney that she had their attention. They might not believe her — or believe in her — yet. Right at that moment, though, they were willing to listen to what she had to say and she knew she had best make the most of that fact. She took a breath and chose her words carefully before plunging ahead.

  “I’ll be honest with you, folks. I came here expecting to find what....” She paused, then pointed at the man who had made the crack about uniforms. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Ted Graham,” the man called out in response.

  Sydney nodded and scanned the room again. “I expected to find exactly what Ted joked about, a militia all decked out in uniforms and trying to behave like members of some sort of military auxiliary.” She paused to let them picture that for a moment, then added, “That’s what I expected because that’s what most star systems have.”

  She paused again, this time looking to meet the eyes of as many in her audience as she could. The next couple of minutes would determine if she would get help from the group or if they would all go their own way, likely getting in hers as they did so.

  “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “How long has 16 Cygni existed as a chartered colony of the Confederacy?”

  “A hundred years,” came a voice from the back of the room.

  “Right,” Sydney agreed. “Or at least close enough. This is still the frontier! Yeah, people have explored systems farther out than this, but none of them have amounted to much of anything yet. And all those older systems, the ones closer in to the center of the Confederacy?” No one spoke up, so the captain answered her own question. “All of those star systems have been organized and running for two or three hundred years, minimum. They’ve gotten fat and satisfied and settled in their ways.”

  She let her eyes rove again, trying to make contact with anyone she had missed before. “Let me tell you something,” she said at last. “Two or three hundred years is a hell of a long time in which to get your act together, to get your militias all spiffied up with matching uniforms and shiny boots and fancy rank pins. After two or three hun
dred years those other systems damn well better have spit-and-polish militias, because the Confederacy pays them to do it — that’s one of the perks when a colony turns into a full Confederacy member system.”

  There was a resounding gasp at that revelation, and a buzz of angry conversation erupted; Sydney let it run for a minute, then leaned into the microphone and growled out a question that silenced the buzz in an instant.

  “How much do you folks get from the Confederacy for what you do?” She purposefully shifted her gaze to Ted Graham in the front row, calling him by name. “Ted, how much does the Confederacy pay you for risking your life in the Cygni militia?”

  There wasn’t even a heartbeat before Graham spat out, “Squat!”

  Sydney pasted a look of feigned surprise on her face and again raked the room with her eyes.

  “Really?” When she finally asked the rhetorical question it was with enough incredulity in her voice that many of her listeners managed to laugh. Then she switched off the humor once more and looked around the room with as serious a visage as she could manage.

  “So why do you do it? Why do you risk your lives week-in-and-week-out patrolling the system when the government deems you worth ... squat?” She picked on the guy in the front row once more. “Ted?”

  Sydney gestured for him to stand up; Graham squirmed a bit, but finally stood and faced her, his arms crossed in front of him. “I dunno,” he began, but then frowned. “Naw, I do know. If we don’t do it then who’s going to? Stupid stuff happens all the time in a system like this. A lot of folks run their ships too long without maintenance or can’t afford maintenance, and when their ships break down somebody’s got to rescue ’em.”

  Now a woman stood up a couple of rows back. “Yeah,” she bellowed, “and every hot-shot crook in the system thinks he can escape to one of the other worlds when he does some stupid shit on his own world. Well, it us militia folks who chase ’em down and haul ’em home to be hanged.”

  Several voices in the crowd called out in agreement with the woman’s comment. Then another man stood up, almost at the back of the group.

  “Until you got here, no one was doin’ nothing about the damn pirates, except us!”

  This time there was a roar as several people jumped to their feet and everyone tried to yell out agreement at the same time. Sydney stepped back from the podium and left them to it, but turned to look at Rudolph, who stepped closer to her in response.

  “I see what you meant by cantankerous,” she said in a low voice.

  “Yeah,” Rudolph agreed, adding a shrug. “That’s the same attitude that makes ’em good at what they do.”

  Sydney nodded in agreement, then stepped back to the podium as the roar began to lessen. She tried to catch the eye of the man who’d mentioned pirates, but he was too far away from her and caught up in conversation with his neighbor, so she settled for pinning the woman in the third row who had preened over bringing crooks to justice.

  “What’s your name,” she asked, leaning into the microphone to be heard above the residual hubbub, and pointing at the woman. “Yes, you,” she affirmed when the woman raised her eyebrows in question. After a moment of hesitation, she called out,

  “Chris Henderson.”

  “Chris,” Sydney acknowledged, then allowed a few more moments for the room to quiet before asking, “Had to do much pirate fighting?”

  Henderson’s face twisted into a snarl. “You bet,” she growled. “We all have. About two years ago they were near to overrunning the Station here — not with those big, mean ships like they got now, but with a ton of little ships like the lot of ours. It got real nasty there for a while.”

  “Yeah,” called out the man from the back who’d first mentioned pirates. “There were a few weeks when all forty of our ships were almost permanent fixtures here at the station. Those pirates just kept swoopin’ in, shootin’ here and blastin’ there.”

  “What’s your name,” Sydney asked the man.

  “Henry Pastori,” the rear-seat man said.

  “You lose any ships in all the fighting?”

  Pastori gave a feral grin. “Not a one,” he answered, pride ringing in his voice. “A few of us got beat up a bit, but we got us a full dozen of those bastards comin’ at us.”

  Sydney returned the man’ grin, and glanced around the room once more and asking the group as a whole, “So, was there ever a real chance of losing control of the Station?”

  Ted Graham spoke up once more. “Well Station Security can speak to it better’n we can, but I know a couple’a SOB’S did get by us and got on board. Never heard in detail what happened to ’em, but Rudolph’s still in charge. I figure they couldn’t’ve got too far.”

  “Yeah, that was a dark day,” Chris Henderson said with a scowl. “I heard that they made off with a cargo that was just bein’ unloaded on the docks — a pretty rich haul, at that.”

  Sydney nodded, silent for a moment as she digested this new information. So one or both of the pirate groups had made a run at Outpost Station. Then a thought struck her: Had it been an actual assault ... or had it been a faint, drawing the over-stretched militia members away from the A and B systems for a while?

  “You say this assault was all done with little ships like yours,” she said, glancing between the three militia members who had spoken. “Had you run into any of their bigger ships before that?”

  It was none of the three she’d heard from but another man, seated in the front row beside Ted Graham, who stood to answer. “I’m Joe Miller, Captain Chambers,” he said, “and the answer to your question is no. The big ships started showing up right after that. It was like they smuggled in the heavy artillery while they kept us busy here at C.” He looked around at his compatriots. “I said at the time that they was up to something, but there wasn’t much we could have done about it even if we’d known for sure. We had to be here — it would have been a hell of a lot worse if they’d gotten control of the Station.”

  Everyone else in the room had fallen silent or sat down as Joe Miller had spoken; clearly, Sydney realized, this was the leader of the militia group, formal or not. She caught his eyes with her own.

  “How have the pirates behaved around the Station since that time?”

  Miller shrugged. “There have been no more attacks, that’s for sure. We hardly know they’re here. I expect they slink in and out disguised as honest merchants when they need something — there’s some things that you can only get here at Outpost, so that’s got to happen at least a bit. But....” He looked around himself, as though for support. “To be honest, Captain, none of us gives a rip about that, and the stationside merchants appreciate the business. As long as they come here peacefully and spend real credits, they’re none of our concern. I mean, yeah, the trade is supporting the other shit that they do, but there’s not enough of us in the militia to mount the kind of patrol it would take to keep ’em away.”

  There was a rumbling of support from the others. Sydney couldn’t argue with the sentiment — wasn’t she at that very moment repairing a ship belonging to presumed pirate Chloe O’Shaugnassey? — though she truly hated the thought of Vattermann’s slimy hands on anything to do with Outpost Station. But it also raised the issue that was at the center of her entire reason for being at 16 Cygni.

  “So, Joe — or anyone else who wants to speak up,” she said, again looking around the room to involve everyone in the conversation. “What is it you expect from me and the Morrigan? Manager Rudolph tells me some of you think that we are the answer to your pirate problem. That with us here the pirates can be driven away, or stopped completely.” She paused, trying to catch as many gazed as she could, then prompted, “This true?”

  Chris Henderson stood up once more, but looked slightly hesitant. “We sure as hell can’t do it ourselves, not against those war ships the pirates got now. You guys have got the only ship that can stand up to them.” She looked around herself and found several others nodding in agreement. “Ain’t that wha
t you’re here for?”

  Sydney stood silent for half a minute letting the question sink in. When she finally spoke it was with a feral smile on her face and a growl in her voice.

  “No. I was not sent here to help you people clean up the problem.”

  The room instantly erupted in howls of complaint and disbelief, some directed at Sydney but most merely one person griping to his or her neighbor about the Confederacy once more ignoring the needs of 16 Cygni. Sydney allowed the hubbub to continue for several minutes before leaning in to the microphone and roaring out a more complete answer over the din, her growl loud enough to drown out even the loudest complainant in the group.

  “I was sent here to clean it up all by myself!”

  Much to her surprise Sydney’s words caused the militia members to quiet once more — though it also put mutinous and resentful looks on the faces of many of those present. Sydney could read their responses clearly in those looks: 16 Cygni is OUR home! We’ve been defending it for years, and now you’re going to push us aside and clean it up without us?

  She waited until the last of the muttering had ceased before continuing. “That’s what my orders from the Confederacy say, anyway. ‘Clean it up,’ they say. But now that I’ve been here a while, now that I’ve seen these pirates in action, I know better. There’s not a chance in hell that my ship and I can fix this mess by ourselves.”

  A visual sweep of the room told her that her words had achieved some effect — the faces staring back at her were no longer hostile, though many still seemed wary. Sydney softened her feral smile a bit and pushed ahead with her sales pitch.

  “Vattermann and O’Shaugnassey have a lot of ships between them, and they’re pretty well armed ships, too. Plus they’re a lot better disciplined than any pirates I’ve ever seen or heard of. Vattermann is ex-TSM, and even though he’s an idiot he had to have learned something about tactics and discipline during his time in the Terran Space Military.