Dauntless

Chapter Eleven<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“Awfully loud, this!”

Tanya laughed as she pulled Philip onto the dance floor. The building was nothing more than a single vast hall, with a handful of doors leading out into the town. It was crammed with people, seventy-five crewmen from Philip’s tiny squadron and over a hundred townspeople. They seemed to be getting along fine, as far as he could tell; some of the men seemed to have found girlfriends already. Or maybe the townspeople were just pleased to see them.

“The people who founded this planet and drew up the founding charter believed that social events like this were a good and safe way to meet people,” she said. The dance steps weren’t very complicated, but Philip still found that he had to spend time concentrating on what he was doing. Apparently, like naval routine, it was something that had to be practiced until it became habit. “They even offered bonuses to settlers who could play the instruments or call out instructions to the dancers.”

Philip frowned. “A safe way to meet people?”

“Yep,” Tanya said. “Look over into the corner.”

He followed her finger and saw a small gathering of middle-aged women. They seemed to be chattering to themselves, but also to be watching some of the dancers, mainly teenage girls and boys. Chaperones, he realised, there to ensure that relationships between boys and girls didn’t go too far. It was a surprise to see them, but it made some sense on a world without a modern medical infrastructure – or, for that matter, the basic ethos that had built Avalon. His homeworld’s founders had believed sincerely in the right of the individual to do what he or she pleased, provided that non-consenting people didn't get hurt. But then, teenage sex on Avalon produced nothing, at least nothing physical. Asher Dales might lack even basic contraception implants, implants that were standard issue on Avalon.

It was still freer than the Theocracy, if the reports from the refugees were to believed. Girls had no say in their choice of husbands at all – and often the husbands themselves had little choice either. They were married off as soon as they became physically mature, often knowing little about sex beyond the basics; the Theocracy’s staggeringly high birth-rate was a reflection of its peoples’ ignorance. The Theocracy should have been as rich as the Commonwealth, but instead most of its population lived in squalor and it sought expansion wherever possible. If it ever reached Asher Dales, it would merely deposit a few hundred thousand colonists onto the surface and absorb the original colonists through weight of numbers. They’d done it before and, given half the chance, they’d do it again.

“You’ve got that look in your eye,” Tanya said, dryly. “What are you thinking about?”

Philip hesitated. “Different societies,” he said, finally. “You seem to have a lot of middle-aged spoilsports out here.”

Tanya laughed. “They are a pain, aren't they? But here marriage isn’t just mating a man and a woman and calling them husband and wife. Often, there’s property rights involved as well – and often political patronage and suchlike. And if someone does happen to get pregnant, they have to get married or the kid gets nothing. We’re taught to be careful and watched to make sure that we don’t do anything we shouldn’t, at least until the papers have been signed.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea just how big a shock it was to me when I went to Avalon,” she added. “I never realised that it was possible to separate sex from marriage, or...do you know what they call girls who have sex before marriage?”

“No,” Philip said, “although I can guess.”

“Sluts,” Tanya said. “And yet they think highly of boys who have sex before marriage. I never understood why they permitted the double-standard, the bastards. And after my mother died, I never went to Church.”

There was a wealth of pain in her voice. Philip felt guilty at what he’d made her remember, before pushing the thought aside. He needed to learn more about Asher Dales, if only because such stringent rules on sex were likely to get his crewmen into trouble. Glancing around the hall, he could see a handful of men who were pushing their luck with the local girls, unaware of their watching mothers. It might just lead to a confrontation between the spacers and the people they were meant to defend – and if the spacers were left with bad feelings, they might not be inclined to risk their lives to defend the settlers. The last thing he needed was a breakdown in discipline on his ships.

“Ah,” he said, suddenly. “Excuse me a moment.”

The planners had set out seven tables alongside the walls, each one laden with food – which was going down rapidly, as it tasted far better than pre-packaged rations – and drink. Schifrin was standing next to one of the drinks tables, studying the bottles with measured care. Some of them were clearly produced on Asher Dales itself, others looked to be of more uncertain parentage. Asher Dales probably couldn't afford the finest wines from across the galaxy, but spacers were known to transport sealed bottles across space and use them to barter with the locals. Anything could have reached Asher Dales through space.

“One drink only,” Philip said, firmly. Schifrin looked up at him, his face a mixture of annoyed and relieved. The bottles had been very tempting, no doubt, but he wouldn't have wanted to crawl back into the booze when he had a ship to command. “Don’t drink any more while you’re here.”

“Aye, sir,” Schifrin said, finally.

Marie came up from behind and fixed her hand onto his elbow. “Come back onto the dance floor,” she said, firmly. “You have to set an example for your crewmen – and some of them are reluctant to dance.”

Philip shook his head in wry amusement. “Tell me something,” Tanya said. “Are those two...dating?”

“I honestly have no idea,” Philip said, pushing the issue to the back of his mind. The thought of Marie and Schifrin dating...well, stranger things had happened. But as far as he knew, neither of them wanted to lose the second chance to serve that they’d been given. And he had asked her to make sure that Schifrin didn't fall back into a drunken haze. “Who knows?”

He smiled, inwardly. There were no rules on fraternization in the Asher Dales Naval Service, if only because he hadn't had a chance to write them. But then, they were both trusted and capable officers and would know not to let their personal feelings interfere with their duties.

Tanya picked up one of the bottles and eyed it dubiously. “Cider, from the Asimov Plantation,” she said. “Old Man Asimov was known for producing the strongest cider when I was a girl; he used to ship it all over the planet and get people drunk every week. We had some of it at my going-away party and half of us had to be carried home.”

She smiled, almost sadly. “And now this place doesn't feel like home,” she added. “Where do I belong?”

Philip nodded, slowly. It was natural for a person who had been away to come home and discover that it seemed smaller than it had been, before they'd known that there was anything else. Tanya probably hadn't fitted in very well even before she’d left for Avalon – and God alone knew what she would do now she was back on Asher Dales. She was hugely overqualified to serve as the town lawyer, assuming that they allowed women to serve as lawyers on Asher Dales. Like most low-tech worlds, it seemed to have very firm ideas on what was and what wasn't an acceptable role for women in public life. So did the Theocracy, but then the Theocracy was designed for expansion, conquest and settlement – and the merciless crushing of all other religions. Having politically-active women would only have thrown a stone into the gears. They might have objected to serving as little more than walking wombs.

He opened his mouth to speak, just as someone walked into his back. There was a crash and he felt a wet patch spreading over his dress uniform. He spun around and saw Tam Farnham standing there. The young man looked apologetic, but he didn't fool Philip for one second. He had deliberately intended to soak Philip with red wine.

“Tam,” Tanya snapped, before Philip could say anything. The temptation to just knock Tam down was almost overpowering, but he was meant to be setting a good example. “What do you think you are doing?”

Tam stared back at her, clearly fighting to keep his feelings off his face. “Whatever do you mean?” He asked, with definite amusement. “I was just walking past when the Captain stepped backwards and crash!”

“Excuse me a moment,” Tanya said. She caught Tam’s hand and dragged him towards one of the doors. The mob of elderly chaperones parted like the waters of the Red Sea when they met her gaze. Philip watched her go, and then pulled off his uniform jacket. It was marked badly by the wine; luckily, it should be fairly easy to wash. The RAN’s officer corps was universally convinced that the uniforms had been designed by a bitter or twisted sadist – they were never easy or comfortable to wear – but they had been designed to be easy to clean.

“That asshole did that deliberately,” Marie muttered. Philip hadn't even heard her coming up behind him. “Want me to trip him up outside?”

Philip shook his head, although he was tempted. “Not yet,” he said, “but if he ever wants to visit one of the ships, refuse him permission.”

Tanya came back into the hall seven minutes later, carrying a black civilian jacket which she passed to Philip. “I'm sorry about that,” she said, tightly. The bitterness in her voice was shockingly clear, even to Philip. “Just Tam being his usual stupid self.”

“Are you all right, dear?” Marie asked. The Marine seemed surprisingly concerned. “A suitor down on his luck?”

“Something like that,” Tanya said. She caught Philip’s hand and pulled him towards one of the doors. Outside, it was cooling rapidly, although it was still surprisingly warm. He looked up and saw the twinkling stars high overhead. Asher Dales didn't have anything like the colossal infrastructure that orbited Avalon and its night sky seemed somehow deserted, as if they were right on the edge of the galactic rim. It was an illusion, but the knowledge didn't stop a shiver running down the back of his spine. He barely heard Tanya’s next words. “I'm sorry you had to go through that.”

Philip looked over at her. In the semi-darkness, her hair seemed to illuminate her face. “I dare say I will survive,” he said, so dryly that Tanya almost giggled before she remembered herself. He’d been in combat with pirates and raiders, and he’d been shot at during a brief visit to Cadiz. Tam might have thought of himself as a tough guy, but any of the Marines on Philip’s ship would have broken him if he’d picked a fight with them. “What does that...person have against me, anyway?”

Tanya blushed furiously, so furiously that Philip could almost see her face lighting up in the darkness. “Tam...Tam’s father and my father are the largest land owners on Asher Dales,” she said, finally. “The Council holds more, but that has to be passed out to newcomers who want to set up their own farms or businesses; my father’s lands are solidly in his name. And Tam’s father used to encourage him to court me because that would link the two families together forever – or at least a very long time.”

She shook her head. Philip could guess the rest. “And Tam, being an enlightened soul, believed that merely the mention of his interest would cause you to fall into his arms?”

“Something like that,” Tanya said. “I knew him as a child and...well, he never really grew up and when he asked me if I would marry him, I said no. And then he started making suit to my mother, asking for her to intercede with me...and my mother, of course, thought that it was a great idea. She never listened to me when I tried to explain that I would sooner marry a convict from the resettlement programs than Tam, who had left at least two girls deflowered and alone...”

Philip blinked. “And your father went along with it?”

“Tam’s father isn't the kind of person you reject easily,” Tanya said, bitterly. She shook her head. “Mother died and I took advantage of the chance to go to Avalon on a Scholarship, only to discover that while I was gone Tam has been telling everyone that we’re engaged and that he allowed me to go out of the goodness of his heart...”

“I see,” Philip said evenly. Perhaps he’d made the wrong decision. Marie could hurt him, or kill him, and it would look like an accident. He’d met far too many entitled young fools who’d been born into Avalon’s corporate families, but most of them learned discipline fast or found that they lost votes of confidence that determined their position within the families. It wasn't a perfect system, yet it was fairly good at separating idiots from the reins of power. “Why don't you just tell him to get bent?”

Tanya shook her head. “He’s been telling everyone that we’re engaged,” she said. “If he seems to change his mind, it would mean swallowing a lot of pride...”

“That’s his problem,” Philip pointed out. Maybe an accident was the right way to deal with Tam. There were plenty of ways an ignorant guest could kill himself on a RAN starship and all of them were detailed in the ship’s databases. “Why didn't you leave Asher Dales forever?”

“My father needed someone to buy the ships and hire the crews,” Tanya said. “If they hadn't needed me, perhaps I would have stayed...”

She caught his arm. “And now you’ve met the council,” she added, “what do you think of them?”

“I think that if they want us to provide effective protection to a dozen worlds in a largely undeveloped sector, they’re going to need to get me more ships,” Philip said, flatly. Civilians who thought they could micromanage military operations were always irritating, if only because it was always clear that they couldn't hope to run an operation at long distance. The smart ones merely defined what they wanted to happen and allowed the military the freedom to decide how it was going to carry out its mission. “Three ships – two, effectively, because one has to stay here – can’t cover an entire sector.”

Tanya nodded, slowly. “I meant to ask you something,” she said. “If there was political trouble on Asher Dales, what side would the military take?”

Philip blinked, surprised. “Are you expecting trouble on Asher Dales?”

“Greg Farnham – that’s Tam’s father – has been pushing for a set of restrictions in the franchise for a long time,” Tanya said. “He feels that newer settlers aren’t really inclined to kowtow to the older settlers once they get set up with a plot of land of their own. And he’s one of the greatest supporters of the convict transfer program. If he was to gain control over the council, there will be trouble.”

Philip had the odd sense that he’d just missed something important. “The convict transfer program?”

“There are hundreds of worlds nearer Mars where they have more convicts – criminals – than they know what to do with,” Tanya admitted. “The original Asher Dales Development Corporation of Mars signed an agreement with several of those worlds; they sent us the convicts in exchange for assistance in paying the settlement costs. We put the convicts to work on Asher Dales and either assimilated them into the mainstream or worked them to death. Either way, they would never get to go home.”

“Ah,” Philip said. The UN had started such a program, but then Earth had been massively overpopulated before the Breakaway Wars and they’d been expelling convicts for almost any offense, no matter how minor. Avalon had been lucky enough to receive only one shipload of convicts, but they’d certainly caused their fair share of trouble before they’d been rounded up and banished to the unsettled continent. “What sort of convicts?”

“Minor criminals only,” Tanya assured him. Philip wasn't so sure. If a planetary government wasn't prepared to execute serious criminals, sending them to an unsuspecting colony was certainly one way to get rid of them. Some of the convicts sent to Avalon had been guilty of shockingly horrific crimes. “But Farnham and his followers like the idea of having workers they can literally work to death. They’ve created a number of plantations where convicts work like slaves – and that’s something that hasn't gone down well with a lot of the smallholders. They think that Greg wants to eventually turn them all into slaves.”

She looked up at him, suddenly. “So if there was a confrontation,” she asked, “what side would the military take?”

Philip hesitated. In truth, the question made him uncomfortable. The RAN had been clear on just how much military officers could attempt to influence political affairs and any officer who sought to meddle with politics could expect to face a Captain’s Board. It had always been made clear to him that the military had no place meddling with politics, but then...Avalon’s system had included enough checks and balances to protect the losers in any political struggle. Asher Dales hadn't really evolved anything of the sort.

“The military is responsible to the elected government of the planet,” he said, finally. “I would hate to try to predict what would happen if there was a fracture in the government, splitting it into two. Civil war would be a very definite possibility.”

Tanya frowned. “That is not a reassuring answer,” she said, severely.

“I wish I had one to give,” Philip admitted. “But if the political process has broken that badly, you’re very close to civil war. And if that happens, the odds are that the military will fracture along sectarian lines.”

 

<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Chapter Twelve<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
“All present and correct, sir!”

“Glad to hear it,” Philip said, dryly. There was no hope of holding an ordinary conference onboard Dasher, if only because the destroyer was too small to support a proper briefing compartment. Instead, his subordinates were largely attending electronically, their holographic images floating in the air in front of him. “There have been some developments on the surface.”

He ran through everything that Tanya had told him, leaving out only the details about Tam’s plan to marry her and unite their inheritances into one super-holding. “I hope that we won’t have to deal with political unrest on the surface any time soon,” he concluded, “but I must remind you all not to make any promises or commitments to anyone down below without clearing it with me first. We need to remain a united force if we are going to accomplish any of our mission.”

“Bit of a bummer,” Schifrin commented. “We work for them, Commodore.”

“I know, Commodore,” Philip agreed, shaking his head at the oddities of naval protocol. He was the Commodore of the entire squadron and should therefore be addressed as Commodore while acting as the Commodore, but in line with the custom that stated that a vessel could only have one Captain Schifrin was also entitled to be addressed as Commodore. “But we do not want to be drawn into a power struggle on the ground.”

“Particularly when the power struggle might be a front for someone else moving in from space,” Marie added. “The Theocracy isn’t the only interstellar power that might want to set up shop in this sector.”

“It’s hard to see why anyone would bother being legalistic about it,” Schifrin pointed out, crossly. “Asher Dales – even with our entire squadron – couldn't stand off a single heavy cruiser from any of the major powers. A light cruiser would still tear hell out of us before we got her – if we did get her. They could simply take the system and claim afterwards that they were invited in by the legitimate government.”

“The Theocracy does have an odd regard for legalities,” Philip pointed out, “all which is beside the point at the moment. We have three priorities; we have to make our presence felt in the sector, we have to obtain more ships and we have to start training the locals.”

“Which will be tricky if we’re not entirely able to trust them,” Captain Thomas Nonagon pointed out. He was the only one with any genuine training experience, having been a mustang – an officer who had risen from the ranks rather than going through Piker’s Peak, the RAN’s naval academy – and then serving a team at OCS. “How many spacers are likely to come from Asher Dales anyway?”

Philip produced a datapad and held it up in front of him. The data had already been distributed through the squadron’s secure datanet, using whisker-thin laser communications to ensure security. Some people would say that he was being paranoid, but even paranoids had enemies – and besides, security was a good habit to develop. Tanya had gathered it for him at his request, noting that most of the computer networks on the planet below were primitive, even by the standards of early spaceflight. The development corporation hadn't been particularly interested in funding modern computer networks. Philip had yet to puzzle out why anyone would consider that a good idea.

“There are apparently seventy-nine people with space-faring experience and four hundred and seven people without who – I quote – want to get their bums off this rock,” Philip said. “The spacers can be tested first; we don’t seem to have anyone with modern military experience, sadly. After that, we can begin testing the newcomers and training them on basic tasks; Thomas, I’m leaving that in your hands, unless you have any objection.”

“Wonderful,” Nonagon said, dryly. “Yet another tempting opportunity to discover how many ways completely ignorant idiots can get me killed.”

Philip nodded in understanding. Piker’s Peak had been operating for over a hundred years, and yet it was a rare year where they didn't lose a cadet to an accident that wouldn't have befallen a more experienced officer. The Marine Training Camps were even worse, often losing a number of recruits to the training course before they could even graduate and be appointed Commonwealth Marines. It would be even more dangerous on the Joe Buckley, if only because they didn't have any of the safety precautions that were used at Piker’s Peak.

“I give you complete authority to select and deselect candidates,” he said. “Their lives are in your hands. Draw supplies from Nancy as you need them, but keep the records updated. We won’t be able to get resupplied for quite some time.”

He looked over at Marie. “And on the Marine side of things?”

“There are a handful of people with regular army experience on Asher Dales, but no one with anything reassembling Marine experience,” Marie said, easily. “That’s a good thing in many ways – there’s less to unlearn – but we lack the sophisticated training technology we would use back home.”

Nonagon snorted. “I thought it was a point of pride that Marine training camps were primitive hellholes,” he said, lightly. “Why do you suddenly want advanced technology?”

“We can set up basic training easily enough,” Marie said. “Practicing anything outside the planet’s atmosphere, however, will be a little harder. I’d almost sooner work with the experienced spacers on Asher Dales, even though they don’t have any Marine experience. At least they’d understand things that can’t really be conveyed through lectures.”

“Put a request in for any gear you and your men need from Nancy,” Philip said. “You’ll be staying behind this time, I’m afraid. Gunny Sanderson will be senior Marine on Dancer.”

“And Top Hat Kratman on Dasher,” Marie said. She hesitated. “I should remind you that we only really have forty Marines in total – and I will need some of them assigned permanently to the surface. It may be months, at least, before we have any replacements from the surface.”

“We may start trying to recruit more people from the Commonwealth, if necessary,” Philip said. It wasn't a good solution, if only because the Commonwealth – gearing up for war with the Theocracy – wouldn't be keen to allow good men with unblemished records to leave for Asher Dales. Finding the two hundred officers and crew for his ships had been hard enough; he’d had to reject a number of possible candidates because they had been dismissed for extremely sound reasons. “But we are going to need some form of training facility out here.”

He cleared his throat. “Joe Buckley will be remaining here on patrol,” he said, firmly. “If there’s an emergency at the cloudscoop, you are cleared to respond to it, but take care to hide Nancy in hyperspace first. She’s going to be the prime target for every pirate in this sector once they realise what she’s carrying. Thomas; you have overall command, but don’t allow the local council to dictate to you.”

“I’ll be very diplomatic,” Nonagon assured him.

“Wonderful,” Schifrin said, mischievously. “We’ll come home to find that we’re at war with Asher Dales.”

“As you were,” Philip said, before an argument could break out. Schifrin and Nonagon were opposites in every way that mattered, one calm and controlled; the other alarmingly prone to bursts of emotion and impulse. And a drinking problem, of course. “I want you to check in with every freighter that visits this system and try to convince them to share intelligence with us. We may not be able to establish a proper hyperspace monitoring service out here, but if we can pull data from navigational computers we should be able to start establishing a baseline for predicting energy storms.

“A second thing we will need is intelligence,” he added. “Again, try to convince the freighter commanders to share what they know about the sector. Chances are that they will have their fingers more firmly on the sector’s pulse than anyone else, including us. We can probably see about offering cheap rates for fuel to participating freighters, if necessary.”

“Some of them may be reluctant to share,” Marie pointed out. “If the pirates were to identify freighters who are cooperating with us, they may attempt to retaliate against those ships.”

“And we can't cover the whole sector,” Nonagon said. “We may face an uphill struggle before we can convince people that we’re here to stay.”

“We have to start somewhere,” Philip reminded them.

He keyed a switch and a star chart appeared in front of them. “Dancer will be escorting a freighter to Hsu, four days from here,” he said. “According to the latest open intelligence brief from Avalon” – and classified data he’d been given by Cassandra – “the Manchu Dynasty runs a regular convoying service from Hsu to New Beijing, so we can leave that freighter in orbit there until the convoy ship arrives. If we’re lucky, there should be a chance to pick up a freighter coming back out here before heading further towards the rim – if so, I expect you to escort her back here.”

“Naturally,” Schifrin said. He frowned. “Should we be concerned about the Manchu Dynasty operating out here, so far from its normal sphere of interest?”

Philip shrugged. The Manchu Dynasty comprised a set of nine colony worlds, all settled directly from China in the days of the UN. They’d been one of the first out-system colonies to rebel against the UN and had fought hard when the UN attempted to crush their insurrection from orbit. Avalon hadn't been too interested in tracking political developments in their sphere since the Breakaway Wars – the Manchu homeworlds were located on the other side of Old Earth – but what data Philip had been able to access suggested that they’d been pulling themselves slowly back together and claiming hegemony over all Chinese-ethnic colony worlds. As there was a great deal of debate over precisely what constituted a Chinese-ethnic world, it was a stance that hadn’t found great favour outside their original homeworlds. Hsu, on the other hand, was simply too poor to defend itself. Help from the Manchu Dynasty might be the only thing protecting them from the pirates – or the Theocracy, for that matter. The Buddhism practiced by the Hsu settlers would be treated just as roughly as any other religion that failed to conform to what the Theocrats considered acceptable.

“Probably not,” he said, finally. “While you’re at Hsu, I’d like you to try and make contact with the local shipping factors – and the representative the Manchu Navy will have established somewhere on the surface. They would probably want to share information in any case, but we could always make a clear invitation. Don’t promise anything, though – we may not be able to keep any promises.”

“And they have long memories,” Schifrin said. Philip nodded. The Manchu Dynasty had warned that it intended to reclaim Old China, on Old Earth, even though Earth itself was largely a ruin and the other powers in the Sol System would hardly be keen on allowing a newcomer into their sphere of influence. “We don’t want to make enemies of them if we can help it.”

“Dasher will escort another freighter to Prospect,” Philip continued. Prospect was even further away from Avalon – towards the Rim – than Asher Dales, a smaller colony world that was drawing on the resources of her closest neighbours to remain a going concern. The pirates had clearly figured out that Prospect wasn't worth raiding – there was nothing on the planet worth taking, apart from women and they were too spread out to make capture easy – but the freighters that travelled to Prospect were tempting targets. And the one currently refuelling at Asher Dales was carrying a shipment of farming and asteroid mining equipment. Philip could name a dozen groups that would be interested in obtaining the material and wouldn't really care where it came from, or how many people would be ruined by their decision. “I doubt that there’s much worth seeing at Prospect, but we do need to run a survey of the system and start monitoring the local hyperspace conditions.”

“And have time to start devising the next series of exercises,” Schifrin put in.

“True,” Philip agreed. He was worried about splitting his force, but in truth there really wasn't any better option. They had to start making an impact as soon as possible. “I’ve cleared additional bonuses with the council – if anyone takes a pirate ship in usable condition, there will be rewards for the entire crew. We can start putting them into service as patrol craft...”

“Once we've checked them carefully,” Marie said, quickly. “Pirates don’t normally bother to carry out even basic maintenance. If the ships weren't so hardy, they’d have killed themselves off by now.”

Phillip nodded, remembering one pirate ship that had been captured while he was still a newly-minted Lieutenant. The crew had been the sloppiest crew in known space; they hadn't bothered with any maintenance, they’d kept slaves – mainly pleasure women – on the lower decks and they’d defecated everywhere. He hadn't been able to believe the stench when he’d cracked open his helmet; in the end, they’d had to blow the airlocks and vent the entire ship before handing her over for reprocessing into something more useful. The worst crew in the entire RAN could not possibly have kept their ship in such a condition. They’d have been court-martialled and drummed out of the service in disgrace.

“And vented the entire ship,” he added. “Still, beggars can't be choosers. Every ship we take off the bastards is one that won’t be raiding any more shipping in this sector, or anywhere else.”

He frowned. “There is a distant possibility that we might encounter unfriendly vessels,” he added, finally. The only unfriendly vessels, apart from pirate ships, that they were likely to encounter were Theocracy warships. “We need intelligence – hell, we need warning. If you sight such a vessel, haul ass out of there and get word back to Asher Dales. Don’t try to take on the entire Theocracy by yourself. The Commonwealth needs to know if they’re operating in this sector.”

His gaze moved from holographic image to holographic image. “We’re pretty much on our own out here,” he warned. “I want no heroics, no needless risks. Don’t **** up.”

“We won't, sir,” Schifrin assured him.

“Good,” Philip said. “Is there any other business?”

“Just one,” Marie said. “Two of our crewmen got into a little spot of trouble at the party last night.”

Philip scowled, remembering the cold sensation of wine spilling out over his dress uniform. “What kind of trouble?”

“They seem to have pushed matters too far too fast with a couple of the local women,” Marie informed him. Philip scowled. He should have been contacted at once. “The local men decided to show their feelings by beating them, but they’d both been through the unarmed combat course and managed to inflict considerable damage before they were subdued.”

Philip scowled at her. “Why was I not informed?”

“As no one was seriously hurt, I took the liberty of agreeing with George Foster, the Sheriff of Asher Dales, that they only really deserved a whipping rather than anything more formal,” Marie said. “They were whipped early this morning and released – both of them seem to be in good shape, considering. I have also taken the liberty of warning them that further misbehaviour would result in having their heads kicked in by me personally.”

“I see,” Philip said. It was a neat solution – and if the locals had no trouble accepting it, he saw no reason why he should take it any further. “I’d appreciate knowing about any such crisis before it explodes in my face.”

“I will inform you if we have a repeat,” Marie agreed. “However, I felt that the sooner it was handled, the sooner it would all be over.”

Philip nodded. “As there is no other business,” he said, “Dasher will light out for the cloudscoop in two hours. Dancer can depart” – he shared a look with Schifrin – “once the crew of the freighter are ready to depart. Joe Buckley will assume primary responsibility for the system upon our departure.”

He tapped a key. “Meeting adjourned,” he concluded. “Good luck to us all.”

The faces vanished, leaving him with the illusion of being alone. He stood up, shaking his head, and started towards the hatch. It hissed open before he arrived, revealing Tanya. She was holding a small bag in one hand and a datapad in the other.

“Captain,” she said. “I was just looking for you.”

Philip blinked. “You could have had me paged,” he pointed out. He wasn't even aware that Tanya was onboard, although there were still several shuttles due to come up from the surface. Tanya could easily have hitched a ride on one of them. “How can I help you?”

Tanya hesitated. “I was wondering if I could accompany you to Prospect,” she said. She sounded almost as if she wasn't quite serious, or being completely honest. “There are some trade treaties that need to be discussed with Prospect’s council.”

Philip frowned. He would have bet good money that discussing anything with Prospect’s governors wasn't her first priority. But she was a friend, and she was their civilian liaison, and if she wanted to ride along with them she had every right to do so. And besides, he wanted to keep her away from Tam. God alone knew what the conceited ass was doing down below.

“I’d be delighted,” he said, honestly. He would like having her along, if only because she was someone he could talk to openly. A Captain was always the most isolated person on his ship. “Your cabin is still open for you.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Tanya said. She looked up at him for a long moment, her dark eyes worried. “I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.”

 

Happy New Year to all of my commenting readers...

Chapter Thirteen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“It’s beautiful.”

Philip couldn’t disagree. Skinner, the fourth planet in the Asher Dales System, was a large blue-green gas giant, two-thirds the size of Jupiter. It was orbited by a series of rings, each one composed of watery ice and asteroids, not unlike Saturn. Earth’s nearest gas giant neighbours were still renowned after over three hundred years of space exploration; Jupiter had been the largest gas giant recorded until only a few years ago. There were scientists who speculated that Jupiter’s size had played a subtle role in the development of intelligent life on Earth. Philip wasn't convinced, but it did make a neat theory. No intelligent races had been discovered ever since the human race had started expanding into space. Who knew – maybe there was something to the theory after all.

Orbiting above Skinner in a stable orbit was a single structure attached to a long tube. The structure was both massive and fragile, consisting mainly of large inflatable tanks to store the HE3 extracted from the gas giant. A small handful of living modules had been attached to the tanks, allowing the station’s small crew to live and work in reasonable comfort. Philip had seen enough gas giant mining stations to know that it wasn't a hard life, but a deeply boring and isolated position. The RAN’s standard punishment for officers who screwed up was to exile them to gas giant mining stations. It saved the cost of a court-martial.

His gaze followed the tube as it dropped down into the gas giant’s atmosphere. Like the rest of the station, it was fragile; a single missile could cut it open with ease. It wasn't as if they could repair it at Asher Dales either. They’d have to send to New Copenhagen or the Commonwealth for replacement components, and probably a repair crew as well. Philip was astonished that someone in the development corporation had thought that building a cloudscoop was a good idea, although it seemed to have worked out well for the station’s crew. They might have been effectively stranded in the Asher Dales System, but they could supply any passing freighter – and the RockRats – with fuel and undercut the nearest official fuelling station in the sector. Given another few decades, it might even become the most useful component in the system’s economy.

His wristcom buzzed. “Captain,” Harmon said, “we’ve picked up a message from the station's manager. He’d be delighted to see you in his office, if you would care to take a shuttle over from the ship.”

Philip exchanged a glance with Tanya. It was questionable just how much authority Asher Dales had over the gas giant mining station. There hadn't been any way to enforce the council’s authority until Philip and his small squadron had arrived. Even so, the cloudscoop had a crew that hadn't been drawn from the settlers, or even appointed by the original development corporation. The precise lines of responsibility and power were rather murky, but Philip didn't mind too much. It would allow him a chance to draw them as he saw fit.

“Understood,” he said. “I’ll fly the shuttle myself. Keep monitoring nearby space for uninvited guests.”

“Aye, Captain,” Harmon said. “No encroachments detected within sensor range.”

Early space operas – still watched on Avalon, mainly for their comedic value – had featured a device that could teleport men and equipment over vast distances. The Commonwealth had been experimenting with such a device, based on the theory of quantum transmission, but had never come close to developing a viable model, any more than it had developed a handheld device that could send signals over interstellar distances faster than the speed of light. It would have been straightforward to dock Dasher with the station – there were two freighters already docked to the station – but destroyer commanders preferred to keep their ships floating freely out in space. Even paranoids had enemies, after all, and a docked ship was a vulnerable ship.

Up close, the station was larger than Philip had expected. Someone – probably the RockRats – had supplied additional modules to the station’s crew, allowing them to expand the facility into a reasonably large living space. It wouldn't be as bad as a standard gas giant mining station, which was lucky enough; the crew would very likely be living on that station for several months, if not years. There seemed to be no weapons or defences, although that wasn't much of a surprise. The gas giant mining station was the only thing keeping interstellar commerce going through the sector and taking it out would have cost the pirates most of their targets. He oriented the shuttle on the station and started the docking procedure, reluctant to allow the autopilot to take over. It was unwise to trust an outdated station’s command and control network too much. A single incompatibility and disaster might result.

The airlock hissed open, allowing him and Tanya to depart the shuttle and enter the station’s docking module. It was basic, with bare bulkheads and connecting tubes lying open rather than sealed closed, but it was easy enough to find their way through the network of airlocks and into the second module. This one was clearly designed for a family, with paintings drawn by children scattered everywhere and a handful of children’s toys on the floor. A man was standing in front of the airlock, waiting for them. He didn't look happy.

“You would be Commodore Larson, I assume,” he said. He didn't sound happy either. “I must say that I find this visit most objectionable.”

Philip studied him, thoughtfully. He was a short man, bristling with an air of impatience mixed with concern – and not a little worry. The station manager – or so he assumed – was balding, showing signs of stress and age that suggested that he had never undergone rejuvenation or prolonging treatments at a more developed world. His brown hair was thinning out alarmingly, while he had a growing paunch that pushed out against a uniform that was clearly at least one size too small for him.

“Manager John Milton, I assume,” Philip said. He held out his hand for the manager to shake. “May I enquire as to why you find this visit so objectionable?”

Milton scowled at him. “I was informed when I bought this station – at a much reduced price, I might add – that I would have complete authority over operations,” he said, crossly. “I have already had to endure a bombardment of messages from the so-called council on Asher Dales, who appear to believe that they have the ability and authority to dictate orders to me – orders that are so impractical it is clear that they have given no thought at all to how the universe really works. And now they have sent you along and expect me to kowtow in front of you.”

Philip shrugged. “I’m not here to do anything more than work with you,” he said, seriously. Milton snorted, loudly. “I don’t care who you have been supplying with fuel or on whatever rates. All I want to do is gather intelligence on pirate activity within the sector and work with the freighters that draw fuel from this station to create an expanded intelligence network.”

“I was told that this would be a great opportunity,” Milton said, flatly. He indicated the paintings with one wave of his hand. “I came out here with my husbands and wives and our children to set up a new home, somewhere we could own for ourselves. Instead, we have been forced to sell fuel at a reduced rate to keep ourselves floating in orbit around this gas giant. I am not going to do anything that might threaten their lives.”

Philip nodded to himself. Group marriages weren't uncommon among the RockRats; indeed, there was no legal reason why Avalon’s citizens couldn’t organise a group marriage for themselves if that was what they wanted. It provided the children with extra security and emotional support during their crucial early years of development. Having a family be as isolated as Milton’s family was a little more unusual, but he could see no reason why it wouldn’t be possible.

“I’m not going to do anything that would threaten their lives either,” Philip said. “All I want from you...”

“Is information on my customers,” Milton said, sharply. His paunch wobbled alarmingly as he spoke. “Do you really think that I would serve the scrum of the universe if I had a choice?”

Tanya looked puzzled, but Philip understood. The gas giant mining station was completely defenceless. It wouldn't be too difficult for the pirates to threaten Milton into supplying them with fuel for their ships, knowing that no one would cover his ass if they decided to blow the station into fragments. Hell, they could burn holes in the modules, vent the entire station, and then seal the breaches and man the station with their own men. Milton would have absolutely no choice, but to do as they said.

But most interstellar courts wouldn't see it that way. Pirates were the scourge of the interstellar trade routes and Milton was aiding and abetting them, even if it was against his will. The courts would probably order the arrest of Milton and the adults in his extended family, and then sentence them to life on a penal world – if they were lucky. It would be far more likely for them to be sentenced to death. Oh, he could understand Milton’s position, all right. He was caught between the devil and the empty darkness of interstellar space.

“I think that it is fairly clear that Asher Dales is the primary authority in this system,” Philip said, slowly. Milton would probably consider that arguable, but much of the interstellar case law would tend to support such a view, particularly now that Asher Dales could patrol its system and hunt down pirates who might be using it as a base. “We could probably come to some legal arrangement...”

“And could you protect my family if the pirates came to call?” Milton demanded. “Your ships wouldn't even know they’d arrived for hours – and then where would you be? Useless! You’d be simply ****ing useless!”

“We will be obtaining more ships soon,” Philip said, firmly. He held out one hand. “Let’s be blunt for a moment. The pirates are blackmailing you into supplying them with fuel and perhaps intelligence on what freighters are going where, right?” Milton nodded, ignoring Tanya’s gasp. “I understand your position and, for what it’s worth, you have my word of honour that neither you and your family will be put through any legal hell by a self-righteous bastard who has never been out on the Rim. Things are going to change out here.”

He leaned forward. “But I need you to help us,” he added. “We don’t need much, apart from fuel and intelligence. And when we obtain a fourth ship, we’ll place her out here on permanent patrol. They won’t be able to come and threaten your family...”

“Nothing written down, ever,” Milton said, firmly. “I don’t want anything that they could see and draw a line between you and me. And I don’t want you sharing anything with the council on Asher Dales.”

Tanya spoke for the first time. “The council,” she said, frostily, “is not in the habit of sharing information with the pirates.”

“The council members are the ones buying stolen goods,” Milton said, flatly. “Do you think that the pirates don’t try to fence their ill-gotten gains to anyone they can find? Your councillors are probably raking in the proceeds while the legitimate owners suffer, unable to recover what’s been stolen from them. And there are plenty of worlds that will buy almost anything, without bothering to ask awkward questions. Grow the **** up.”

“That will do,” Philip said, before Tanya could frame a suitably unpleasant reply. It would be nice to find proof that Greg and Tam Farnham were in bed with the pirates, but he doubted that it would be that easy. The pirates would hardly keep bills of sale, let alone records of who had brought what...and the buyers would have even less incentive to keep records. If the Asher Dales Naval Service became a going concern, or one of the other interstellar powers became involved in the sector, the buyers would start feeling the heat very quickly. “I’ll give you a transmitted with an encryption system that should be impossible to break quickly. All you have to do is relay intelligence to my ships and...”

“Come and collect it in person,” Milton said. “Those bastards will probably start picking up the transmissions even if they can't decrypt them. And then...dear god – do you know what they do to young women?”

Philip, who had walked through the wrecks of vessels destroyed by the pirates, nodded silently. The pirates had nothing to lose, literally. They knew what would happen if they were captured by almost any naval service; they’d be executed on sight. And so they had no reason to hold back, or to treat their captives with any mercy. The women would be raped, often brutally, before they were executed; the men would often be tortured to death. There were some people who felt that perhaps pirates should be offered life on a penal world instead of death, in the hopes that it would prevent atrocities, but it would never get through the Commonwealth’s Assembly, let alone any other interstellar legislature. The revulsion felt for the pirates was too strong.

“We will,” he said. “Before we leave, perhaps you could show us the rest of your station?”

It took nearly an hour to go through the entire station, but it was time well spent. Milton’s family had been designing their own home for years, often welding on new modules or even pieces of expended rock they’d bought from the RockRats, creating a nice environment for their children. The gravity seemed to fluctuate oddly from time to time – artificial gravity fields liked it when the starship or orbiting station didn't change its internal structure on a regular basis – but the kids seemed to enjoy it. They all looked surprisingly happy and well-adjusted, despite living almost alone with no one, apart from their parents, for company.

The station actually grew much of its food in one of the modules, which had been filled with an algae compound the UN had developed long before hyperspace had been opened to human expansion and later settlement. In its basic form, it produced a tasteless mush that provided everything humans needed to live, something that had been used to solve Earth’s food crisis – and set off a population explosion that had continued until Earth had been rendered almost uninhabitable. The RockRats had improved upon the compound until it could be made quite tasty, particularly with the addition of a handful of exotic spices. Philip suspected that some of the extended family would be quite happy to open up new trade links with Asher Dales, if only they could be convinced that they would be safe from the pirates. It would take some time to gain their trust.

“Thank you for your time,” he said, finally. Milton nodded, crossly. He still looked worried, even though they’d agreed that the official story would be that Philip had forced him to welcome them at gunpoint. “Please keep in touch.”

“You come here and we will,” Milton growled. “Best of luck, Captain. I just hope you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew.”

Philip allowed Tanya to precede him into the shuttle and then closed the airlock, separating the shuttle from the gas giant mining station., It only took a few seconds to put some distance between themselves and the station, before he orientated the shuttle on Dasher and started to head back towards his ship. He’d be relieved when they linked up with the Foolish Genius and headed out to Prospect. A chance to take a shot or two at a pirate ship would be very welcome...

“They’re supplying information to the pirates,” Tanya said, shocked. “Shouldn't we arrest them?”

“They don’t have much choice in the matter,” Philip pointed out, mildly. “Once we get more patrols running through this part of the system, we can cut off the source of information – or manipulate it to lure the pirates into a trap. They’re right, sadly; if the pirates do think that they were betrayed, they will destroy the station after torturing and murdering Milton’s family.”

“But...” She shook her head, angrily. “Who on the council would have been taking goods from the pirates?”

“It could be anyone,” Philip said. “There’s no way to know, at least not now. We’ll set up a network of stealthed recon satellites in the next few months and start using them to track activity on the other side of the world from our position, but that’s going to take some time. It isn't as easy as it seems to cut off a world from space, at least without a much larger squadron...”

Tanya’s eyes narrowed. “I wonder if it will turn out to be Greg,” she said, savagely. “I’d love a chance to nail him for something...”

Philip smiled. “It would be nice, wouldn't it?”

Inwardly, he wasn't so sure. Greg Farnham was one of the most powerful people on Asher Dales, with hundreds of clients at his beck and call. An attempt to arrest him might undo the delicate social fabric binding Asher Dales together – almost as much as an attempt to arrest Lucas Falcone would shatter the Commonwealth. But then, the Falcone Corporation would know better than to risk allowing its CEO to expose himself so blatantly. The Board would remove him at once if they had even the slightest hint that he was benefiting from criminal acts.

“Let’s hope we find proof one way or the other soon,” he said. A witch-hunt might be even worse for the budding colony. “And then at least we will know.”

 

<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Chapter Fourteen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
“I’m very glad to see you, Philip,” Captain Elizabeth Tyler said. “I can call you Philip, can't I?”

“You certainly can’t call me Captain,” Philip agreed, with a grin. “You can call me Philip if you please.”

He leaned back in his chair and relaxed. Captain Elizabeth Tyler – Mistress of the Foolish Genius – and her crew had been delighted to see Dasher; she’d invited him and Tanya to join her for dinner once they’d entered hyperspace. It was an old custom from the days of the Breakaway Wars, but he hadn't expected anyone to remember it in the Einstein Sector. The Foolish Genius, a family-owned ship rather like Milton’s gas giant mining station, was a lumbering medium freighter with a regular contract with Prospect’s development corporation. So far, they’d been lucky and escaped from pirates who might try to harm them, but Elizabeth had known that their luck would run out one day.

The meal hadn't been very complex, but it had been produced with fresh meats and vegetables from Asher Dales and that made all the difference. Elizabeth had kept them all entertained with stories of how her grandfather had originally purchased the Foolish Genius and then passed it down to her father, and then finally to his eldest child. Most of the nineteen-strong crew were relatives of her, apart from a pair of younger crewmen who had joined the ship through marriage alliances with Elizabeth’s children. Philip had grown up on Avalon and spent his entire spacefaring career in naval service, but there were people – outside the RockRats – who spent their entire lives in space. They had a freedom that was often denied to those born on a planetary surface, or even those who were born to the RockRats. On the other hand, they were almost completely defenceless if the pirates came knocking.

“I’m glad that someone is finally starting to take an interest in this sector,” Elizabeth said, as she took a sip of her port. Philip had little interest in wine – he had never had the patience to become a wine snob – but he hadn't been able to identify the liquid at all. It might have come from the other side of the galaxy as far as he was concerned. “We’ve had too many ships disappearing recently for us to remain unconcerned.”

“So I have heard,” Philip said. He’d broached the idea of sharing information, only to be surprised by how rapidly Elizabeth embraced the idea. The chances were that she’d actually had a network set up among her fellow spacers long before Asher Dales had decided that it needed a naval service. As long as they could use it, Philip wouldn't have minded who got credit for the idea. “Do you have any idea where the pirates might be basing themselves?”

“I’m afraid not,” Elizabeth said, regretfully. “There are quite a few colonies out past Prospect that don’t appear on any official charts, but I don’t think that any of the ones I know are helping the pirates. One of them is determined to remain low-tech; the others want to just remain isolated and allow the galaxy to go to hell on its own. There are a couple that might be interested in developing relations with Asher Dales and the rest of the sector, now that the founders are dead and their replacements less inclined to remain isolated from the greater galaxy; you may wish to pay them a visit once you have a moment.”

“I’ll certainly try to do so,” Philip assured her. “Have you heard anything about Theocracy ships being sighted in this sector?”

“Very little,” Elizabeth said, after a long moment. “I did encounter a Theocracy cruiser at Hsu once, three years ago. I don’t know what it was doing there, but the ship’s Captain was very rude. He seemed to think that I should be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, cooking for my man-master. What a disgusting little tyke.”

She shook her head. “I can't say that they’d be very welcome out here,” she added. “Quite a lot of the people who live on these worlds came out here to get away from the Theocracy. I’d be surprised if they even gave the bastards the time of day. Besides, they don’t let independents trade within their space, even if we don’t undercut their shipping combines. Anyone would think that they had something to hide.”

Philip nodded. Every year, distinguished economists on Avalon would produce papers that proved that the Theocracy was on the verge of collapse. Everyone knew what happened to a society that refused to allow commercial competition; it stagnated and then collapsed into anarchy. But the Theocracy, so far, had refused to collapse and space the rest of the galaxy the prospect of having to fight a war to contain its expansion. It was impossible to say for sure what was happening inside the Theocracy – the Theocratic Navy was extremely good at keeping out unwanted guests, while their social system made it difficult to insert long-term agents onto their worlds – but it certainly didn't lack for confidence. Even the UN at the height of its power couldn't match the Theocracy for sheer bare-faced arrogance.

“But we’d be happy to let you know if we saw any of them,” she said. “What do you think you’d do if you did know?”

“I’m not sure,” Philip admitted. Tanya’s question about the proper relationship between the military and civil governments had raised another question in his mind. What should he do if he did find evidence that the Theocracy was interfering in the Einstein Sector? Hell, what should he do if the Commonwealth went to war against the Theocracy? There might be entire legions of social scientists who believed that war could be averted with sufficient understanding and concessions, but Philip knew that there was no way anyone could make enough concessions to the Theocracy to change its behaviour. Enough understanding sometimes led to more disgust, rather than acceptance. “I’d have to think of something.”

“Let me know when you do,” Elizabeth said, cheerfully. “I’d love to stick a finger in their eye. They’re nothing more than pigs...”

Philip’s wristcom buzzed before he could respond. “Go ahead,” he ordered. He’d given orders not to be disturbed, unless trouble was bearing down on their position. “Report.”

“Captain, we’re picking up at least one vessel on an intercept vector,” Harmon said. “It’s hard to be sure at this range, but it should be in firing range within forty minutes.”

Elizabeth looked up at him, sharply. “They’re taking their time,” she commented. “Do you think they have bad intentions?”

“I’m sure of it,” Philip said. He stood up and Tanya followed him. “I hate to cut the evening short, but I’m needed on my bridge.”

“I know,” Elizabeth said. “Good hunting.”

***​

“Report,” Philip barked, as he strode onto Dasher’s bridge and took the command chair. “Time to intercept?”

“Thirty minutes, perhaps slightly more,” Harmon reported. The tactical officer keyed his display and the contact, a small vessel, appeared as a glowing red icon. “They seem to be rather hesitant about engaging us, sir.”

Philip frowned. “They might be civilian, hoping to join a convoy,” he said, finally. “Did you transmit a standard greeting?”

“No, sir,” Harmon reported. “They may not have picked us up, sir; we’d be hidden within Foolish Genius’s emissions. If we ping them, they’d know we’re here.”

“Unless they saw us leave Skinner and decided to follow,” Philip said. He shook his head a moment later. Pirates wouldn't want to tangle with Dasher even if they were flying a light cruiser, rather than one of the sometimes ramshackle ships that pirate commanders were forced to purchase from dodgy dealers. There was too much chance of taking damage they wouldn't be able to fix. “No; that doesn't seem likely, does it?”

He smiled to himself as he settled back in his command chair. “Keep us close to Foolish Genius, helm,” he ordered. “When they enter a range that Foolish Genius could reasonably be expected to detect them, they can send the standard greeting. We’ll see how they respond to that...”

The minutes ticked by slowly as the unidentified craft came closer, forcing Philip to order Dasher to alter course slightly in the hopes of preventing early detection. Sensors were somewhat untrustworthy in interstellar space, but the pirates – if they were pirates – might get lucky, or they might pick up a sensor ghost and decide to back off rather than engage the freighter. Foolish Genius sent a standard greeting as the unknown ship closed to within five minutes of firing range, but there was no reply. Philip’s eyes narrowed as he studied the display, calculating attack vectors in his head. Refusing to reply to a standard greeting wasn't just rude, it was almost always taken as a sign of hostile intent. The rules might have been a bit looser outside a system’s territorial limits, but the odds against two ships meeting by accident in hyperspace were staggeringly high.

“Still no response,” Harmon confirmed. “Foolish Genius is requesting permission to alter course.”

Philip shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “The hostiles don’t know about us yet, or they’d never come in so fat and happy. We don’t want them to know about us until we’re ready to give them a bloody nose.”

“Aye, sir,” Harmon said. “Unknown vessel now altering course slightly...she’s trying to run our charge down.”

“Smart of them,” Philip observed, sardonically. The freighter couldn't hope to outrun the raider, but if she was a very lucky freighter, she might just be able to prolong the encounter until a warship turned up, or until the pirates gave up and slipped away in search of easier prey. It wasn't likely to happen, yet Elizabeth and her crew would have ample motive to try. Seven of her crew were young women, after all.

The final seconds ticked away, and then...

“Missile separation,” Harmon snapped. A new red icon flared to life on the display, a bright red line projecting the missile’s course. “It reads out as a warning shot...”

There was a pause, and then the missile detonated, only a few thousand kilometres from Foolish Genius’s hull. “That was a standard nuke, sir,” Harmon added. “They’re hailing Foolish Genius.”

Philip smiled to himself as the pirate hail echoed out from the speakers, slightly blurred by hyperspace’s high-energy fields. “...Under the guns of a warship,” a voice said. It was harsh and cold and utterly pitiless. “You will cut your drives at once and surrender. Resistance will result in the destruction of your vessel.”

“I think it’s time that we introduced ourselves to our new friend,” Philip said. He felt his lips pull back into a snarl. “Mr. Harmon; take us away from Foolish Genius and fire at will.”

Dasher jerked as she launched four missiles right towards the pirate ship. The pirate had been utterly surprised, but even if he had been prepared there was little he could do about the incoming missiles. Any warship would mount enough point defence to force the attacker to fire a heavy salvo of missiles in hopes of swarming the point defence by weight of numbers, yet the pirates didn't seem to have bothered with any specialisedpoint defence weapons. They did mount a pair of heavy energy weapons, but they only managed to hit one missile before the other three slammed into the pirate ship’s armour. A warship could have taken that blow and survived, but Philip half-expected the pirate ship to simply vaporise. Instead, it lost its drives and started to spin helplessly in space. Air venting from one of the breaches in its hull left him wondering if they hadn't bothered with internal safety precautions as well. Dasher might have been an old ship, but it still mounted internal airlocks to prevent the entire ship from venting if there was a hull breach...

He keyed his console. “This is Captain Larson of the Dasher,” he said. “You are ordered to surrender now or your ship will be destroyed. I say again; you are ordered to surrender now or your ship will be destroyed.”

There was a long pause. He wouldn't have risked boarding a damaged Theocracy vessel, not when the Theocracy commanders were reputed to be fanatics who would overload their own drives to take their enemies to hell with them. But the pirates had been badly shaken by the sudden reverse in their fortunes and might just surrender without a fight. Who knew? They might all be dead already, if their ship had vented completely. The next set of pirates wearing protective suits he met would be the first.

“Picking up a response, sir,” Harmon said. “It’s very weak. I think we tore up their communications system pretty good.”

The voice sounded shaky, without a trace of the arrogance from the earlier communication. “Please...we surrender,” it said. Philip couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Probably male; he’d never encountered any female pirates, although they were supposed to exist. “Don’t kill us...we surrender.”

Philip keyed his console. “Keith, you’re up,” he said. “Take as many of the sorry bastards alive as possible, but don’t risk yourselves. We can blow up the ship from a distance if we have to.”

“Understood, sir,” Sergeant Kratman said. “We’re punching free...now.”

Philip settled back in his command chair, forcing himself to breath evenly. The combat had been the shortest of his career, even if one included the long wait between detecting the oncoming vessel and finally engaging her. Hurry up and wait had been an attribute of military life long before the human race had ever invented a starship. The legions of Caesar or Alexander the Great had probably felt the same, even though they’d been tougher than any men of the spacefaring age. Or so he’d been told.

The temptation to listen in to the Marine channels, even to attempt to micromanage, was overpowering, but he resisted. He had to trust his people to do their job, even though he was worried about allowing them onto the pirate vessel. The pirates had to know their fate, unless they knew anything worth using as a bargaining tool, unless...he frowned, wondering if he should offer to cut them a deal. They could easily be transported back to Asher Dales and put to work on the land, instead of merely putting them out the nearest airlock. It might even make it easier to take prisoners in the future. He put the question aside as the minutes ticked away. What was happening over on the pirate ship?

“We’ve secured the ship,” Kratman reported, finally. “No resistance; most of the sorry bastards were killed when their ship was hit. It seems they armoured the drives quite nicely, but forgot about the connecting tubes until it was far too late. We’ve got about twenty-one prisoners here...”

Philip scowled. “What about their command crew?”

“Gone,” Kratman admitted. “The bastards had suicide implants. My guess is that they died the instant the ship was so badly damaged that capture became a likely possibility. I’m rather surprised that their deaths didn't trigger a self-destruct system...”

“Have the prisoners shipped back to Dasher and then inspect the pirate ship,” Philip ordered. “I’m guessing that their main computer got smashed too...?”

“Apparently not,” Kratman said, “although god alone knows why not. What’s the point of preparing your command staff to avoid capture when you don’t safeguard the navigational computers?”

“No idea,” Philip said. It was an irrational decision. “Once you’ve inspected the ship, let me know if it’s worth the effort of salvaging her. We’re going to need a few ships for the trainees, even if they are absolute junk.”

He closed the channel and looked back at his bridge crew. “And good work, all of you,” he added, softly. “A few more encounters like that and the pirates will start running the moment they see a seemingly-unescorted freighter.”

***​

“You’re going to love this,” Bartley said, two hours later. Dasher had taken the pirate ship in tow and the small convoy had resumed its course towards Prospect. “The missiles cut one of the command interlinks between the bridge and the main computer on the pirate ship. They didn't manage to purge it in time before they lost main power completely. The data we need should still be inside, once we hook it up to a portable power supply and start probing through the databank.”

He smiled. “I’m afraid that the pirate ship won’t be able to enter or leave hyperspace on her own power,” he added. “We really smashed their main power cores and burned out the vortex generator. Shoddy ****ing maintenance as well, sir. They should have at least installed a cut-out to protect against power surges...ye gods, Captain; the idiots could have stranded themselves seventy thousand ****ing light years from anywhere.”

“That’s par for the course with pirate ships,” Philip reminded him, patiently. “What about the rest of the ship?”

“Well...we’re going to have to replace the main power core, but we can pull one of the spares from Nancy,” Bartley said, slowly. “No hyperspace; maybe a speed limit in normal space...apart from that, we could probably get her to work better than they did. The weapons are junk, though. We probably need to replace them before we could take her into battle.”

“I’m not planning to take her into battle,” Philip said. “I merely want a training ship for the trainees.”

“They’d probably get themselves killed,” Bartley said. “It’ll take me another few hours to be sure that I’ve removed all the death-traps the idiots set up for themselves by accident. I’d strongly suggest taking this ship to a shipyard and having her broken up for scrap.”

“We don’t have the luxury of throwing ships away,” Philip reminded him. “Keep working on her – I’ll even let you name her.”

“The Death By Stupidity sounds about right,” Bartley muttered. “What the hell were they thinking?”

Philip shrugged. “I’m not sure that they were thinking at all,” he said. “But we’ll sure as hell find out.”

 

Happy new year to you as well Chris !!!
Thanks for the chapters !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I have to turn off my lurker cloaking device, and thank you for your fine stories last year. Everyone, please visit the Smashwords store!

 

Chapter Fifteen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“They’re all in the hold, Captain,” Kratman said. “I don't think that any of them are particularly important.”

Philip nodded. Dasher wasn't actually designed to hold prisoners, certainly not more than a handful of pirates. Normally, the survivors would have been quickly interrogated and then escorted to the nearest airlock, or – if there was some reason to keep them alive – transferred to a larger ship or a merchant vessel with an empty hold. No pirates could have burned through solid metal to escape or hijack the ship, even onboard an unarmed merchantman.

“Three of them, however, claim to have been merchant crewmen before they were pressed into service on the pirate ship,” Kratman continued. “The remainder all seem to be junior crewmen. I took the liberty of splitting the three merchant crewmen from their fellows and placing them in one of the empty cabins.”

“Unsurprising,” Philip said, more to himself than to Kratman. Pirates were known to press merchant crewmen into service on their ships, if only because most pirates wanted to make their fortunes and then retire before their luck ran out. It was a legal issue that had never been fully settled; were they involuntary pirates and therefore not deserving of hard punishment, or were they effectively collaborators, and therefore should be put to death alongside the hardened pirates? “Do you believe them?”

“I had their DNA checked against our records,” Kratman said. The burly Marine passed Philip a datapad. “One is from the Commonwealth; he was reported missing, presumed dead, on a freighter a year ago. The freighter went missing on a voyage to Heinlein and was never seen again, so it was assumed that pirates had captured or destroyed her. I haven’t been able to verify the other claims, I’m afraid. My gut feeling is that they're telling the truth, but...”

“They may have become pirates over the years since they were captured,” Philip said. Pirate crews loved breaking newcomers, forcing them to loot, rape and grow to love their new career. It was a trick as old as humanity itself; once the newcomers had blood on their hands, there was no way to escape. And if they were captured by one of the naval forces patrolling space, they could expect nothing more than their certain execution. “Which leaves us with the interesting question of precisely what do we do with them?”

He frowned, considering. “Tell them that they will be debriefed, thoroughly,” he said. “Once they’ve been pumped of everything they know, we will try and find them a place to work off their debts to society on Asher Dales or one of the other colonies.”

“Some of them may have skills we could use in the navy,” Kratman pointed out. “I’d think they’d be delighted for a chance to strike back at their tormentors.”

“I don’t think I trust them that much,” Philip said, shortly. “And the others?”

“Guilty as sin,” Kratman said, with a certain amount of relish. “They’re just awaiting your attention.”

Philip keyed the console and the screen lit up, displaying an image of the prisoners in the hold. They looked a bedraggled lot; the Marines had stripped them, removed anything that could be used as a weapon, and cuffed their hands behind their backs before throwing them into the hold. The raiders, who had intended to ransack a ship and murder its crew, now looked utterly shattered. Philip would have felt sorry for them if he hadn’t known what they’d had in mind. Like all bullies, they’d broken when they’d been confronted with a superior force.

“And none of them know anything important,” he said, slowly. Pirate commanders normally kept their subordinates in the dark, if only to make it harder for their subordinates to mutiny against them and take command for themselves. Little details like the location of pirate bases, the names and identities of fences who would take the loot and sell it on the black market – even a complete roster of ships lost to the pirates – would not come from their minds. The senior officers, the ones who had committed suicide, would have kept such details to themselves. “None of them are playing dumb, are they?”

“They don’t have anything to bargain with,” Kratman assured him. “They’re just scum, basically. And I’m afraid it gets worse.”

He tapped a switch and displayed the recorded images from the helmet cameras mounted in the Marine combat suits. “We vented part of the ship when we fired on her,” he noted, grimly. “One of the places we vented was the rear hold. I’m afraid we killed a number of their prisoners.”

Philip cursed as he saw the bodies. They were all young women, naked as the day they were born, their pale skins carrying the marks of countless beatings and rapes. It wasn't the first time he’d seen pirate victims, but this was worse. He’d killed them the moment he’d issued the order to fire on the pirate ship. The only consolation was that their deaths had probably been quick, if not painless.

“We couldn't identify any of them, I’m afraid,” Kratman admitted. “We ran their DNA against the records we have, but we didn't even have any relatives on file. My guess is that they were taken from one of the worlds in this sector and never expected to return alive. The crewmen we interrogated don't know anything for sure.”

“We do know one thing for sure,” one of the Marines said. He had trained as a medical corpsman and was the closest Dasher had to a proper doctor. “Some of them were raped by the pieces of filth we have in our hold. You need to dispose of them right now.”

Philip nodded, slowly. “I think there’s little point in interrogating the bastards,” he agreed. Based on prior experience, any of the pirates who knew anything worth trading would already have started trying to use it as a bargaining chip. “It’s a pity we don’t have a handy penal colony nearby...”

“We could take them with us to Prospect,” Kratman suggested. “I'm sure they could find a way to work them to death, if necessary.”

“Maybe not,” Philip said. “Besides, they’d be eating up supplies and consuming oxygen.” He shook his head. “Have them convoyed to the airlock and eject them out into hyperspace, unless you feel you can extract useful organs from them...?”

“They’re drugged up little shits,” the corpsman said. “It would be safer to force-grow organs for transplant if necessary.”

Philip nodded and left the Marines to attend to the executions. Striding back through his ship, he entered the small machine shop near engineering and saw a handful of computer nodes from the pirate ship scattered over the workbench. Bartley had been busy; he’d spliced in cables from portable computer testing kits and started to download the contents of the computer cores into a secure store. A handful of decryption programs were whirring away, trying to hack into the pirate databanks and unlock their data, while Bartley himself was tinkering with a piece of the fused vortex generator.

“Captain,” Bartley said, in some surprise. “I wasn't expecting you for another hour or two.”

“The pirates know nothing,” Philip said, shortly. “Please tell me that you have something better for me.”

“I may have,” Bartley said. “Someone scrubbed this system at least twice in the recent past, long before I think they installed it into the Death By Stupidity. That may explain why the self-destruct system failed so badly, sir; the computer system wasn't actually meant for the ship. It’s actually a very outdated machine, so I’m damned if I know where they got it.”

He shook his head. “They were also pretty cautious with the data they entered into the system, but the navigational subroutines worked perfectly – and I think they didn't even realise that they were working perfectly. I compared the data with our charts of the sector and I think I have a rough idea of their hunting patterns. They probably saw us leave Skinner and decided that we would make a suitable target.”

“Curious,” Philip observed. “They didn't see Dasher?”

“I don’t think so, although with these computers mashed into a sensor network they took off another ship...” He shook his head again, in disgust. “I really don’t know how they managed to last as long as they did, sir. Whoever was in charge of building the pirate ship seemed to have stripped out all of the valuable components and then replaced them with cheap scrap or older systems that weren’t designed to link into more modern devices. We probably did them a favour killing them as quickly as we did. They might have lost their atmosphere at any given moment, or worse...”

“They would have had a base,” Philip said. “Do you have a rough location for it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Bartley admitted. “As you can see” – he tapped a control and a holographic star chart appeared in front of them – “their first cruise after they last purged the system started at Ashfall and went through Prospect, Greenhill and Jack’s World, before they headed to Asher Dales. I’m inclined to think that their base is actually on Ashfall, unless they ran into computer troubles there and were forced to purge the system.”

Philip tapped his console and brought up what little the CIS had supplied about Ashfall. It was a new colony, barely twenty years old, settled directly from the Core Worlds. Politically independent, it was one of the worlds that had sent funds to establish a naval service based at Asher Dales, but it hadn't made a major contribution. There was no way to tell if it had merely contributed in hopes of buying some protection, or if they’d paid as much as they could and expected no return. Tanya might know more about the colony – he made a mental note to ask her – but it was out of their patrol route. They’d have to go visit the colony after returning to Asher Dales.

“But you don't know for sure,” he concluded.

“I’m afraid not,” Bartley said, flatly. “They may not have intended to have good operational security, but the effect has been excellent from their point of view. A hacking expert on Avalon might be able to pull more data out of these pieces of crap machines...”

“You’ve done very well,” Philip assured him. “All we have to do now is keep the ship in tow and use her as a training ship once we get back to Asher Dales.”

“She’ll kill half of our cadets, if we’re lucky,” Bartley growled. “It would be fun to try to rebuild her, but it would probably be cheaper to produce a whole new starship. She would need a stay in a proper shipyard.”

Philip frowned. There wasn't a proper shipyard at Asher Dales and there wouldn’t be one for years, unless they could convince the Commonwealth or some other interstellar power to fund one being built in-system. Asher Dales simply lacked the funding and infrastructure to produce one for itself. And he suspected that the council would refuse to make a formal request to any power, knowing that the shipyard might come with strings attached. Unless...

He smiled, darkly. Quincy, the owner of the commercial shipyard that had held the three destroyers before trying to sell them on to Tanya, had attempted to cheat her. Philip had wondered what had possessed him to take such an insane risk, knowing that his business wouldn't survive a full investigation by the CAB. But there was one very good reason to take the risk; Quincy might have intended to sell the three destroyers to pirates, or rebel factions along the Rim. It wasn't as if pirates could file suit in a court of law and demand recompense; Quincy must have assumed that Tanya was working for a pirate band, or one of its backers.

If he’d had time before they departed, he would have dropped a note to the local law enforcement office to have them investigate Quincy and perhaps some of the other independent shipyard owners, but he hadn't had time. Instead...he could send someone back to Avalon and push Quincy into moving his operation to the Rim. There were plenty of people on Avalon who would demand his head if word got out that he’d sold decommissioned warships to pirates – and besides, his crews were probably infiltrated by pirate moles. His equipment could make an excellent start on producing a local shipyard at Asher Dales; once mated with the gas giant mining station and the RockRats, perhaps they could even start producing starships of their own.

His wristcom buzzed. “Captain,” Kratman said, “we have put the bastards out of the airlock and have resealed the hatch.”

Philip nodded. “Confirm their deaths in the log and then we can be on our way,” he ordered., calmly. “Keep the three former merchantmen under guard until we reach Prospect, just in case. I don't want them in any position where they can harm the ship, even theoretically.”

“Understood, sir,” Kratman said. “They seem pretty beaten up, but we’ll keep an eye on them anyway.”

***​

“You killed them all?”

“Apart from the three who claim to have been forced into service,” Philip said. He was surprised by Tanya’s reaction, although maybe it shouldn't have been a surprise. Civilians never really understood the nature of pirate attacks until they saw them with their own eyes. Besides, there were so many legal questions about who had the right to patrol interstellar space – and what laws should be enforced by what navy – that it was easier to grant the ship commanders the right to enforce their own laws against piracy. “They may be telling the truth, so we’ll drop them off on Prospect and let them try and make new lives for themselves.”

“I wasn't complaining,” Tanya said. “I was just surprised that you didn't want to put them to work at one of the penal camps.”

“I would prefer to make the point clear that raiding shipping in this sector will eventually lead to inevitable death,” Philip said, grimly. “Every twisted sick bastard who becomes a pirate commander believes that he will never be held to account for his crimes. Some of their crews may think better if they learn that we are killing pirates and preventing them from profiting by their crimes. They would be less willing to serve if they know that we will kill them.”

“I hope you’re right,” Tanya said, slowly. “And what if you’re wrong?”

Philip shrugged. The interrogation of the three pressed merchantmen hadn't yielded much information, beyond details of just what the pirates had done to force them into service. Their tale had been horrifying, but it had also been banal. They’d been locked up when they hadn't been needed on duty and forbidden to leave the ship under any circumstances. That wasn't too much of a surprise, really. The pirates would not have trusted their unwilling crewmen any further than strictly necessary.

“Then there are a few less pirates charging around the sector in creaky warships,” Philip said. It was a shame that most interstellar powers were reluctant to arm merchant shipping, but there were limits to how heavily armed a freighter could be. They weren't warships and cramming weapons into their hulls wouldn’t change the fact that they wallowed like elephants in mud, making them sitting targets for a genuine warship. It was possible to build a Q-Ship up from a civilian hull, but the expense was astronomical and the end result not really useful for anything other than stealth missions behind enemy lines. “I don't think that any of their victims would object to their executions.”

“I don’t think that they would object,” Tanya said. She shifted, uncomfortably. Even the Captain’s cabin on Dasher was a very small compartment, almost claustrophobic compared to cabins on heavy cruisers or battleships. “I was just surprised that you made the decision so quickly, so casually...”

Philip shrugged, absently. “We caught them in the act,” he said. “And there was no doubt about their crimes, none at all. So we punished them by throwing them out into hyperspace, where their bodies will drift forever until they are consumed by an energy storm. And good riddance to bad rubbish.”

He smiled. “Anyway, I had an idea,” he said, and outlined the plan to blackmail Quincy into moving his operation to the Rim. “Do you think its workable?”

“It sounds possible,” Tanya agreed. “Do you want me to go back to Avalon and start the ball rolling?”

“I was thinking more of sending one of the Marines,” Philip said. It would be nice to get an update from Avalon about the situation along the border with the Theocracy, but whatever news they got from the Commonwealth would be nearly a month out of date. The thought bothered him. They might find themselves under attack without any warning at all. “And maybe a couple of the more hard-boiled crewmen, the ones who will know just how to pressure him for maximum advantage.”

Tanya frowned. “Shouldn't you tip off the Commonwealth’s authorities?”

“I’d like to see what we can get out of Quincy first,” Philip said. He grinned, nastily. “He might even know the location of a pirate base or two. We might just be lucky...”

It was unlikely, but they could hope, he told himself. Besides, sooner or later, they would take a pirate ship with an intact computer core, or cut a deal with a pirate that would allow them to track down and destroy the base. Or perhaps it could be captured and pressed into naval service. It would certainly save them the trouble of building additional bases for their own deployments.

“We will have to check out Ashfall as soon as possible,” he added, thoughtfully. “If they are supporting the pirates, we’re going to have to stop them before they make a bad situation far worse.”

 

Chapter Sixteen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“I’m very glad to see you and your boys, Captain,” Governor Howell assured him. “I was feeling rather exposed out here.”

Philip nodded, unsurprised. Prospect was younger, smaller and generally less well-positioned than Asher Dales – and there was almost no investment out beyond the planet itself. In fact, no one he’d been able to speak to had even admitted to carrying out a basic survey of the other planets in the system for possible economic exploitation, let alone settlement. The sole source of security in the system was a single orbiting satellite in geostationary orbit over Sherlock, the colony’s main – indeed, only – city of any note. Philip hadn't needed the governor to tell him that a single burst from a laser cannon would be enough to put the satellite out of commission for good.

Not that they need to be so obvious, he thought to himself, with a hint of sour amusement. Years of dealing with the sensor networks the Commonwealth established even in secondary star systems had left him a little spoiled. A cunning pirate ship could, if he was careful, actually dock with the satellite and splice a remote control system into its computer cores, ordering it to ignore the presence of his starships in orbit around Prospect. Or they didn't even need to go to so much trouble. Simply entering and maintaining an orbit on the other side of the planet would leave them nicely shielded against detection – assuming that they had any reason to fear detection.

“I was a big proponent of the idea of a unified defence and patrol force for the sector,” the Governor continued, cheerfully. “I had to argue quite hard with the Board, of course – blasted penny-pinchers couldn't see a good idea unless it had a nice fat profit margin – but they finally agreed that we could use some of our discretionary funds to help support your little force. Indeed, given just how many problems you people have caused us over the last year by cutting back your light units, helping us out here is the least you could do.”

It took Philip a moment to parse out and understand the remark. The Governor was talking about the Commonwealth, of course. With war looming on the Cadiz border, the Commonwealth had been forced to concentrate its light units in a desperate attempt to ensure that the battleships had enough escorts when they were finally deployed forward on a war footing. Historically, the Commonwealth had provided light units to interstellar escort formations based towards the Core Worlds, but those contributions had grown more and more limited. The new construction was being worked up at frantic speed and deployed forward to escort the Commonwealth’s Navy.

“I’m not a representative of the Commonwealth,” he said, firmly. The Commonwealth might have an interest in his success – it was just the sort of covert operation, perfectly deniable because it had never really happened at all, that appealed to the Monarchy – but he wasn't working directly for the Commonwealth Government. “I might add, however, if I were a representative of the Commonwealth Government, that we have been forced to redeploy to deal with a looming threat that has – so far – been ignored by most of the galaxy because the Commonwealth blocks the Theocracy’s advance into the Core Worlds.”

He’d wondered how the Governor would take that statement. The question was answered when the Governor threw back his head and burst out laughing, bellowing like an amused bull. “Good point, young man,” Howell said. “I would say, speaking for the United Stars, that we do have some interest in seeing the Theocracy...diverted. But political opinion back home won’t allow us to join any...pre-emptive alliance.”

“An interesting stance,” Philip said, with equal cheer, “given that a case could be made that the United Stars – if they had joined the Colonial Alliance – could have prevented the Breakaway Wars from destroying Earth and slaughtering billions of innocent victims.”

“True enough,” Howell said. He smiled as he took a sip of his drink. “I’ll be frank with you, Commodore. The United Stars has no official interest out here; it’s over seven hundred light years from the United Stars themselves, which is at least partly why the Prospect Development Corporation pressed so hard for the appointment of a United Stars Governor like myself. While there is some commercial interest out here, we cannot be seen to take an overt hand in events...”

“Even though your citizens are doing the dying out here?” Philip asked, dryly. “A single pair of destroyers – or even long-endurance frigates – would safeguard your colony world...”

“And draw us into the sector on a permanent basis,” Howell warned. “Given the...circumstances behind the founding of the United Stars – and the role some of our citizens played in the UN’s greater misdeeds – there is no political appetite for creating a permanent naval station out here. Indeed, most of the settlers of Prospect are people who believe that the United Stars has already exceeded the bonds laid down in the Constitution.”

He shrugged. “If Prospect was a colony that was sending money back to the United Stars, I dare say that the President would take the risk of...establishing at least a limited naval station out here,” he concluded. “But as it is, it would look too much like imperialism – and the Senate, still less the public, would never allow it.”

“But they’re prepared to contribute funds towards a united defence force,” Philip said.

“Of course,” Howell agreed. “Such a force will not be an overt tool of government policy. We will, of course, expect a say in your deployments and operations...”

“No,” Philip said, flatly. “I’m afraid that that question is not open to debate.”

Howell seemed surprised. Philip couldn't tell if it was real, or if the man was merely a good actor. “But he who pays the piper...and we have contributed a considerable percentage of our discretionary funds...”

Philip shook his head. “I took this job on the understanding that while overall goals would be those agreed by the parties funding the defence force, the day-to-day operations would be decided by myself and – eventually – a Board of Admiralty,” he said. He didn't intend to budge on that issue, not now or ever. “I will not share tactical data or intentions with you or anyone else, not when such information might be easily leaked to the pirates or others with hostile intentions out here. Furthermore, I will not allow the navy to become a political football out here.”

He grinned, suddenly. “And if you have influence depending upon what you contribute, you’re badly outvoted,” he added. “There are no less than ten other planets or development corporations that have provided more funds than yourself. I would be surprised if you wanted to create a precedent that would cause protection to be withdrawn from your planet.”

The Governor laughed. “Well put,” he said, dryly. “But what about the people who are serving with your little navy?”

“They will all take an oath of loyalty to the navy and the cluster,” Philip said. “We cannot afford to become torn apart by planetary loyalties, or we will be completely ineffective – just like the Aztecan Union Navy. I’m afraid that that will be a requirement of service within the cluster defence force.”

“I see,” the Governor said. “Are you aware that it is technically illegal for a citizen of the United Stars to pledge allegiance to any non-United Stars military force?”

“An interesting technicality,” Philip pointed out. “If you’re helping to fund the force, how is it not related to the United Stars?”

“Clever,” the Governor said. He cleared his throat. “As it happens, we have about two dozen men willing to sign up with you, if you would care to fly them back to Asher Dales. They’ll be in a gray area of our law, but as you so rightly pointed out – we are helping to fund this united defence effort.”

He smiled. “And now that we've got that settled, what would you and your crew like to do on our poor and humble planet?”

“Two days of shore leave,” Philip said, “should give us time to rotate all our crew through at least a few hours on the planetary surface. I’m afraid that spacers...”

“...Can be a little rowdy when on leave?” The Governor said. “We’re quite used to it, I’m afraid. They could go hunting if you feel that that would be permissible. We managed to miss a particularly nasty predator on Prospect until after we’d established the first settlements.”

Philip lifted an eyebrow. “Is it just me, or are such little oversights more common these days?”

“Interstellar survey work isn’t what it used to be,” the Governor agreed, blandly. “In this case, they managed to miss a particularly nasty cross between a spider, a crab and a tiger. The blasted creature can move at sixty kilometres an hour, has very sharp fangs and a very nasty disposition. I’m told that the reason there’s such a small population is because they would rapidly eat themselves into starvation if there were more of them on the continent.”

“Sounds lovely,” Philip said. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Good idea,” the Governor said. “The last few hunting missions managed to lose one or two people before they killed the Webster. Even with modern weapons and sensors, they’re extremely hard to find or kill from a safe distance.”

He shook his head. “I’ll make certain to show any more prisoners you happen to bring over here the footage,” he added. “That should convince them not to run out of the settled areas after dark.”

Philip shrugged. “With your permission, I intend to spend a couple of days surveying the system and then head back to Asher Dales,” he said. “Captain Tyler informs me that she will have finished dumping your pods down to the surface by then, so we will be escorting her back to Asher Dales and handing her over to one of our other ships. Do you have anything or anyone you wish to send back with us?”

“Merely copies of my dispatches for Head Office,” the Governor said. “I trust that you will honour the standard diplomatic protocols?”

“Of course,” Philip said. “I’m not sure when they will actually reach the United Stars. The closest StarCom is in the Commonwealth, but none of my ships are returning there unless something goes badly wrong.”

“I quite understand,” the Governor said. “Just don’t let anyone have a look at my classified documents.”

They shared a chuckle. Without a StarCom, the only way to send messages from one star system to another was via starship – and so most interstellar powers allowed their messages to be transported on whatever starship happened to be available, even if it wasn't a friendly ship. The documents were heavily encrypted, although very few governments would send anything that was highly secret on an unfriendly – or even a neutral – starship. It added a touch of farce to secure government communications that Philip found faintly ridiculous.

But then, even StarCom units weren't fully secure. They also tended to be big obvious targets floating in orbit around important and wealthy worlds. If someone happened to take out a StarCom, that world would be isolated from the network until the StarCom was replaced – and who knew what could happen in the months it would take to produce a new unit and ship it out to the targeted world? StarCom units were expensive, even by the standards of the major interstellar powers. The Commonwealth had a small number of reserve units – the exact number was highly classified – but if the Theocracy happened to take out much of the network, any hope of coordinating a concentrated response to an invasion of Commonwealth space would be right out the airlock.

“I’ll keep them as secure as my mother’s secret recipe book,” Philip said. Despite himself, he rather liked Governor Howell, even if he did laugh a little too loudly to be fully convincing. Besides, the Governor was walking a political tightrope between satisfying his political masters and the Prospect Development Corporation, which had been a big backer of the unified defence force concept. “Thank you for your time, Governor.”

“And thank you for yours,” Governor Howell said. “I hope you and Miss Barrington have a lovely time exploring Sherlock City. We add more buildings every six months to cope with the transients.”

“I meant to ask,” Philip said. “Why Sherlock City?”

“The original planner of the first settlements was a Sherlock Holmes fan,” the Governor said. “He had to be prevented from naming the entire planet after him, but he managed to get his way on the capital city.”

“I see,” Philip said. “At least it’s not another blasted Landing City.”

***​

Sherlock City was easily the smallest city Philip had ever seen; indeed, it would vanish without trace on any of the largish towns on Avalon, or on any of the more developed worlds closer to Earth. The once-great megacities of Earth might be abandoned ruins now, but they’d once played host to billions of humans. No one, not even the UN at the height of its power, had been able to ship out a significant fraction of Earth’s population, nor start a birth control program that might cut the birth rate sharply enough to allow Earth to recover. Centuries of human mistreatment had been pushing the planet towards total ecological collapse long before the Breakaway Wars had resulted in the planet being targeted for destruction. There was a shocking warning for humanity there, if they cared to heed it; a full-scale interstellar war could easily exterminate trillions of human lives.

There were fewer homebuilt buildings in evidence, most of them clearly prefabricated buildings that had been dropped from orbit and converted into living and office space for the colony’s governors. Unlike Asher Dales, the Governor was appointed by the United Stars Government, although his political powers were circumscribed by the Prospect Development Corporation and the United Stars Constitution. Eventually, if all went to plan, political power would eventually be handed over to an elected planetary government, but that was still at least fifty years off. The United Stars, having a medical infrastructure that could support prolong, rejuvenation and longevity genetic treatments, had ensured that many of the original colonists would still be alive to take control of their world.

“It seems smaller, somehow,” Tanya observed. “Do you think that they’re hiding their population?”

“Every successful colony world starts by establishing a farming infrastructure,” Philip pointed out. Tanya’s own homeworld had done the same, even though it had been largely based around farmers and farming. “Once they can feed themselves, there’s generally a boost in secondary development – orbital and planet-side industrial bases – and expanded medical facilities. I guess that the Prospect Development Corporation isn't fully backed by its government, or they would have made a much higher investment at first...”

He shook his head. It made sense; with so many light years between the United Stars and Prospect, the government wouldn't want to risk such an investment. Far better to allow private industry to handle the job. If nothing else, taxpayers money wouldn't be wasted if the colony failed – although Philip couldn't actually remember a colonising program actually failing. The UN had effectively lost control of three colonies before the Breakaway Wars, and one newly-settled world had turned out to host a virus that loved feasting on human flesh, but most colonies on habitable worlds succeeded according to projections. Colonies on asteroids or Mars-like worlds did sometimes fail, yet most settlement programs tended to avoid such worlds. They were just too expensive to make habitable.

“The Governor seemed to think he could give you orders,” Tanya said. “I’m sure that the council back home is going to have issues with that.”

“They all are going to have issues with it,” Philip said, flatly. “The last thing we need are a few dozen politicians who think they can give the navy orders. That’s something we’re going to have to watch, at least until we have enough ships to cover all of the sector’s inhabited worlds. It would be easy for one world to demand protection at the expense of another.”

He shook his head. In two days, they would re-enter hyperspace and return to Asher Dales. Despite himself, he worried over what might have happened while they were gone. It was a five-day trip back home...he caught himself and smiled. When had he started to think of Asher Dales as home? It wasn’t home, not really. Avalon was home, but Avalon had rejected him. His dismissal from the RAN wouldn't be reversed unless Admiral Morrison managed to destroy his career as effectively as Philip had managed to destroy his own...

And yet, if Admiral Morrison did managed to torpedo his own career, it would be extremely bad for the Commonwealth. What idiot had thought that assigning Admiral Morrison to Cadiz was a good idea? There were times when he felt that the Commonwealth deserved to suffer in the coming war, if only to remind its leaders that complacency had no place in the modern galaxy. Their complacency in the face of a growing threat from the Theocracy had left an idiot barely capable of tying his shoelaces together in command – right where the Theocracy’s first offensive was almost bound to strike. Did they actually want to lose Cadiz?

He snorted. After all the grief Cadiz had given the Commonwealth since it had been annexed, there were probably thousands of soldiers and spacers who’d be quite happy to see the insurrection-torn planet surrendered to the Theocracy. Maybe the Theocracy would choke on them...

...Or maybe they’d bombard the planet from orbit and exterminate the local population. Anything was permissible as long as it was in the service of God...

“Come on,” he said, pushing the dark thoughts aside. “Let’s see if we can find somewhere to drink in this town. And then we’d better get back to orbit before something else decides to go wrong.”

 

Haven't been around for a couple of days its great to be able to catch up. Thanks Chris

 

Chapter Seventeen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“What a stink!”

Philip nodded in agreement. The Death by Stupidity – the name had stuck – stank to high heaven, even though they’d vented the ship completely once they’d removed the bodies and consigned them to rest in hyperspace. God alone knew what the pirate crew had been thinking – some of the ship’s less important components had been literally rotting away – but their own ship would have killed them sooner or later, if Philip and his crew hadn't killed them first. He was starting to wonder if it was worth the effort of taking the Death by Stupidity back to Asher Dales, if only because the ship was a danger to even a trained and experienced crew. On the other hand, a darker part of his mind pointed out, if the trainees could survive the Death by Stupidity, they could survive anything.

They’d towed the Death by Stupidity back into hyperspace before using its own drives to propel it forward, in a loose formation with Dasher. The long hours in hyperspace, Philip had decided, would allow them a chance to start repairs on the pirate ship, even though they might have to drop everything in a hurry and return to the destroyer if another pirate ship showed up. Harmon had argued that they could repair the Death by Stupidity’s weapons first and use her against another pirate ship, but Philip had overruled him. The Death by Stupidity was a death-trap and he wasn't going to allow her to be flown in combat until she had been completely repaired and her more unsafe components replaced from the stockpile they’d brought with them to Asher Dales.

The pirate ship’s bridge was a cramped, uneven affair. Someone – perhaps someone like Quincy – had put the bridge together from a number of different components, leaving it a curious mishmash of consoles that belonged to different makes and models of starships. The helm console looked to have been pulled from an outdated UN-built light cruiser, while the tactical console seemed to have come from the Manchu Dynasty and the commander chair’s consoles seemed to have been put together from scratch. One of the sets of controls on the commander’s armrest had made no sense until Bartley had traced them back to electrodes fitted into the other positions on the bridge. At a flick of a switch, the pirate commander could send hundreds of thousands of volts flowing through one of his men, if the man had displeased him. The belts affixed to their consoles – Philip had assumed that they were there to keep them in place if the artificial gravity failed – seemed designed to ensure that whoever was seated there couldn't leave without the commander’s permission. Philip had heard of navies that practiced corporal punishment, but the pirates seemed to take it to a whole new extreme. Life onboard a pirate ship would be nasty, brutish and short. A single hint of disloyalty and the pirate commander would slaughter his men in job lots.

He bent down and studied the tactical console thoughtfully. Like the Commonwealth’s own designs, it offered a wide range of options for the authorised user – and presumably computer lock-outs to prevent unauthorised users from accessing and deploying the ship’s weapons. The Commonwealth’s designers had often had nightmares over the prospect of someone activating the formidable missile batteries on Commonwealth starships and bombarding Avalon or another planet and insisted on creating proper security measures. At a glance, it was clear that the pirates didn't have such careful controls on their weapons, although they did seem to have built a biometric reader into the tactical console. Or maybe they didn’t bother to use it. There was no way to know.

“They only had a handful of missiles left in their magazines,” Bartley said, when Philip remarked on it. “They were all standard nukes, and all quite outdated. No way to tell where they actually came from, of course. It’s quite possible that they’re dealing with some black colony out along the Rim, trading weapons for supplies from the Human Sphere. Or they might well have come from the Theocracy. The design is primitive, but workable.”

“And probably not top-of-the-line for the Theocracy,” Philip said, ruefully. The missile they’d taken apart hadn't been particularly sophisticated, which was something of a relief. Standard missile warheads included penetration aids as a matter of course, aids that helped it to hit its target while avoiding point defence or being suckered onto a remote drone and expending itself uselessly. But the pirates had never intended to get into a fight with a warship and only a handful of commercial starships would carry point defence. “Pity, that.”

Bartley nodded. No one was entirely sure just how advanced the Theocracy’s standard missile design actually was, which meant that there would be a great many dangers in confronting them when the war finally began. The Commonwealth had built a formidable array of defences into its modern starships, but there was always the danger that the Theocracy – or someone else – had made a genuine breakthrough into counter-ECM techniques that would neglect all of the defences so painstakingly built into the starships. And if that happened, the opening battles of the war were likely to go very badly wrong for the Commonwealth.

It seemed impossible that a heavily-controlled – even oppressed – society could produce anything that was a match for a democracy, but Philip had studied the True Faith – the society that had given birth to the Theocracy after it had been exiled from Earth. They had been obsessed with finding better ways to do things, even things that had been settled for hundreds of years. Indeed, they’d even worked on the early generations of the vortex generator that had opened the gateway to the stars for humanity. There were no current reports of conditions on the surface of Abdullah – apart from reports from defectors – but if they had managed to harness their population’s creative power as thoroughly as their forbearers, they were likely to be far more advanced than their enemies would prefer.

“They mucked up the missile launch tube as well,” Bartley said, as they headed through the hatch – taken from a outdated Marine Landing Craft – and down into the ship’s bowels. The stink was growing stronger and stronger, despite the facemasks they’d drawn from the ship’s supplies. “Can you believe that they could only fire one missile at a time? They couldn't possibly fight a standard missile duel with anyone!”

Philip laughed. Missile salvos broke through enemy defences by weight of numbers and penetration aids. A single missile, no matter how sophisticated, would have real problems flying through even outdated point defence systems to strike its target. And there would probably be no time to fire a second missile before the target’s retaliation blew the pirate craft into flaming debris.

“Lucky for us they were so incompetent,” he agreed. “Can you fix the problem?”

“Not with what we have on hand,” Bartley admitted. “Their missile launch system is largely buggered – I think it was pretty crap even before we mashed it up when we took the ship. I’d be surprised if we even managed to fire one missile before the system failed on us – ideally, I’d like to pull the entire missile launcher unit out and replace it with a more advanced unit. Or I could pull one together from spare parts if you would like, but that would take longer...”

“Maybe a machine shop on Asher Dales would be able to do it,” Philip said. He didn't want to use one of the handful of spare launchers they had to rearm the ex-pirate ship, but he also didn't want to assign Bartley to a long term project that would limit his time on Dasher. “Do you think you could put together a list of specifications and we can see if anyone on the planet can do it?”

“Easily,” Bartley assured him. He led the way into one of the lower holds. “I think this might interest you, sir.”

The hold was dark, illuminated only by a torch Bartley produced from his belt. Philip winced when he saw the rear bulkhead, clearly badly damaged when the Death by Stupidity had been knocked out by his missiles. One of Bartley’s assistants had welded in some sheet metal to keep the ship’s atmosphere within the hull, but it still looked worryingly unsafe. Philip intended to have Bartley and his assistants go over the whole ship in cynical detail before they allowed any untrained recruits loose on her. The last thing they needed was a training accident that made others reluctant to join the navy.

Bartley played the torch over a pile of boxes. The Marines would have broken into a handful of them, just to check that they weren’t carrying anything dangerous, before they allowed the engineers into the hulk. Philip’s eyes followed the light, frowning as he recognised a handful of power cells and other spare parts within the boxes. Bartley stepped closer and pointed the torch at one particular component. It looked like nothing more than a long silver tube, but Philip recognised it at once. Any plasma cannon required a containment coil to hold the charge within the cannon and, unless he missed his guess, he was looking at part of a coil. It wouldn't have many other uses, unless the pirates had gone all the way back to fission-powered ships like the ones that had delivered human settlers to Mars and the outer planets.

“That’s a plasma coil, all right,” Bartley said. “They were in pieces, which is perhaps why the Marines didn't raise the alarm, but it’s a complete set. A good mechanic could put it together within thirty minutes, attach a bottle of charged plasma to the coil, and then it would be ready for use. And there’s no less than twenty of them within the hold.”

Philip shook his head, slowly. Plasma cannons were generally deployed on the ground, against enemy armoured vehicles and aircraft. They tended to be used sparingly, even by the Royal Avalon Marine Corps and its counterparts, if only because the plasma coils could overheat and explode. Philip had once heard of a training accident with a plasma cannon – one later traced back to a piece of faulty equipment – that had wiped out an entire Marine platoon of ten men. An enemy sniper who managed to hit a plasma cannon might well inflict disproportionate casualties upon his target.

But twenty of them would give a light infantry force terrifying punch, as long as the cannons held out. And there was no logical reason for the pirate ship to be carrying them. They could have bolted them to their hull and used them to intimidate merchantmen – even though it was unlikely that they could produce bursts capable of even scorching a warship’s hull – but why store them in their hold? Unless...

He scowled. “Do you know where they were taking them?”

“No way to know,” Bartley said. “I removed a pair of control chips from the cannons and accessed them, but they were completely blank. They’d control the cannon, all right – not much else. And as far as they are concerned, the cannon’s next shot will be its first. They don’t have records that will allow us to determine where they were last used, if at all.”

Philip bent down and examined the coil. It seemed surprisingly delicate for something so dangerous, but it was an illusion. The coil had been designed to control and direct superheated plasma bursts. Plasma cannons weren't known for accuracy, yet a skilled gunner could use one to dominate the battlefield. It could withstand anything he could do to it, probably.

“Take one of the cannons out and see if you can find anything that might tell us where it came from,” he said, although in truth he had little hope of success. Any interstellar power could have manufactured the plasma cannon – and if they wanted to prevent anyone from knowing who had produced it, it would be easy to use a standard design and remove all identifying marks. “And then check them all, when you have a moment, and see if they are in good condition.”

“I’d like to bring a couple of the Marines in on this,” Bartley said. “They can help check the weapons and prepare them for service. I assume you’d want to gift them to Asher Dales?”

“Most of them,” Philip said. The Asher Dales militia, according to Tanya, didn't have anything much heavier than assault rifles. It wasn’t too surprising for an outfit drawn mostly from farmers, but they wouldn't be able to stand up to even a scratch force wearing powered combat armour. Philip knew from reports he’d drawn before leaving Avalon that there were far too many weapons, including combat armour, heading towards renegade forces along the Rim. The pirates probably had access to more firepower than legitimate defence forces. “We can keep three of them for the ships, just in case. A plasma cannon might come in very handy.”

He straightened up. “Is there anything else you’d like to show me?”

“I think you’d better see this,” Bartley said. He led the way through the darkened corridors until they reached another military-grade airlock. It had been burned open by the Marines and left hanging open, the jagged edges of the hatch daring anyone to touch it. “One of my assistants found it only an hour ago.”

The pirate commander’s cabin – or so Philip assumed it to be – was surprisingly mundane. A handful of compartments for clothes, a small selection of weaponry – all missing their charge packs, he noted – and a single computer system mounted against one bulkhead. He could almost sense the presence of the pirate commander, using the room as a place to withdraw from the universe and relax after looting and pillaging a helpless merchantman. Philip shook his head angrily at the odd burst of sentiment. The pirate commanders he’d seen led their crews by being the most bloody-minded vicious sons-of-bitches on their ships, ruling with an iron hand and a perfect readiness to torture or kill any bastard who dared displease them.

“The computer is a modified Sigma-Epsilon-Xavier from the United Stars,” Bartley explained, as he picked up one of its processors. “It wasn't actually connected to the starship’s main computer, probably for security reasons, so we didn't actually look at it until we were making a complete survey of the starship. Take a look at this.”

Philip took the processor and examined it, thoughtfully. It wasn't much larger than his hand, but it could store an entire universe of data, perhaps everything the human race had ever committed to computer storage. One side of the cube seemed to be oddly married, as if it had been exposed to intensive heat. A closer look revealed that there had been a datachip inserted into the processor, a datachip that had self-destructed, presumably at the same time as the suicide implants inside the senior crew’s heads had been triggered, killing them before they could be forced to talk.

“The internal structure has been pretty much wrecked,” Bartley said, “but we did managed to carry out some limited investigations. That’s top-of-the-line military or intelligence gear, sir.”

Philip scowled. He’d suspected as much as soon as he’d seen the plasma cannons. Someone had provided them to the pirates, probably paying them a considerable sum of money to transport them to their destination. Who would have risked using pirates to ship weapons when anyone who could produce the weapons could have shipped them without relying on pirates of dubious integrity? The Theocracy could certainly have used a stealthed destroyer to ship the weapons to Prospect or even Hsu. Why use pirates unless...

He shook his head, angrily. There was no way to know for sure, at least not until they captured a senior pirate alive or found something on the Death by Stupidity that would lead them to the pirate base. They’d have to go through the ship with a fine-toothed comb once they returned to Asher Dales, which might make it useless as a training ship...but then, it would give the recruits practical experience that they couldn't have found elsewhere.

“Inform me if you find anything else like this,” he said, passing the processor back to Bartley. It had to have been supplied by the mysterious person or nation that had provided the weapons – and probably the implants as well. Had the pirates even known that there was no chance of surviving a close encounter with a warship? There had been states that had implanted people, not only against their will, but without their knowledge. “I’m going to return to Dasher.”

“Understood, sir,” Bartley said. “I don’t think we’ll find another one of these on the ship, but we can try.”

***​

“Someone was definitely trying to use pirates to hide their hand,” Philip said, later. They were seated in his cramped cabin, looking at the final inventory from the pirate ship. “Those weapons could have been used to knock over almost any government out here.”

“So they give them to someone who is...displeased with the current state of affairs,” Tanya said, slowly. “Maybe someone like Greg Farnham?”

“Let’s hope not,” Philip said. It was tempting to believe that there had only ever been one shipment – and it had been intercepted – but that was too much to hope for. There had probably been many shipments, each one to a group that felt rebellious. He couldn't be sure that the Theocracy was behind it, yet how many other suspects were there? “Those weapons could go through the militia like a knife through butter.”

He settled back and sighed. “We’ll be back at Asher Dales in a couple of days,” he said. “Once we’re there, we can decide what to do next...”

Tanya smiled. “I have a better idea,” she said. “Why don’t you come camping with me for a day or two. I promise that you’ll love it.”

Philip considered, and then nodded. “Why not?”

 

<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Chapter Eighteen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
“It sounds like you had an eventful voyage.”

“I’m afraid so,” Philip agreed. Tanya’s father had agreed to host the pair of them for dinner, along with George Foster, who was both the elected Sheriff of Asher Dales and CO of its small militia. Philip rather liked him, although he seemed unimpressed with Philip’s exact legal status as commander of the small navy. “Still, any voyage where you dispose of a number of pirates is a good voyage.”

“I can see why you would feel that way,” Foster said. He shook his head. “The worst case I have ever had to deal with was Jim Hendricks, a couple of years ago. He beat his wife until I stepped in and beat the crap out of him. You seem to deal with a worse class of criminal.”

“Pirates are long past any hope of redemption,” Philip said. “I’d be quite happy to trade them for your wife-beater if you’d like.”

Foster chuckled, and then sobered. “I’m a little more worried about the weapons you captured,” he said. “Do you think that the pirate ship dropped weapons off here?”

“I don’t think they did on this particular trip,” Philip said, slowly. “What little navigational data we removed suggested that they didn't spend very long at Asher Dales before they tracked us into hyperspace. They would probably have seen all three destroyers in orbit and kept their distance, at least until we were safely gone.”

“But they could have come earlier,” Foster said, grimly. “We wouldn't have had a prayer of spotting them if they landed in the outback.”

“No,” Philip agreed. “How many groups do you have that might want to overthrow the government?”

“Quite a few people who would prefer that they were in charge,” Barrington commented, flatly. “Apart from that...I don’t see anyone who would be prepared to resort to armed insurrection. They’d never be able to govern properly.”

“I don’t think they’d worry about governing properly,” Philip pointed out. “Give a few dozen men modern armoured combat suits and weapons and they’d be able to dominate the entire planet. You’d have the choice between doing as they said and having your heads kicked in – it's happened before and it will probably happen again.”

They exchanged nods. Humanity’s early years of interstellar expansion had been chaotic, despite the UN trying to keep the whole process under control. Claim-jumpers had settled worlds before the official colonists arrived and refused to move, small colonies had been taken over by invaders from other colonies and some colony efforts had been sabotaged by their enemies on Earth. And on Asher Dales, hundreds of light years from the nearest major interstellar power, there was no one who would intervene in their favour. They might feel that a coup on Asher Dales was an internal affair, or they might demand a stiff price that would end the planet’s independence.

Perhaps that was what the Theocracy had in mind, Philip wondered. Trigger off a series of coups by outcast groups, secure in the knowledge that the new rulers would prove to be incredibly unpopular very quickly – and then move in under the guise of restoring order. Or perhaps they merely wanted compliant local authorities to provide a fig-leaf for stationing a Theocracy naval station in the system. Or...there were just too many possibilities.

“We’ll consider the issue and practice with the new weapons you brought us,” Barrington said, finally. “What do you intend to do in the next few weeks?”

Philip smiled to himself. “The records we did capture from the pirate ship suggested that it set out from Ashfall,” he said. Ashfall wasn't actually far from Asher Dales as the starship flew; indeed, he’d even considered dog-legging through Ashfall on their return journey from Prospect. Only the presence of the Foolish Genius had deterred him from altering course. “I think we’d better check out the system, just in case.”

Barrington frowned. “Ashfall didn't contribute to the defence force,” he said, slowly, “but I can't see them supporting pirates. They’re in enough trouble with their planet’s...unique climate to risk embroiling themselves with us.”

“Or maybe they think they have no choice, but to work with the pirates,” Tanya said. She had been oddly subdued during the dinner. “Ashfall isn't exactly the most habitable world in the galaxy.”

“Then they should pack up and move here,” Foster growled. “We could do with an extra twenty thousand settlers – and we don’t have any goddamned ash falling from the skies.”

“They’re stubborn,” Barrington pointed out, mildly. “They may have gotten into trouble and found themselves unable to call for help.”

“Farnham is going to ask why we are helping them when they have paid nothing to us,” Tanya said, shortly. “What are we going to tell him?”

“That we’re good neighbours,” Barrington said, flatly. “I won’t have it said that we refused to help our neighbours when they needed us.”

Philip nodded in agreement. Barrington was right; there might have been no legal obligation to go to Ashfall’s aid – assuming that Ashfall was in danger – but it was the right thing to do. Who knew – maybe Ashfall would be able to return the favour one day.

“I hope that you enjoy your hike,” Barrington said, changing the subject. “Just...try to stay out of sight, why don’t you?”

“And remember to go armed,” Foster added. “There are some nasty creatures out there.”

Yeah, Philip thought, in the privacy of his own head, and some of them walk on two legs.

***​

They set out the following morning, taking a groundcar from Landing City and heading north, along a road that had been created by burning a path along the ground and then paving it with tarmac. Philip studied it with a certain amount of distaste. The foliage along the road provided far too many places for ambushes, a legacy of his time on Cadiz. It was quite possible to ambush someone in interstellar space, of course, but it was less likely to cause collateral damage. Tanya seemed to take it in her stride, however, and Philip forced himself to relax. They weren't in the middle of a danger zone.

The road turned to grass as they kept driving north, leaving the main network of roads on the planetary surface behind. From what Tanya said as the driving grew rougher, the original colonists had intended to construct the roads out of perfectly natural materials, but there just hadn't been the money for such an expensive project. Avalon could and did produce roads made of genetically-engineered grass, yet Avalon was the heart of the wealthiest interstellar society for light years. And besides, Avalon’s citizens often flew aircars rather than anything that skimmed along the ground. They could afford to be flashy. Colonists on newly-colonised worlds had to settle for reliability.

He stopped thinking about it as Tanya drove them up towards the mountains, and then stopped at the bottom of a rocky path leading upwards. The view was astonishing, even to a person who had watched gas giants spinning in the inky darkness of space, a reminder that planetary surfaces provided more displays of the wonders of the natural world. It was easy to see the contrast between the natural ecology and the plants transplanted from Earth as part of the settlement program. Earth’s plants and animals tended to be far tougher than the local biology and often took it over within a surprisingly short period. But then, evolution was the survival of the fittest – and Earth had produced the galaxy’s only known sentient race.

“Take your rucksack, rifle and pistol,” Tanya said, as she pulled on her own bag. She hadn't trained like a Marine – or one of the commandos who were reputed to be even tougher than Marines – but she knew how to pack. “And be careful where you put your feet. Many of the beasties up here seem to think that humans are just another species of prey.”

Philip nodded, checking the rifle out of habit. It was a basic model, mass-produced for settler worlds – and worlds that didn't have restrictions on civilian possession of weapons. He’d checked it before they left, confirming that it was a familiar, rugged and very reliable design, rather than one of the glittering weapons produced for idiots with too much money in their wallets. A wise man, he’d commented at the time, would sooner have reliability than a flashy design, although there were times when he wondered if the Naval Design Board was entirely composed of fools.

“What about the car?” He asked. “Should we leave it here?”

“There’s no one around for at least forty miles,” Tanya said. She paused. “Unless one of the bushmen came this way, of course. Don’t worry about it. It’ll be here when we get back.”

She turned and led the way up the hill. Philip found it harder going than he expected, although he was damned if he was going to admit defeat first. It wasn't as steep as it had looked, but the rocks were often slippery and he had to be very careful where he put his feet. One small tuft of native grass – or so he’d thought – had started to scuttle away as soon as he stopped near it, running on a hundred tiny legs. He’d felt a shiver running down his spine as soon as he saw the creature, just before it vanished into the undergrowth.

“We don’t really have a record of that creature yet,” Tanya said. There was an odd note in her voice, almost wistful. “Back when I was a kid, there were a number of older men who considered themselves naturalists; they wandered the fields and hills, looking for new kinds of creature to catalogue. We used to refuse to help them because we wanted the mystery to last as long as possible...”

She shook her head. “We were just dumb children then,” she added. “The thought that a list of what we might encounter in the forests meant nothing to us. Even some of the horrific tales told about humanoid creatures in the mountains were more thrilling than serious – we used to tell them around the campfires. My old scout leader swore until his dying day that he’d seen a humanoid creature during a solo climb up Mount Bastard, although I don’t think anyone actually believed him.”

“I’m not surprised,” Philip said. He’d stopped, just behind her, and turned to look back the way they’d came. The mist was floating in from the north, leaving the mountains poking out of a sea of purple fog. He could feel the wind changing rapidly, almost as if it was daring them to proceed any further. “A humanoid creature...I don’t think there are any, outside the zoos and gardens in the Human Sphere.”

“There are plenty of tales,” Tanya agreed, slowly. “Our children are going to grow up believing in them, until the time comes to put aside childish dreams and become an adult. And isn't that something tragic about humanity?”

Philip said nothing. There were worlds that had been founded on political, economic or religious tenets, each one convinced that they knew the only path to true happiness. And most of them had failed, either by being forced to adapt to new circumstances or through bloody upheavals as the new generations rebelled against their parents rejection of higher technology. It was far harder to remain steeled against modern medicine when the lack of it killed almost as brutally as interstellar accidents. Even the Theocracy, despite its prevailing religious belief, was capable of adapting and reaction to new circumstances.

He shook his head sadly as Tanya resumed the climb, heading upwards into the mist. The Theocracy hadn’t always been bent on galactic conquest; hell, it’s original devotees had been good people, precisely the sort of people who should have enriched their host society beyond the dreams of avarice. But they’d been persecuted and hounded until they’d set themselves the task of crushing all other religions, to spread their faith across the galaxy. And if the Commonwealth fell, the Theocracy would be able to storm towards the Core Worlds and even Earth itself.

“And there was the story of ET, the lonely alien being,” Tanya said, as he caught up with her. The path was growing steeper now; one slip might send them plunging down towards the rushing stream below. “And of how he looked up at the stars and realised that they were all humanity’s, that his race would never be able to complete. And so he died of despair.”

Philip nodded. The story was a familiar one; indeed, it might well have predated humanity’s rise into interstellar space. But back then, everyone had believed that intelligent life would be common and it would probably find Earth before Earth found them. Some of the old video entertainments from that era had survived, mainly for comedic value. Philip had watched many of them during his training at Piker’s Peak, even though he hadn't been able to understand why any intelligent race would fly giant flying saucers into Earth’s atmosphere when they could simply drop rocks from orbit.

“Here,” Tanya said, changing the subject. “This is what I wanted you to see.”

Philip followed her gaze. Ahead of them, the path ran down into a hollow within the mountain, a small valley filled with trees and shrubs. The air felt heavier somehow as he followed her down into the valley, realising that humanity had rarely touched the hidden valley – if at all. Giant birds flew overhead, cawing in alarm as they spied the human intruders, before vanishing back to their nests within the trees. A handful of rabbits – the curse of interstellar colonisation efforts – hopped neatly away, even though they didn't seem to be scared. But then, they would never have seen humanity within the valley.

“I climbed up here once after a row I had with my father,” Tanya admitted. “I just took the truck and drove at random, heedless of where I went. I was so angry at the universe that I had the idea I could just walk up the hill and vanish into the mists, but...I stumbled into this place instead. Don’t you think it’s remarkable?”

Philip nodded, shaking his head in awe. The valley was almost a self-contained ecosystem of its own, largely isolated from the rest of the region. Indeed, he suspected that even its weather was separate from the rest of the mountains. A whole army could hide up here, living off the land, and no one down below would ever suspect a thing. If they had lost settlers – maybe indebted convicts who didn't want to help build a colony world they couldn't really share – they could be living up here, isolated from the rest of Asher Dales.

Tanya walked around briskly, setting up the tent in a series of easy steps, while Philip started to open the containers of food. They could have hunted for their meals, but he was starting to understand why Tanya didn't want to disturb the tranquillity of their surroundings. There was something about the valley that was completely relaxing, allowing him to forget his woes and just relax completely. Even the processed food – Tanya had brought a handful of self-heating containers - tasted nice. The tea they made with water from a nearby stream was even better.

“I tried to fix this in my memory before I departed for Avalon,” Tanya said. “I knew that there was nowhere like this in the Commonwealth, or at least nowhere I’d be allowed to visit.”

Philip reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. She nestled against him, relaxing slightly. “Thank you for coming,” she said, slowly. “Tam...Tam has been sending me flowers and pressing me to set the date.”

“I see,” Philip said, tightly. “Why don't you just tell him to forget the whole idea? You don’t have to marry him...”

“But far too many people think that it would be a great idea,” Tanya admitted. “Even my father thinks it would ensure that his descendents maintain control of Asher Dales.”

She looked up at him, suddenly. “Do you think that I could enlist in your navy?” She asked, mock-seriously. “Maybe that would discourage Tam from chasing me.”

Philip laughed. “You could always get married to someone else instead,” he pointed out. “Or do you need your father’s permission to get married?”

“Not legally, no,” Tanya said. “But if the parents really disapproved, they could just cut the happy couple out of their wills. It could be disastrous for a young farming couple out here.”

“But you’re not a farmer,” Philip said. “You won’t be unable to practice as a lawyer if your father disinherits you.”

“But they’d certainly take my liaison position,” Tanya said, “unless...”

She looked up at him. “Father...wants me to make my own choice,” she said. “Perhaps I could convince him to disinherit me violently enough that no one could claim that he hadn't cut me out of his life.”

“I think that would tear him apart inside,” Philip said, after a moment. Who’d want to be an aristocrat when it meant having to use your children as game pieces? “And I think you should just tell him that you’re not interested and that if he tries to harass you again, you’ll swear out a complaint against him.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think you should let him drag it out,” he added. “There has to be someone else willing to marry him.”

“He’s an ass,” Tanya said. “I really wish you were right.”

She leaned over to him and it was suddenly the easiest thing in the world to kiss her. He pulled her over and onto him, suddenly kissing with a passion he hadn't felt since he’d been a teenager. It was a bad idea, part of his mind warned him, but the rest of him didn't care. The universe could wait for a while, while they found what happiness they could.

 

Yeah baby! They are going to get FREAKY!

 

Chapter Nineteen<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“I’m sure there must have been a riskier way to train cadets,” Captain Thomas Nonagon said, as he studied the Death By Stupidity, “but I don't think I can think of anything more qualified.”

Philip smiled. “As long as the ship remains pressurised, I’m sure they’ll be fine,” he said. It would be a few weeks before they allowed cadets loose on the former pirate ship, no matter how experienced they’d been before they signed up with the tiny navy. The engineers would go over the ship in cynical detail beforehand, gaining all sorts of experience that might come in handy for the future. “How are the cadets looking, by the way?”

Nonagon dropped a datachip in front of him, smiling thinly. “We have about fifty cadets now, all trying to train from scratch,” he said. “The ones who do have space experience have been pressed into service training their less fortunate companions. A handful have already washed out, I’m afraid, but the remainder should have the right stuff. Of course, many would have been rejected for Piker’s Peak back home…”

Philip glanced down at the datachip. Well begun was half done, he’d been taught, and they’d started keeping files on the cadets from the beginning. He didn’t have much use for bureaucracy – and intended to cut as much of it as possible out of the newly-formed navy – but there were some details that had to be recorded carefully. Medical histories, training, prior experience…they would all have to be taken into account when the time came to hand out positions on the training ship. And perhaps a handful of Marines to support the cadets when they started to panic on the captured ship. Philip had been far better trained than any of the Asher Dale cadets when he’d first served on a training ship and the experience was one he still regarded with a mixture of horror, relief and excitement.

“We’ll give them all a chance,” he said. It seemed to be a rule that military forces developed tighter rules on personnel selection when they had a surfeit of recruits, but Asher Dales wouldn’t be producing more than a few hundred at most – at least as long as there was free land for new homesteaders. “Is there anyone we should watch carefully?”

“Only one guy who suffers from manic depression,” Nonagon admitted. “He seems to know what needs to be done, at least in theory, but he verges between being delighted to serve as a cadet to grumbling. But then, he could be putting on an act, of course.”

“Go with your gut,” Philip said, flatly. “If he’s a problem, get rid of him.”

He tapped a control and the star chart of the sector appeared in front of them. “I’m taking Dasher to Ashfall,” he said, shortly. “We need to know what’s going on there – if they’re under the control of a pirate force, directly supporting a pirate force, or even if they’re completely innocent. I want you to remain here; when Dancer returns, you can escort the Foolish Genius to Haven with my small band of thugs onboard. Keep a sharp eye out for enemy action…”

“Of course, sir,” Nonagon said. His voice didn’t betray any resentment at having to remain at Asher Dales for another week, maybe longer. “I do wish that there was a better way to get the shipyard we need than blackmail.”

Philip shrugged. Quincy had to have been up to something shady, or he would never have risked his business – to say nothing of his freedom. The only motive Philip could believe was that he’d been supplying ships to pirates, perhaps even to Theocracy raiders. He’d wrestled with his conscience long enough to convince himself that taking Quincy and his shipyard to Asher Dales would remove all chance of the pirates continuing to use the establishment. And if Quincy refused, he’d drop a tip to the Commonwealth’s authorities and let them handle the used-starship dealer.

“We’re too broke to have principles,” he said, lightly. “Besides, he did try to cheat us.”

He shook his head before Nonagon could say anything else. “He may run for it instead,” he added. “I don’t think that we are going to be squeezing him too hard.”

“Maybe,” Nonagon said. He still sounded doubtful. “And while you’re gone, I’ll try to keep the cadets from killing themselves and their instructors.”

“Best of luck,” Philip said, dryly. “Remember – we need as many of them as we can get.”

They discussed a few other minor matters, and then parted. Philip headed for the shuttle back to his ship, taking the time to inspect Nonagon’s ship along the way. The next meeting was going to be far harder than merely checking in with a very capable subordinate. In fact, it looked to be rather awkward.

***​

Tanya was perfectly restrained until they reached Philip’s cabin, whereupon she pushed him inside and kissed him as hard as she could. Philip found himself kissing her back with alarming passion, silently cursing the sadists who had designed the ship’s cabins. The small bunk beds in the compartments assigned to the ship’s junior officers would be even more of a deterrent, even though young officers and men still found time for relationships while they were off-duty. It happened, and as long as they didn’t break any serious regulations or render themselves unfit for duty, senior staff tended to turn a blind eye.

Their relationship had shocked him, even though part of him had dared to hope that she’d wanted him to go climbing with her so they would be alone together. She’d surprised him that afternoon, and on the following two days before they’d scrambled down from the mountain, recovered their vehicle and driven back to Landing City. There had been a quiet desperation in her love-making that had torn at his heart, even as his body had been reminding him of how long it had been since he had had a woman. The longevity treatments that had been spliced into his genetic code made him as energetic as a man half his age – and were a grim reminder that he would almost certainly outlive her. Tanya might have had some rejuvenation treatments while she’d been on Avalon, but Asher Dales couldn’t afford the kind of medical establishment that allowed long-term life prolonging treatments.

Afterwards, he found himself lying on his back, staring up at her. Her bare breasts seemed to bobble provokingly in front of him, drawing his attention inwards and sending signals down to her groin. A faint red mark showed where he’d bitten her in passion, but it was fading away into the paleness of her skin. She didn’t have any marks where she’d worn her comfortable, rather than flashy, underwear, he noted absently. Tanya seemed to be more practical-minded than some young midshipwomen he’d known while he’d been on his first deployment. They generally learned better by the end of their first cruise.

And yet…part of him was astonished at how far he’d allowed it to go. He was ****ing the daughter of the planet’s leader, for crying out loud! And said daughter was semi-engaged to one of the more powerful young men on the planet, who would no doubt make a terrible fuss if he found out that his young bride wasn't a virgin. There were some backward planets that placed a high premium on female virginity, which had always struck him as odd; after all, they also thought highly of young men who had lost their virginity outside marriage. It was utterly absurd, and modern technology should have liberated the human race from such outdated conceits, but it was very real. Humans never seemed to become more intelligent, no matter how many worlds they claimed.

Perhaps I should challenge Tam to a duel, he thought, absently. He was needed on the bridge – it was a scant few hours before departure – but part of him wanted to remain on his bed. One finger rose, almost of its own accord, until it was touching her breast and gently circling her rose-tipped nipple. It hardened and he had to hold himself back from pulling her to his mouth. There really wasn't time for another round – and they had to have a talk. And that wasn't going to go down well at all.

Did he love her? He was honest enough with himself to admit that he didn’t know. Tanya was attractive, and fun, but was that the recipe for lifelong happiness together? She had been brought up in a culture that was just close enough to Avalon’s to make the differences rather more unsettling than they would be in a more distant culture. No one on Avalon would have batted an eyelid at anything done between consenting adults in private – it certainly couldn’t be considered a legal crime unless minors or non-consenting adults were involved – but he had a feelings that the rules were different on Asher Dales. And yet even the Theocracy, which had strict rules on preventing male-female interaction outside marriage, had problems keeping horny boys and girls apart. Asher Dales probably ignored it unless it was too blatant to ignore. After all, Barrington hadn’t raised any objection to them climbing a mountain on their own.

And it doesn’t really matter about her if you were offered a chance at reinstatement, does it? Part of his mind mocked. He did want to return to the RAN in triumph – and, knowing Admiral Morrison as he did, it would only be a matter of time before he screwed up so badly that even his political patrons would throw him to the wolves. Philip doubted that they’d be able to turn him into a scapegoat fast enough to avoid blame for whatever the Admiral had ****ed up, but they did have vast amounts of political power. Not that it really mattered, did it? And what would you say to her if you left her and Asher Dales forever?

Tanya gasped as he pressed her nipple, and then tried to sit up. It wasn't easy in the bunk, which had only really been designed for one occupant. But he did have to try. He cleared his throat and instantly regretted it, feeling weak and indecisive. He’d faced pirates without a qualm, but having a serious talk with a girl seemed impossible. Women thought that they owned you the moment you went to bed with them…

“We need to talk,” he said, and kept his eyes firmly fixed on her face. It was tempting to drop his gaze to her hardening nipples, but he didn’t want to be distracted. “We can’t share a cabin while we’re away from Asher Dales.”

Tanya looked back at him, evenly. Was that a hint of hurt in her eyes? Or was she merely enjoying herself with no regard for the future? It was quite possible that she’d seduced him in the hope that word would get back to Tam and he’d do something stupid, so stupid that even his father couldn’t save him from the hangman.

“Right,” she said, finally. She caught his hand with hers and pushed it away from her breast. “And why can’t we live together on your ship?”

Philip wanted to sigh, but somehow he restrained himself. “There are…issues with commanding officers having relationships onboard their ships,” he said, which was true enough. It wasn't technically against regulations for Captains to sail with their families, but he’d never heard of a single example in the RAN’s long history. Admirals did tend to move their families to the worlds where their fleets were based, but that wasn't quite the same. Besides, far too many wives of senior officers thought that their husband’s rank also belonged to them. “I cannot have a relationship while my crew are unable to have relationships themselves.”

“At least seven of your crewmen have already formed attachments to girls on the surface,” Tanya said, frostily. “And your regulations against fraternisation only apply to officers and crewmen onboard your ships. I checked. I’m still a civilian.”

“Yes, but…” Tanya squeezed her hips and he gasped, distracted for a long moment. “It’s setting a bad example, love, and I can’t risk it, not now. Even in the RAN, it would be considered bad form – and out here there isn’t the same support structure that I would enjoy back home…”

“And so you want us to be formal while we’re flying through space,” Tanya said, flatly. “And there I was thinking we could enjoy ourselves in the long hours in hyperspace.”

Philip flushed. He had too many things to do while in hyperspace, but Tanya – who had no duties onboard Dasher – would have become bored very quickly. There was always the vast library of books and entertainment videos stored on the ship’s mainframe, yet there were people who just couldn’t concentrate on them for long. Speaking for himself, he couldn’t understand it. He’d loved the chance to relax while they’d been climbing up the mountain.

“It isn’t your fault,” Philip assured her, quickly. Too quickly; she pulled herself off him and slid her legs over the side of the bunk. She picked up her bra and panties and pulled them on in quick, sudden motions. “I can’t…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tanya said, savagely. “I know exactly what you mean. Men are all the same.”

She finished pulling on her clothes and stormed out of the cabin. Philip watched her go, and then shook his head to himself. It always felt bad when a girl left him, even if she came back later; he’d never been able to attract anyone permanently. But then, if he had, would he have left Avalon and gone to Asher Dales?

That’s enough ****ing self-pity, he thought to himself, as he headed over to the tiny fresher. There was enough fresh water, at least; capturing a comet had been a day’s work for a single freighter, which had melted down the ice and transferred it to the destroyers. Dasher’s onboard recycling plant would ensure that the crew could take as many watery showers as they liked, even though a small percentage of water was lost on every cycle. He washed himself down quickly, switched to sonic pulses to dry himself thoroughly, and then pulled on his uniform. Departure was in only three hours, after all, and there were a great many things he had to do before then.

He tried to tell himself not to worry about Tanya, but his mind refused to listen. Whatever he really felt about her, he did care for her – and he didn’t want to see her hurt.

***​

“Take us out,” he ordered, quietly. “Open the vortex as soon as we are away from the planet.”

“Aye, sir,” the helmsman said.

Dasher hummed quietly as she slid out of orbit, all of her components working at maximum efficiency. Philip was pleased; Bartley’s last report had made it clear that the small destroyer was almost as good as new. But then, there was no such thing as planned obsolescence when it came to starships, not when hull metal was so expensive. They could be swapping out older components for the next five hundred years if necessary.

“Vortex generator online,” the helmsman said, seven minutes later. “Opening the vortex…now!”

Space twisted in front of Dasher, opening up into a single funnel that seemed to rend and tear at the boundaries of normal space. The eerie lights of hyperspace seemed to reach out for them, just as his stomach twisted with the odd sensation caused by entry into the higher dimension. Dasher seemed to shiver as she passed through the vortex and into hyperspace, her sensors already searching frantically for prowling pirates or raiders. There had only ever been a handful of interceptions upon entire into hyperspace, in all of humanity’s long history, but taking precautions always paid off in the long run. Besides, a starship – even a battleship – was frighteningly vulnerable in the first few minutes after entering hyperspace.

“Course laid in, sir,” the helmsman said. He paused, just for a moment. “There are signs of a major energy storm, barely several million kilometres from us,” he added. “Request permission to alter course to evade the storm?”

“Permission granted,” Philip said. Only a fool would take a starship through an energy storm. Every spaceport seemed to have at least one grizzled old sot who claimed to have been the sole survivor of a voyage through an energy storm, but it was far more likely that the starship would be utterly destroyed, lost without hands. “Take us well around its position.”

He watched dispassionately as the display updated, revealing the storm’s presence in hyperspace. It actually seemed to be drifting towards Asher Dales, which would make life interesting for anyone who tried to reach the system while the storm was still raging. No one knew for sure what happened when a starship tried to open a vortex into the teeth of an energy storm, if only because there had been a slight shortage of volunteers willing to fly the ships. Dancer might end up returning to normal space outside the system and waiting for the storm to blow over, or head onwards before it fell back into hyperspace.

“Course laid in, sir,” the helmsman said, again. “Main drives functioning at full capacity. Hyperspace turbulence minimal, but higher energy discharges from the presence of the storm. Estimated time of arrival at Ashfall: three days, seven hours.”

“Good,” Philip said. The storm was likely to be a bother, but they would be able to evade the worst of it – he hoped. Very few stories about close encounters with storms suggested that the starship had a hope in hell of surviving. “Take us out, and then prepare for a series of drills. I want to be ready for anything by the time we reach Ashfall.”

“Of course, sir,” Harmon said. “Let’s just hope that they’re not ready for us.”

 

<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Chapter Twenty<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
Ashfall had looked a promising world for settlement when it had first been discovered, according to the files that Tanya had downloaded into Dasher’s databanks before they left. It had had a remarkably similar appearance to Earth, save only for the fact that unfrozen water covered barely a tenth of the world. There was no reason why the planet’s settlers couldn’t create a road that ran all of the way around their planet, or even march entire armies from place to place without needing to rely on water transport. It hadn’t been until the first settlers had arrived that they’d realised that the remarkably pretty world had a very nasty sting in the tail.

The world was orbited by a moon over two-thirds the size of the planet, far larger than the moon that had dominated Earth’s night sky and lured humanity onwards, out into space. It created monstrous tidal forces between the planet and its moon, forces that had literally pulled mountains up out of the ground – and a large number of those mountains were volcanoes. Unluckily for the settlers, each planetary month saw at least a quarter of those volcanoes erupting into the sky, blasting ash into the upper atmosphere. The ash then fell on the ground, where it was broken down by the planet’s unique ecology; indeed, one of the later researchers had even wondered if the planet’s ecology was truly natural. Evolution had produced some remarkable surprises, he’d noted in his log, but surely it had had a helping hand on Ashfall.

It hadn’t really helped the original settlers, who’d come out of stasis tubes to discover that their livestock found it incredibly difficult to survive on their new homeworld. They’d brought plants, of course, but unlike most other worlds in the Human Sphere, plants from Earth simply couldn’t survive very long on Ashfall. Luckily, they’d been able to eat some of the local vegetation, yet it hadn’t been enough to ensure a balanced diet. The development corporation had given it up as a bad job and abandoned the few thousand settlers to their own devices. Philip wasn't too surprised at their callous attitude. The investors were hundreds of light years away in nice safe systems, only really concerned about making a profit on their investments.

“Reaching pre-selected coordinates,” the helmsman reported. “Vortex generator is online and ready to take us out of hyperspace.”

Philip smiled, tartly. After the four-day trip, with uncomfortable silences between him and Tanya, any form of action was welcome. And a quick look at the planet’s file had convinced him that the settlers probably weren't helping the pirates of their own free will. Their world was a tough place to live and it had bred an equally tough group of citizens. The pirates either had a base elsewhere in the system, or they were forcing the locals to cooperate by force.

Or they have some way of holding the population in check, he reminded himself. Ashfall would hardly be the first colony to be extensively dependent on technology to survive. The pirates might be their only source of technology. He pushed the thought aside as the vortex generator started to open the gateway to normal space. His chest lurched again as Dasher returned to normality and drifted out into empty space.

“Stealth systems online, sir,” Harmon reported. “There’s no sign that we have been detected, or that there’s anything to do the detecting.”

“Keep alert,” Philip ordered. In the Commonwealth, with remote passive sensor platforms scattered everywhere, it would be impossible to open up a vortex without being detected in short order. Ashfall didn't have anything like the technological base required to produce such sensitive detectors, which meant that – in theory – their arrival should have been unobserved. “We don’t want any nasty surprises.”

No one had bothered to survey the remainder of the Ashfall System after the planetary colonising effort had ended so disastrously for the investors. Dasher drifted within an asteroid field, every sensor straining to pick out the presence of planets and spacecraft within the system. Even time-delayed information could be useful, but there was almost nothing manmade at all. A single navigational beacon chiming away in orbit around the gas giant seemed oddly isolated against the barrenness of the system. It had little to recommend it for formal colonisation, apart from Ashfall itself. The Commonwealth probably wouldn't be interested in mining the gas giant if there was no planet-based economy to provide a ready market for processed food.

“The beacon reads out as a fairly standard claim marker,” Harmon said, after a long moment. “I could query the beacon and see who placed it there, but that would risk exposing us to detection.”

“Leave it,” Philip said. It was a safe guess that the pirates – if there were pirates in the system – would have ignored the legitimate claim on the gas giant; hell, it was quite possible that claim-jumpers would also have arrived within the system. “Take us towards Ashfall, slowly and calmly. We want to remain undetected as long as possible.”

He scowled as he settled back in his command chair. The RAN took a fairly mild view of selling armed starships – and the supplies of weapons to go with them – to anyone outside the Theocracy and a handful of other unfriendly states, but they drew the line at modern cloaking technology. They had been offered some systems that would provide limited protection against the most complex and advanced sensor systems the pirates were likely to possess, yet they’d still been too expensive for Tanya’s budget. In hindsight, Philip suspected that they should have purchased at least one set of cloaking equipment, but that wouldn't help them now. They’d have to rely on the destroyer’s stealth systems – and they were formidable.

Active sensors had one great weakness as far as the defenders were concerned; they could be picked out by an encroaching enemy, long before the radar pulses returned to the defender’s sensor arrays. Passive sensors were far less likely to be detected at long range, because they emitted no betraying radiation, but they did depend on the attacker emitting some betraying radiation of his own. A heavily-defended world like Avalon would have been incredibly difficult for Dasher to approach under stealth, yet Ashfall had almost no sensor arrays at all. Slowly, her passive sensors watching carefully for a single enemy contact, she slid closer to the planet.

Philip forced himself to remain calm, knowing that the crew would take their cue from their commander. As a young lieutenant, he had taken temporary command of a stealthed ship and waited in a far more dangerous system until the enemy fleet had finally come into view. It had been an exercise, but it had still been risky; in space, it was customary to assume that a stealthed ship was up to no good and open fire without warning. Ashfall was showing no signs of hostile intent, yet there was no way to know for sure. He could feel the tension on the bridge rising; his men spoke in hushed voices, even though there was no chance of their voices being heard across the vacuum of space. The sense of being hunted was overwhelming...

“Contact,” Harmon sang out. A red icon flared to life on the display. “One unknown vessel in orbit around Ashfall. It’s running a basic sensor sweep, but they don’t seem to have locked onto us. I think that they’re probably unaware of our presence.”

“Let's hope so,” Philip said, studying the enemy craft. “Launch the two remote platforms and nudge them as close as you dare to the pirate ship.”

Dasher shivered as the two remote platforms were launched from her forward missile launchers. The platforms were masterpieces of improvisation, built from a handful of scavenged kits and placed within decoy missile units. They weren't as stealthy or as capable as the top-of-the-line equipment produced for the RAN, but he would bet his life that they were better than anything the pirates were likely to produce for themselves. Hell. the pirates were probably even unaware of their existence. Nothing he’d seen in years of pirate-chasing had convinced him that any of them realised that there was a more subtle approach to warfare than simply sneaking up on one’s intended prey and opening fire from point-blank range.

The hours ticked by slowly as the two platforms drifted into orbit, alarmingly close to the pirate ship. Philip was almost disappointed with the ease with which their control units nudged them closer, relaying their findings back to their mothership via undetectable laser communications beams. He would have expected a harder task in sneaking up on the pirate ships, but it seemed that the pirates weren't paying much attention to their operational security.

“Interesting,” Harmon mused. “I have an ID on the ship’s class; she’s a modified Moscow-class light cruiser from the Breakaway Wars. UN-built; designed more for heavy firepower than for speed or stealth. The sensor waves I’m picking up from here, however, appear to be from a standard commercial kit – they didn't come from a military unit, or their senior chiefs are bloody idiots and don’t know how to use it properly.”

Philip chuckled. “It hardly matters,” he said. “Just how tough is our newfound friend?”

“Uncertain,” Harmon said. “If she has UN-designed missiles from that era, we could take her easily, but...they’ll probably have stuffed her full of the best missiles they could buy from one of the smaller states or black colonies. And if her crew is actually bright enough to put their pants on before their trousers...”

“They might be able to last long enough to blow us out of space.” Philip concluded. With warships, there was a general rule; the larger the ship, the more damage it could absorb before it exploded or staggered to a halt. Dasher had an experienced crew, but she couldn’t survive a missile duel with the pirate ship. It didn't leave them many options for engaging the ship. “Can you pull any of her transmissions from within her hull?”

“No, sir,” Harmon said, after a moment. “They’re at least bright enough to shield their internal transmissions, if nothing else.”

A new icon flared up in front of the display. “Ah,” he said. “Second contact...hellfire!”

Philip leaned forward. “Report,” he snapped. “What is it?”

“A Mark-III Orbital Bombardment System,” Harmon said. “She’s not precisely stealthed, but she was out of detection range until she cleared the planet. The UN built her to keep rebellious colonials under control, sir; give her a few moments and she could wipe out the settlers once and for all.”

Philip swallowed a curse. He’d been halfway through developing a plan to take out the light cruiser, one he was fairly sure would succeed without Dasher taking serious damage, but the OBS added a nasty wrinkle to the whole tactical picture. If he’d been a ruthless mother****er of a pirate, he would have keyed a dead man’s hand program into the OBS, ordering it to bombard the planet if anything happened to the light cruiser. They’d have to take the OBS out first, before turning on the pirate ship – and that would tip off the pirates that Dasher was present in the system. Even the most incompetent crew in the galaxy wouldn't miss the explosion as their planetary blackmail threat went up in a flash of exploding plasma.

Unless...

An idea was flickering through his mind. It might work, and yet...it didn’t offer good odds of survival for the person he picked to deal with the OBS system. He’d sent people to their deaths before, but it never got easier – and he’d never sent anyone into a situation where he expected him to die. He hesitated, on the brink of deciding to carry out the risky part of his mission himself, before reminding himself sharply that his place was on the bridge. Someone else would have to go in his place.

He keyed his console and opened a channel to Marine Country. “Top,” he said, without preamble, “I need a volunteer for a very dangerous mission.”

“Hell, sir, I'm offended that you even feel that you need to ask,” Kratman said. Philip rolled his eyes. Marines seemed to enjoy trying to outdo one another at gung-ho, or charging an enemy position in the certain knowledge that it was suicide. “I volunteer and so does my entire platoon. What do you want me to do?”

“I’m going to tell you how to do your job,” Philip said, not without a hint of irritation at himself. It was an unwritten law in the RAN that senior officers set objectives; junior officers, the people on the front line, got to decide how to carry out the mission to achieve their objectives. Marines, existing in a different sphere to most of the spacers they shared ships with, were not supposed to be under the direct command of a spacer. “One volunteer helps us to target the OBS; the remainder head down into the planet’s atmosphere and try to link up with the settlers.”

“I see,” Kratman said. He sounded...irked. The mission to take out the OBS would have been a fitting challenge for a man who’d claimed to have left the RAMC because he was board, but he had to stay with his men. “Medley is the best damned pilot in the corps, so I’m putting his name forward for the volunteer mission. The rest of us will armour up and get ready for an injection into the ****-storm on the ground.”

Philip cut the connection and studied the map produced by the two remotes. Ashfall, according to the records, had one main city, a largely-underground construction at the north pole. The geographic records claimed that the poles were the places where the least ash fell from the skies, although there was enough to make eking out an existence a difficult and dangerous task. If there was anywhere where the pirates would have set up a headquarters on the ground, Bravo City was it. The Marines would have to get down on the ground, link up with whatever planet-side resistance there was, and then take the pirates out.

He scowled, hesitating before issuing the final orders, committing himself to his plan. There was still time to back off and return to Asher Dales – and do what? Three destroyers would be able to take out the OBS system and the pirate cruiser, but it would take weeks to concentrate his forces. And then they would be royally ****ed if something else happened that needed a destroyer. And the council would object to using all three of their warships...

Philip shook his head, gathered himself, and began to issue the orders. The Marines were already donning their armour; once they were ready, they would board their shuttles and float off into space. Their shuttles wouldn't bring up their drives and go driving into the atmosphere until Philip and Dasher had engaged the light cruiser. A ship crewed by a RAN crew would probably be able to take a shot or two at the shuttles, even while they were fighting for their lives, but he doubted that the pirates would have the discipline – or the time – to take the offensive. The Marines wouldn't take chances, just in case. Murphy would stick his snout in as soon as he saw an opportunity – and then the **** would really hit the fan.

Another dull clunk echoed through his ship as the two Marine shuttles disengaged. Jets of compressed gas would direct them away from his ship, jets that would be almost impossible to detect except at very close range. The third craft – a modified orbital manoeuvring bug – was far quieter. It should be impossible for the pirates to detect, but...

He scowled, pushing the thought out of his mind. Oddly, now he was committed, he found it easier to focus. There was no time for anything, but action.

“All right,” he said, calmly. He had to project calm at his crew. “Take us towards the pirate, slowly.”

“Aye, sir,” the helmsman said. “Moving...now.”

Philip tensed as the pirate ship’s icon grew larger on the display. How close could they get before they triggered an alarm? The pirates had to be paying at least some attention to their sensors, surely. How close could they get? He’d played around with the computer simulations before deciding on an ideal range, knowing that he didn't dare get too close to the ship’s energy weapons. The UN hadn't thought highly of energy weapons back then, but they’d still been able to produce capable weapons – and the pirates might have upgraded in the years since their ship had left UN service. An energy duel at point-blank range would be utterly disastrous for Dasher. She just didn't have the armour to stand up to such fire.

He tapped his console, silently blessing the RAN archivists who had insisted on uploading and storing statistics for all models of starships, even the ones that would be hopelessly outdated in a modern battle. There were hundreds of notes on the Moscow-class, enough that he had to remind himself not to be overconfident. The pirates had almost certainly pulled out her old compensators and replaced them with newer models, or they’d never be able to use her drives at max power. Their crew would wind up getting smashed to jelly against the bulkheads. It was a mystery why the UN had built such an overpowered starship, but things had been simpler in those days...

His lips curled into a smile. Every generation since Adam and Eve had probably thought the same thing.

“Weapons locked on target,” Harmon reported. There was a pause. “Medley has pinged us, sir. He’s in position.”

Philip felt the doubts rush away as he recommitted himself to action. They wouldn't fail. If they failed, Ashfall would likely suffer under the pirate jackboot as the pirates sought someone to take their rage out on. They could not fail. They would not fail.

“Fire,” he ordered.

 

It has hit the rotating blades now for sure !!!
Great few chapters and we thank you !!!

 

Chapter Twenty-One<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Dasher lurched violently as she launched a complete missile salvo at almost point-blank range.

“Missiles away,” Harmon snapped, as the tactical display lit up like a Christmas tree. “Impact in seven, six, five...”

“Signal Medley,” Philip snapped. “Tell him to go, now!”

The pirate ship was coming alive, far too late to avoid taking a beating. Its commander would be sending orders to the OBS to open fire on the planet, Philip knew, and prayed that the whole plan would come off successfully. A flare of light on the display marked the detonation of Medley’s warhead, right on top of the OBS. It hadn’t been designed to survive when targeted directly, luckily; the entire unit vaporised before it could open fire on the planet.

“Pirate point defence ineffectual,” Harmon noted. “They’re trying to return fire, but their missiles are uncoordinated…”

Philip watched as seven missiles slammed into the pirate ship. Any halfway competent naval crew would have had their point defence and ECM on a hair-trigger, even if they were in orbit around a supposedly safe world. The pirates didn’t seem to have authorised their computers to engage incoming targets without permission, allowing his entire first salvo to strike home. He could imagine the carnage inside the pirate vessel as standard-nukes and bomb-pumped lasers burned into her hull. She simply wasn't armoured enough to stand up to his fire, but she could ride it out – perhaps.

“They are returning fire,” Harmon reported, as the display sparkled with angry red hornets. The pirate ship didn’t seem to have a proper targeting solution, but their missile warheads would certainly be able to lock onto the source of the incoming fire. That, at least, might allow them a chance to hurt Dasher before it was too late. “Nine missiles…correction; eight. One of them exploded just after launch.”

Maintenance failure, Philip thought, with a certain wry amusement. Missile warheads were supposed to be sealed units, but they could be opened and modified by a fully-trained crew. The RAN built endless safeguards into their warheads to ensure that they couldn’t be detonated inside the ship’s hull – the detonation of a warhead inside the hull was every commander’s worst nightmare – yet the pirates didn’t seem to have bothered. Or maybe they’d altered the safeguards and forgotten to put them back into place. There was no way to know for sure.

“Engage with point defence as soon as they enter range,” he ordered. They were fighting at effectively knife-range, trying hard to overwhelm their bigger and nastier opponent before they managed to find their balance and start hammering them back. The pirates didn’t seem to have modern penetration aids, but even outdated missiles shouldn’t have had any problems tracking Dasher. They weren't trying to hide any longer. “Continue firing on the pirate ship…”

Dasher lurched violently as a missile detonated against her lower hull. Red icons flashed up on the status display, only to fade to an angry yellow as the ship’s computers realised that the damage hadn’t been too serious. It might still prove a disaster in the long run, but they’d survive. The pirate ship was still taking a beating, her commander trying to power up her drives to get her to open the range between her and her tormentor, yet it was already far too late. No tactical officer could have failed to keep targeting and hammering the light cruiser, even without computer support.

“I’m picking up a signal,” Harmon reported. “They’re begging to surrender, Captain.”

Philip thought fast. Taking the pirates alive might lead to more information they could use to hunt down the pirate base, but at the same time giving the pirates a chance to catch their breath might prove fatal. Surrendering was always tricky, even when dealing with an opponent who respected the Albion Conventions. Destroying the pirate ship might solve a great many problems, yet…he wasn't a butcher.

I don’t suppose it matters if we blow their ship into flaming debris or if we put them out the airlock, part of his mind commented. Or are you going to claim that you spared their lives?

He pushed that thought aside. “Order them to hold fire, deactivate their sensors and prepare to be boarded,” he ordered. The Marines were already on their way down to the planet. They couldn’t be recalled to take possession of the pirate ship, which left Medley as the only Marine rifleman in orbit. He smiled, remembering some of the lectures he’d had at the academy about taking possession of enemy vessels. At least they wouldn’t have to treat the pirates with respect. “Slip a couple of our warheads up to them and hold position next to their hull. Make sure they know that one hint of anything we don’t like and it will be game over.”

“Aye, sir,” Harmon said. He tapped his controls, gently. “I have two warheads near the ship now, sir. They can maintain position for the next few hours.”

Philip nodded. Given time, they would be able to disarm the warheads, recover the missiles and refurbish them for reuse. The RAN tended not to risk recovering missiles – unlike the sensor drones used to simulate missile firings for live fire exercises – but his tiny force didn’t have the same level of resources as the RAN. He’d shot through half of Dasher’s missile load in a bare two minutes. The chronometer insisted that the entire engagement had lasted no less than one hundred and ninety-two seconds, but it had felt longer, much longer.

“Damage report,” he snapped. “How badly did we get hit?”

“I’m just inspecting the damage now,” Bartley said. He should have been safe in Engineering, but ‘safe’ was something of an illusion if a destroyer had to face a much larger vessel. “They dented our hull pretty badly, sir, and we have some internal damage in the compartments closest to the blast. Lucky it wasn't a bomb-pumped laser or we would have taken savage damage…”

Philip allowed himself a moment of relief. “Thank God,” he said. “How long will it take to make repairs?”

“Roughly two days if we have to remain here,” Bartley said. “No promises, mind. Hull metal is tricky stuff to work with – it’s very difficult to actually melt it without weapons-grade lasers. I’d like to pull off the entire section and replace it with fresh hull plating, but we can’t do that without a proper shipyard and some spare parts.”

“We might be able to pull something off the pirate ship,” Philip said. He stood up. “Mr Harmon; I intend to lead a boarding party to the pirate ship. You will have command – I want you to monitor us through the sensors and through live channels from our suits. If something happens to us, blow the pirate vessel, pick up the Marines from the planet and return to Asher Dale. They will have to decide who’s in command of the squadron.”

“Aye, sir,” Harmon said. “Shouldn’t I lead the boarding party and…?”

“Rank hath its privileges,” Philip said. He grinned to conceal his growing apprehension. “Besides, I do have experience in boarding unfriendly vessels. And I won’t be leading a team of Marines.”

The small squad assembled in front of the shuttle’s hatch. Philip had selected nine of his crewmen, all – apart from Medley – inexperienced in boarding unfriendly ships. On the other hand, they had a string of disciplinary marks in their RAN files that stated that they were experienced at fighting – particularly when bored. Pistols had been issued to the squadron’s crew – and, by orders, were worn at all times – and Medley handed out rifles to those who had qualified to use them. Philip allowed himself a small moment of relief for Marie's paranoia. She’d insisted that all of their personnel qualify on hand-weapons as soon as possible, just in case,

“I’ve downloaded the specs for a Moscow-class ship to your helmets,” he said, by way of preamble. They’d all used specs to navigate during drills, but they were somewhat untrustworthy. Crews often altered the interior layout of their ships and the changes didn’t always make it into the official record. A surrendered warship was supposed to provide updated specifications for SAR purposes; the pirates, needless to say, hadn’t done anything of the sort. Philip doubted that they would know how to do it even if they’d realised the need. “Stay sharp; take prisoners if possible, but if they give you any trouble – shoot to kill. Do not drop off the command net or Dasher will blow the enemy ship into atoms, with us included.”

He allowed his gaze to sweep over them, inspecting their gear. “Let’s move,” he said, finally. “They won’t stay waiting for us much longer.”

The flight to the pirate ship took minutes, but it felt like hours. Philip inspected the ruined craft through the shuttle’s sensors and shook his head in disbelief. The entire stern of the starship had been turned to wreckage, almost certainly beyond their ability to fix. Its hull was warped and cracked by the bomb-pumped lasers that had burned through the sheer metal and into the fragile innards of the craft. They seemed to have taken a few elementary precautions – their atmosphere wasn’t venting out into space any longer – but they had been taken completely by surprise. He braced himself for the horrors he was about to see. The interior of a wrecked starship was always unpleasant to the human eye.

“Don’t bother with the airlock,” he ordered, as the shuttle came to a halt relative to the pirate starship. It was possible that the pirates might be planning an ambush, or even that they planned to blow the ship despite his promise to take surrenders. Better not to give them an opportunity to cripple his small force. “We’ll go in through the gash in the hull.”

Up close, the pirate ship seemed a darkened hulk, illuminated only by cooling fragments of hull metal and a handful of emergency lights. Philip muttered a command and the shuttle’s main lights were focused on the gash, revealing ruined metal and a handful of bodies trapped in the hull. Philip had to swallow hard as he made out the broken bodies, consoling himself that at least it had been quick. They’d almost certainly been prisoners, rather than pirates. Their nakedness alone proved that…

The trip into the hull was easier than it seemed. Unsurprisingly, the pirates had lost their artificial gravity along with their power cores and the team managed to lock themselves to the deck using magnetic books. Inside, there was barely any illumination apart from their lights, save only a handful of flashes as power discharged randomly through the hull. Philip saw another couple of bodies and panned his light over them, noting the weapon in one of their hands. They’d definitely been pirates, caught with their pants down when his ship had opened fire. They had probably had a second to realise that the end had come before they died. The nasty part of his mind hoped that it had been a painful death.

“There’s lights and power beyond this point,” Medley reported. The Marine had taken point, followed by a trio of spacers whose files made them sound more murderous than a legion of Theocratic Janissaries armed to the teeth. They could probably deal with any resistance from the pirates. “Permission to open the airlock, sir?”

Philip checked his team’s telltales, and then nodded, once. “Permission granted,” he said. “Watch your step.”

The airlock clanked open, revealing a small pressure cabin beyond. Medley and two of the spacers stepped inside and the airlock hissed closed. A moment later, Philip heard Medley’s voice through the radio, warning the pirates to put down their weapons and surrender. The airlock opened again five minutes later, allowing Philip and the rest of the team to enter the pressurised part of the ship. A handful of pirates were squatting on the deck, covered by two spacers while Medley searched them and bound their hands. Two girls who were probably captives – judging from the bruises on their bodies – were treated more gently, but they were still searched and bound. They might have been taken against their wills, yet they could still be affected by Stockholm Syndrome. It was quite possible that they might have come to have feelings for their captors.

He gave the pirates a quick once-over and then followed his team through the remainder of the ship. The pirate bridge looked to have been utterly destroyed, suggesting that they hadn’t bothered to be careful when installing equipment. Some of their crew had been killed at their stations when they exploded in front of their faces; others had been badly injured and left to die on the deck. The pirates didn’t seem to have tried to take care of their wounded, although Philip suspected that there was little they could have done for the more serious cases. Not even the best surgeon in the RAN could have helped the man whose entire body had been savagely burned. Philip checked him, and then used his pistol to put a bullet through the man’s head. It was a mercy killing, he told himself. There was nothing else that they could do.

“Thirty-seven crewmen taken alive,” Medley reported. Philip frowned. According to the files, a Moscow-class cruiser required a seventy-strong crew, although that had been back before automated equipment had helped to reduce the number of crewmen each ship needed to operate at a minimal level of effectiveness. “We’ve also located roughly forty bodies, although some of them are so badly damaged that we’ll need to run a DNA check to confirm just how many we killed. There’s no way to tell how many of them were pirates before we opened fire.”

Philip nodded, slowly. “Ask the prisoners how many there were on the ship when we opened fire,” he ordered. What had the pirates been doing at Ashfall? They might have turned the world into a raiding base, or…there were too many other possibilities. And how compliant were the local authorities? Were they in bed with the pirates, or were they forced to cooperate under duress? The OBS certainly suggested the latter. “And don’t hesitate to ask the question as forcefully as necessary.”

He keyed his communicator and linked back to Dasher. “This is Larson,” he said. “Has there been any word from the shuttles?”

“Sergeant Kratman reports that they have secured the main city,” Harmon reported. “It seems that the locals had their own plan to take back their city and when we blew up the OBS, they rose up in revolt. They had it pretty well timed too, sir. I think they were hoping that someone might come along and help them.”

“Curious,” Philip commented, aloud. He had had no qualms about attempting to aid Ashfall, but other commanders would have hesitated. Ashfall hadn’t contributed anything to the defence force, after all. And then there was the slight shortage of any major naval power in the sector, a power that might have been willing to intervene. It was something he was going to have to raise with the planetary leaders. “How stable is the situation on the ground?”

“Apparently a great many pirates have been lynched,” Harmon reported. “The legitimate authorities are back in control of their world.”

“Good,” Philip said. “We’ll be back over within the hour.”

He linked back to Medley. “According to the pirates, there were ninety men onboard the ship and forty…pleasure captives,” the Marine reported. He sounded utterly disgusted. The poor girls had been taken from the planet and thrust into a nightmare. “Most of the prisoners were held in the rear of the ship.”

Philip winced. They’d been trapped there when Dasher had opened fire and had been killed during the brief, savage battle. There had been no way to know in advance – and even if there had been, how could they have prevented their deaths? The only alternate outcome would have been the destruction of his ship and much of Ashfall by vengeful pirates. He couldn’t have risked holding anything back.

“Understood,” he said, harshly. “Have the captives interrogated until we learn the location of their base – if they knew about any other base. After that, we can hand them over to the local authorities or take them with us back to Asher Dales.”

“Aye, sir,” Medley said. His voice didn’t express any doubts. “It will be done.”

***​

“I don’t think we can salvage the ship,” Bartley said, two hours after the battle. The engineer had made the trip over to the pirate cruiser as soon as the pirates had been removed and the bodies pushed into a holding orbit. “The entire stern assembly is gone, Captain. Repairing her would cost more than buying a whole new cruiser – and it would require a great many custom components that would have to be ordered specially. She’s only really fit for spare parts.”

Philip nodded, unsurprised. It would have been useful to have another ship, but not at that price. “Start stripping her down for spare parts,” he ordered. “If you find that their shuttles are usable, we’ll ship them down to Ashfall. I’m sure the planetary government will find a use for them. Once the ship is barren, we can push her into the local star. We can’t leave her in orbit or the pirates will see her if they return here after we’re gone.”

Bartley looked up in surprise. “Sir,” he protested, “we could use the hull metal…”

“We don’t have the facilities to store it,” Philip reminded him. “We could tow the hulk to Asher Dales, but…”

He shook his head, remembering one of his long-term plans. “We’ll tow her back home,” he said, after a moment. If Quincy surrendered to blackmail, they would have a commercial-grade shipyard at Asher Dales. They could use the hull metal. “You’re right. We could probably make some good use out of her.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Two<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“That is remarkable,” Tanya said, in awe. She’d been frosty on the shuttle, but she’d seemed to forget about it the moment she saw the sky over Ashfall. “It’s beautiful.”

Philip couldn’t disagree with her. Ashfall looked to be permanently under a cloud, but the light of the sun passed through the ash and cast an eerie, constantly shifting blend of colours over the fields. He’d seen the Northern Lights on Avalon, yet Ashfall’s colourful atmosphere put them all to shame. A flickering line of red light passed through the air, almost as if the planet was being bombarded from orbit. In the distance, he was sure he could hear a thrumming noise. The ground seemed to be constantly alive.

The city ahead of them was built under the rocks, despite the dangers of sudden earthquakes or volcano bombardments. What little could be seen from the surface was a handful of blocky dark buildings, illuminated by a multitude of burning torches, and almost nothing else. The ash kept falling from the sky, only to be picked up by the wind and hurled back into the atmosphere. It was a minor miracle, Philip told himself as they started to walk towards the buildings, that mankind could live on such a world. The breath masks they’d brought with them didn’t seem to provide complete protection against microscopic flecks of ice floating in the air.

Up close, the building was barely five metres high, even though it had been dug firmly into the surrounding rock. A pair of men wearing complete overalls that covered their entire bodies were waving to them, beckoning Philip and Tanya into the light. It might have been a trick of the planet’s atmosphere, but they seemed to be shorter than the average human being. They followed them into the light and the door closed behind them with an audible thud. A moment later, the floor began to descend down into the ground.

“You can take off your masks in here,” one of the two figures said. He removed his overall, revealing a body too short and stocky to be natural. Philip blinked in surprise, even though hindsight told him he shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Ashfall was too tough a prospect for baseline humans, but genies from Mars would have found it a welcome change from their homeworld’s overpopulated biosphere. “The lower levels are safe to all who come here.”

The elevator came to a halt and a door slid open, revealing a small welcoming party. Philip was introduced to the Planetary President – he’d been the Vice President, but his predecessor had been murdered by the pirates when they’d arrived – and a handful of other elected politicians, as well as the planet’s Head of Security. Ashfall, as the Head of Security admitted ruefully, hadn’t really had any security when the pirates had arrived. They hadn’t even realised that they were being invaded until it had been far too late. Like the President, the Head of Security had stepped into a dead man’s position. His predecessor had committed suicide shortly after the pirates had taken over.

It was astonishingly warm in the rocky chamber. Philip could see several different types of genie scattered through the crowd, although most of them seemed to have been designed purely for Mars or heavy-world planets. Genies were rare in the Commonwealth, partly because all of the Commonwealth’s core worlds fell within the same spectrum of habitability as Earth herself, at least before the Breakaway Wars. It was easy enough to add improved resistance to disease to the human baseline, but more overt changes tended to be frowned upon. The genies were often alienated from the society that had birthed them. It was amazing how often human prejudice had little to do with reality.

“We never had any warning,” the President explained, as they were served drinks and invited to join the party. “They were right on top of us before we knew that they were there and…they beat hell out of those who tried to put up a fight.”

“Luckily they weren't bred for this environment,” the Head of Security growled. He was the tallest person Philip had yet seen on Ashfall, although he was still shorter than Philip himself. “Those living out on the farms were fairly safe as long as they kept out of sight. Sensors work about as well as a broken fusion core out here, so we hammered a couple of their attempts to spread out beyond the city and then settled down into a stalemate. They threatened to kill us all if we ever pushed them out of the city itself…”

“Until you came along,” the President said. “We’re not ungrateful, you understand, but we would like to know why you intervened.”

What we might want in return, Philip filled in, silently. He couldn’t really blame them for being careful. There had been odd reports about how the Theocracy had wriggled its way into possession of a couple of star systems along the Rim. But really, he didn't want anything in return.

“We intend to make it impossible for pirates to operate in the sector,” he said, simply. “All we really need from you is a commitment to share intelligence – you pass on to us anything you pick up concerning pirate activity. We’re certainly not interested in your...beautiful planet.”

The President laughed out loud. “All you purebloods are softies,” he said, cheerfully. “What’s wrong with our lovely world?”

He sobered, remarkably quickly. “They designed us originally for a polluted landscape,” he said, seriously. “I think they had ambitions that we could actually repopulate the Earth, as we would be able to live there, but...well, we had other ideas and decided to come out here instead. We had to use a little blackmail to convince the corporation to back us...”

“Quite understandable,” Philip agreed, dryly. He wasn't in the best position to complain about blackmail. “I take it that there are a few things in the official planetary file that aren’t entirely true?”

“Only a few,” the President agreed, gravely. “We don’t really want visitors out here, you see. They designed us while we were in a test tube and that makes some folks uncomfortable. But we...well, we just want to live our lives out here, on this wonderful world everyone considers worthless.”

“Except the sadistic hiking fraternity,” Philip said. Actually, he could see the RAMC wanting to hire land on Ashfall to use as a training ground. It was a challenge merely remaining alive on the surface. “I shouldn't think you need to worry about that.”

Tanya had a different question. “What did they want from you?”

The Head of Security’s face twisted into an ugly scowl. “Women,” he said. “We’re sexually compatible with baseline humanity, but our traits are dominant. The bastards took women from the city and abused them on their ships...”

“So there was an entire nest of pirates here,” Philip said, grimly. It didn't quite make sense, at least to him. Why set up shop on a world that offered nothing in the way of repair facilities? There was certainly no cloudscoop orbiting the system’s gas giant. It was possible for a starship to run a scooping mission itself – if designed to survive a pass through a gas giant’s atmosphere – but he doubted that the pirates could carry out such a mission. Their standards of maintenance were really dreadfully shoddy. “But why? What do you have to attract them?”

“Women,” the Head of Security said, again. “We will be wanting the bastards you captured for trial and execution, of course.”

“I’m sure you would,” Philip said, flatly. “We are going to interrogate them and see if they know anything we might be able to use. After that...well, if you have a labour camp here, I’m sure they’d be grateful if we didn't shoot them out of hand.”

“The population would prefer a more permanent solution,” the President said. He held up an oddly inhuman hand before the Head of Security could say a word. “But we recognise that it was your people who took the bastards alive. I don’t know if they can tell you anything through – the ones we had to deal with on the ground were ignorant sons of bitches. They didn't even have the proper gear for running around on our lovely world.”

He shook his head in disbelief. Philip didn't believe it either, even though he had no reason to doubt the President’s statement. Pirates were raiders, normally; they weren’t interested in setting up vest-pocket kingdoms out along the Rim. Had Ashfall merely been unlucky enough to be discovered by a pirate who did have longer-term plans than looting, raping and murdering? Or was there a piece of the puzzle still undiscovered?

But if the pirate commander had been interested in setting up a kingdom of his own, why choose somewhere that demanded a high degree of genetic tinkering or technology to allow a permanent colony to survive? It made no sense. The bastards didn't have to make sense, yet how to combine the reasonable mastery they’d shown of their cruiser and the incompetence they’d displayed in picking a base of operations? As far as he could tell, the only reason anyone would want Ashfall – women could be had anywhere, after all – was its very isolation from the rest of the sector. But was that enough to cancel out its obvious disadvantages?



“You’ll have to ask your prisoners, lad,” the President said, when Philip outlined his reasoning. At least he didn't seem to be as self-important as some of the other politicians Philip had had to deal with in the sector. “Maybe one of them can tell you something actually useful.”

***​

Ashfall hadn't had a prisoner holding camp before the pirates had arrived and taken over, at least according to the Head of Security. The pirates had corrected that oversight at once and converted a vast underground chamber into a detention centre, after placing shaped charges at certain locations that would bring down the roof if someone attempted to liberate the prisoners. It had been sheer luck that the pirates had been willing to surrender; they could have wrecked half the city if they’d detonated all of their charges. A handful of smaller rooms had been converted into isolation chambers, each one now holding one of the captured pirates. Medley, in effective command of the captured cruiser, had carried out preliminary interrogations, isolating five prisoners who had been part of the command crew. Their implants had been inspected by the Marine Medical Corpsman, who had proclaimed them beyond all hope of removal. The real mystery was why they hadn't forced the prisoners to commit suicide.

The pirate in the room looked up hopelessly as they entered the chamber. He’d been injured in the brief, but very destructive battle; there had been little time to spare to give medical treatment to the prisoners. Philip disapproved of such laxity, yet it might work in their favour. The prisoners might be more inclined to talk if they were in pain. After all they’d inflicted on the helpless planet’s population – the handful of surviving comfort girls had been brutally treated by their captors – he found it hard to feel sorry for them.

“I’m not going to waste time trying to break you,” Philip informed him, flatly. “We have interrogated your former subordinates and they have confirmed that you were the ship’s helmsman, effectively the third in command of your ship. Isn't it lucky for you that you were ****ing one of the girls when we blew hell out of your ship?”

He allowed his eyes to narrow. “But that girl had quite a lot to tell us about how you treated her and the others,” he continued. “You have a very simple choice; you can tell us what you know, or I will hand you over to the planetary authorities. How do you think they will treat you after everything you’ve done?”

The pirate looked up at him, bitterly. “They told us that we would be kings,” he said, in a low, almost broken voice. “They told us that we would have all the bitches and money that we could want for, once we completed their mission.”

“They lied to you,” Philip said, flatly. “Look where they’ve led you. A single cell and a very short walk to a hangman’s noose. What do you owe them?”

“But they’ll kill me if I talk,” the pirate said. Philip found it hard to care. Maybe – almost certainly – the pirate was right; they would kill him if he talked. On the other hand, the planetary government definitely would kill him if he didn’t talk. “I...I want to make a deal.”

Philip smiled to himself, darkly. “A deal,” he repeated. “And what makes you think that we would be interested in doing a deal?”

“Look,” the pirate said. “I know that Commies like you talk tough, but you do sometimes make deals with us. I want protection and a new life somewhere where they will never find me, somewhere where I never have to worry about money again. And if you give me that promise, I will give you something you need desperately.”

Philip studied him for a long moment. Patience didn't come easily to him, even after years of training, but it would give the pirate time to get nervous. What did he know that he thought was worth sparing his life? Pirates generally didn't care for duty or honour or all the little concepts that meant so much to military personnel. They’d sell out their own grandmothers if they were offered a suitable price. And if he happened to know that one of the other captives happened to know the same piece of information, he’d be more desperate to close the deal.

“I know the location of a base,” the pirate said. “Surely that’s worth something to you, isn't it? A place where you can find hundreds of us, a place where our ships are repaired and sent out on...”

“Murderous raids,” Philip injected, flatly. “Do you want to deal with us?”

The pirate nodded, frantically. He couldn't hide his panic, not when his mind was consumed with thoughts of the hangman’s rope. “I do,” he said. His voice turned crafty. “But you have to agree to deal...”

Philip reached forward and grabbed him by the throat. “The problem with getting information out of bastards like you is that your commanders insist on you being injected with security implants,” he remarked, almost conversationally. “These implants are magnificent proof of mankind’s inhumanity to man. If they detect that their bearer is being interrogated – drugs or direct neural linkages or even old-fashioned torture – they self-destruct, killing the host instantly. They do have some safeguards, which is why you’re not dead now despite the pain, but it’s very difficult to force information out of their bearers.”

He pressed his face against the pirate’s face. “Understand this,” he said, flatly. “If your information doesn't pan out, you won’t be going to a cell or the hangman’s noose. We’ll start experimenting on you to see if we can beat your implants. I'm told that we succeed once every ten pirates.”

There was a pause as the pirate realised that there was a good chance he’d die in interrogation. In truth, the odds were very poor – and poorer still for top-of-the-line covert intelligence implants. The CIS had been running a black program to develop ways to break into a person’s head despite suicide implants, but Philip hadn't heard of any successes. Not that they’d want to advertise it if they had, of course. It was possible that shipping the pirate to Cassandra and the CIS would result in useful data, yet it would be at least two months before the Commonwealth could send anything back. The only real hope for getting information out of the pirate was through cutting a deal and having him disclose the information voluntarily.

“I...I will give you the information,” the pirate pleaded. “Please...”

Philip looked him in the eye. “If your information proves to be accurate,” he said, flatly, “we will grant you a safe place to live where your former friends will never find you.” It wasn't as if Asher Dales didn't have hundreds of thousands of miles of empty countryside. The pirate – and anyone else who cut a deal – could be held safely there, unable to even contact his former associates. “If not, we’ll see if we can crack into your skull.”

The pirate started to babble, frantically. Philip listened carefully, sorting out the useful pieces of data from the torrent of useless facts. The important detail was that there was a pirate base alarmingly close to Asher Dales, orbiting a dying red star that went by the inspiring name of UNAS-99789. It was located on an asteroid that had been converted into a colony by a long-gone colony mission that had apparently managed to get rather badly lost. Philip wasn't sure how much of that he actually believed. The colony’s original settlers might have been enslaved by the pirates, or they might have started to work with the pirates. A quick check revealed that – unsurprisingly – there was no record of any colony at the red star. The UN had taken a brief look at it, catalogued it without bothering to actually name it, and never gone back. There was nothing there apart from a handful of asteroids and comets.

Philip allowed the Marines to handle the remaining interrogations, handing the useless pirates over to the Head of Security. The useful prisoners would be shipped back to Asher Dales on Dasher, which would give the interrogation teams additional time to work away at them. It was amazing how much a person could be forced to recall when they were being ruthlessly interrogated by the Marines.

But an intact pirate base...! He grinned as he considered their stroke of fortune. If they were really lucky, they might be able to discourage hundreds of pirates with one fell swoop. And if the base led to other bases, he wouldn't complain at all.

 

Chapter Twenty-Three<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“I think I owe you an apology.”

Philip didn't turn as Tanya entered the observation blister behind him. They were coasting towards Asher Dales, the blue-green orb growing steadily larger in front of them. The remains of the pirate cruiser were keeping formation with Dasher, at least for the moment. A pair of shuttles would drag her into a stable orbit where she would be stripped for each and every useful component, after which the hull metal would be removed and stored for later use.

“I didn’t mean to…oh, I don’t know,” Tanya admitted. “Everything is just so confused. I’m a grown woman; why the hell can’t I control my own life?”

Philip smiled, without looking back at her. “I think pretty much everyone goes through the same experience of learning that there are some things you can’t control,” he said, flatly. “And that life is a mixture of holding your own and learning to compromise with others – and trying to learn when compromise is necessary and when it is a dreadful mistake.”

He turned, looking into her bright eyes. She’d been crying, part of him noted; he wanted to take her in his arms and reassure her that it was going to be fine. But it wasn't going to be fine, was it? She had to either reject her suitor and face the consequences of her rejection, or accept a loveless marriage to a boor. In a civilised society, no man would feel that he had the right to marry a woman – or vice versa – but Asher Dales was still developing. God only knew what it would become if it allowed men like Tam Farnham to dictate its development.

Avalon’s development had been largely derailed by the belief that people had the right to determine their own path through life, provided only that non-consenting others were not harmed. Its corporate masters had been wise enough to compromise before their opponents turned radical, creating either a nightmarish communist or fascist state when they came to blows. He could see why Asher Dales would develop the society it had – land ownership was the key to independence and power – but that didn’t make it any easier for the people caught in the gears. There was always a human price, one that was ignored unless it happened to impact upon a known face…

One death is a tragedy, he reminded himself, grimly. Ten million is a statistic.

“I don’t know what to do,” Tanya said. “Philip…”

Philip shrugged. “You’re in what we in the military call an untenable situation,” he said. “You can’t jump one way, you can’t jump the other way – and you die if you stay where you are. Does that simplify the problem for you?”

Tanya glared at him. “You’re making fun of me,” she snapped. “This isn’t ****ing funny!”

“I never said it was,” Philip said. “Let me see; as long as you neither marry him nor set him straight, Tam Farnham is going to be claiming that you’re his intended bride. Which, I’m sure, makes it very difficult for you if you happened to fall in love with someone else. If you marry him, you wind up in bed with a bastard who is likely to cheat on you – and probably has vile personal habits like smoking in bed, or snoring.”

Despite herself, Tanya giggled. “You store,” she accused, lightly. “I couldn’t get any sleep.”

“Liar,” Philip said. “I spent two years in a midshipman’s compartment. Anyone who snored loudly would find himself being marched to sickbay for preventive treatment after the first night or two.”

He cleared his throat. “And if you reject him, you may be disinherited by your father,” he concluded. “On the plus side, you won’t have to jump into bed with Tam – and he can go find someone more suited to being his wife. I’m sure there’s a tough farmwoman out there who’d be happy to marry him – and clobber him if he starts treating her like ****.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Tanya said. She hesitated. “I’ll have to tell him that the wedding is off – and that it was never even on.”

“I fear so,” Philip agreed, gravely. He hoped she wouldn’t spend the next couple of hours analysing and overanalysing her decision. His last girlfriend had never been able to make up her mind and it had driven him crazy; he certainly hadn’t really regretted it when he'd received a message informing him that she’d found a rich man on Avalon to share her bed. “If you’ll listen to a word of advice…”

Tanya looked up at him, thoughtfully. “Yes…?”

“Don’t have this conversation with him when you are alone,” Philip warned. “Or at least without someone in shouting distance, someone who can help if you need help. Men tend to go a little stupid when they think they own women and he might try to hit you…”

“I understand,” Tanya said. “I won’t let him anywhere near me.”

The hatch hissed open and she exited back into the main body of the ship. Philip watched her go, and then turned back to stare at Asher Dales, unable to escape a sense of foreboding that threatened to overwhelm him. God alone knew how Tam Farnham – or Greg, his father – would react to the news. An anticipated match could become the be-all and end-all of the male mind, particularly those wealthy and powerful enough that few dared say no to them. He would be wise to anticipate an unpleasant reaction…

He lifted his wristcom to his mouth. “Bridge, this is the Captain,” he said. “Connect me with Lieutenant Martinez on Dancer.”

***​

“So you took out an enemy warship and liberated an entire planet,” Barrington said, two hours later. They had gathered in the town hall for a meeting of the oversight committee, with Greg Farnham sitting at one end of the table. Tanya had left the shuttle as soon as they had landed and vanished to parts unknown. God alone knew where she was, but Philip had ordered Marie to keep an eye on her if possible. “I think we ought to be pretty impressed.”

“And yet the engagement will cost us heavily,” Farnham grated. He didn’t sound happy, even though he couldn’t have heard anything from his son, who wasn't present in the chamber. “How much will it cost us to replace those goddamned missiles you expended in the engagement?”

“More than I’d prefer,” Philip agreed, mildly. “On the other hand, we do have a fairly-intact hulk to salvage, friendly relations with one of our nearest neighbours – and a pirate base to take out. That should put a crimp into their operations in this sector and buy us time to get organised.”

“Your ship took damage when you engaged one pirate ship with the advantage of surprise,” Farnham growled. “How badly will you be damaged when you attack a pirate base on your own?”

“I’m still working on the operations plan,” Philip admitted. The Marines were still interrogating the pirates, but they had managed to produce a fairly detailed outline of the pirate base’s defences. They’d hijacked a hidden colony and turned it into a base of operations, which wasn't entirely surprising. The downside was that Philip and his men couldn’t simply launch a salvo of missiles from a safe distance – even a c-fractional assault. They needed to take the base intact, or at least as intact as possible. “It is quite possible that we won’t take any damage at all.”

Farnham snorted, loudly. “You’ll take damage,” he predicated. “And what will that cost us?”

Philip met his gaze, levelly. “And just what has years of pirate activity cost you?”

He allowed his eyes to narrow. “You’re in danger even without a pirate ship hanging over your head, demanding food and women on pain of orbital bombardment,” he added. “You are dependent on shipments of high technology from more developed worlds. What happens to you if those shipments are captured by pirates, or shipping lines cancel deliveries because the threat of pirate attack is too high?”

“And then we will make do without those shipments,” Farnham snapped. “What do we want from your…developed worlds?”

George Foster leaned forward. “Don’t be more of a fool than God made you, Greg,” he drawled. “When your daughter was gored by that angry bull it wasn't prayers and bandages from your clients who saved her life. It was a medical pack shipped in from Avalon. How many of us would survive our first encounters with poison-weed if we didn’t have onsite analysis and antidote processors? I don’t think there’s a one of us who doesn’t owe his life, in one way or another, to modern medicine.”

He smiled, darkly. “And what would you do if a pirate ship turned up and demanded that you gave them your daughter? Ask them nicely to go away?”

Farnham flushed angrily as laughter ran around the table. “I supported the creation of a defence force because it was necessary,” he said, angrily. “I dare any of you to question my patriotism.”

There was a long pause. “But I am against engagements outside this system,” he continued, in a calmer tone. “Most of us moved out here to get away from pettifogging politicians and grasping corrupt bureaucrats. The more we become involved in out-system affairs, the greater the danger that we will lose out independence…”

“Right,” Barrington said. “And what do you intend to say to the other worlds that helped fund the purchase of three destroyers? Do you think we can afford to repay them?”

“Gentlemen,” Philip said quietly, “with all due respect, this is getting us nowhere. You hired me and my men to protect you against pirate attacks. I am telling you now that we have a window of opportunity to take the attack to the pirates before they realise that their cover has been blown and they abandon the base. It is my very strong recommendation that we attack the pirate base as soon as possible. I intend to leave in just under a day.”

He paused, considering. The intelligence suggested that someone was planning something major in the system, but he had a nasty feeling that they’d only seen glimpses of the whole scheme. Pirates running weapons to rebels, pirates setting themselves up as kings…what did it all mean? They had to know that pirate kingdoms didn’t tend to last, didn’t they? And where were the weapons coming from in the first place? He knew that they were missing something, but what?

“If we can trap and destroy a number of pirate ships at once, we will be able to deter them from mounting any further attacks in this sector,” he continued. “At the very least, we will buy time to expand our own forces, develop an intelligence network, and establish a proper convoy system. We need to move now.”

Every naval officer learned the realities of interstellar communications, realities that weren't very understandable to civilian politicians. It took about four days to go from Ashfall to the pirate base at UNAS-99789. The pirates might have sent a ship to Ashfall that had arrived just after Dasher had departed with her prize in tow. If so, they presumably already knew that Ashfall had been liberated and a number of pirates had been taken alive. They’d be tempted to assume that the suicide implants had worked and that no information had been obtained by the liberation force, but would they take that chance? In their shoes – and particularly if someone else was behind the pirates, pulling their strings – Philip would assume the worst and evacuate the base before unfriendly visitors arrived. He had to assume that the pirates would do the same.

“I believe that we should move to a vote,” Foster said. “All those in favour of attacking the pirate base, raise your hands.”

“I have one question,” Farnham said. “Can you take out the pirate base with only one destroyer?”

“I’m going to be taking both Dasher and Dancer,” Philip said, flatly. It wasn't a decision he intended to debate with the politicians, not after they’d agreed not to interfere in how he ran his navy. “And Death by Stupidity; the pirate craft may come in handy. The third destroyer will remain here, along with ECM drones that will simulate our presence to any watching onlookers.”

His lips twitched into a cold smile. “If nothing else,” he added, “we might confuse them about just how many ships we have in the sector.”

“But we told everyone that we had three,” Farnham protested.

“They’d be fools to assume that we were telling the truth,” Philip said. “I never believe anything I see in the media unless it is confirmed by multiple sources. And even then I am sceptical. They’ll expect us to lie about our forces and their dispositions.”

“So it seems that we are in agreement,” Barrington said. “Commodore Larson; you have permission to take out the pirate base. And please allow us to wish you the very best of luck…”

There was a crash as the door slammed open. “You bastard,” Tam Farnham bellowed, striding into the room. There was an ugly red mark on his face, suggesting that he’d been slapped by someone feminine. Philip knew who’d struck him, if only because he was still walking around on his own two feet. Marie would have crippled him and then dragged him to the nearest hospital for treatment. “You ****ing seduced my fiancée!”

Barrington stood up with surprising speed. “What is the meaning of this, Tam,” he said, in a voice that should have frozen Tam in his tracks. There was enough warning in it to change anyone’s mind. “You were not invited to this meeting…”

Tam was too angry to realise that Barrington had smoothly offered him an out. “That…” He waved a hand at Philip, his voice shaking with rage. “That man has seduced your daughter, my fiancée! I demand justice!”

Philip braced himself, expecting Tam to lunge forward and start swinging. He carried himself like a brawler, rather than someone who had had the training to turn him into a deadly fighting machine, but there was no mistaking the solid muscles along his arms. One good punch to the throat and Philip would be choking to death. But then, Philip had been drilled in unarmed combat since the day he’d joined the navy and had been training ever since, often by picking bar fights with Marines. It might have been setting a bad example for his men…

…Or maybe not. No one would pick on a Marine if they only wanted to beat someone up for shits and giggles. They’d be lucky to escape without having to be hospitalised. He’d fought for the challenge – and the chance to blow off some steam. The Marines had probably felt the same way too. Quietly, he shifted his pose, preparing to fight. Raw strength and stupidity wasn't a hard combination to beat.

“This is neither the time nor the place,” Greg Farnham snapped. His father’s voice should have stopped Tam, even if he hadn’t been smart enough to pick up on all the other warnings. “Tam…”

His son ignored him. “You,” he said, pointing one finger at Philip’s face. “You have defiled my fiancée and insulted my honour. I challenge you to a duel!”

“Get out,” Barrington said, sharply. Philip felt a moment of sympathy for him, although not as much as he might have expected. Any man who was prepared to even consider pressuring his daughter into an unwanted marriage deserved all that happened to him. And besides, if Barrington allowed the duel to happen, it would cause all kinds of problems for the future. “I’ll…”

“I challenge you,” Tam thundered. “Will you accept my challenge, or will you prove yourself a base and cowardly dog.”

Philip felt his temper fraying, despite himself. “You appear to believe that you have the right to force your suit on Tanya against her will,” he said, coldly. It was better, one of his tutors had taught him, to keep an iron grip on one’s temper – and if threatened with losing one’s temper, to pretend to lose it while one could still think straight. “There is no moral difference between you and a common rapist from the sewers. Do you really believe that she would want to marry a man such as you?”

Barrington started to say something. Tam’s bellow of rage drowned it out. “You ****ing son of a bitch,” he bellowed, so loudly that the entire building was echoing. “I ****ing challenged you and…”

“I will meet you on the field of honour,” Philip said, keeping his voice cold. Avalon hadn’t exactly forbidden duelling, but it wasn't considered socially acceptable – and the challenged party was always free to withdraw. “You may choose your weapons. I believe that single-shot pistols are traditional…?”

“No chance of that,” Tam thundered. “I will face you unarmed and break you over my knee.”

His father caught hold of him and dragged him out of the room. Philip watched him go, struggling to hold back a smile. Tam might have been able to hurt him – or kill him – with a pistol, but bare-knuckled fighting? The fight would be, at the very least, even. And Philip had never been afraid to challenge equal or even superior forces.

Which is partly why you’re out here, he reminded himself, as the room slowly cleared. No one seemed interested in talking any longer, which was something of a relief. You were the one who embarrassed Admiral Morrison to his face, Philip my boy. What happens when you finally pick on something you can’t beat?

“This won’t be easy,” Barrington said. “Tam has been the planetary champion of wrestling and boxing for the past four years. You may find that you have bitten off more than you can chew. Or perhaps the other way around, I fear.”

He patted Philip on the shoulder. “But good luck anyway,” he added. “You might well win.”

 

<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal"><FONT size=3><FONT face="Times New Roman">Chapter Twenty-Four<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com
“I don’t suppose I can talk you out of this?”

Philip shook his head as Captain Saul Schifrin escorted him towards the field. It was a simple patch of grass, normally used by the town’s children for football and other games. There was a certain simplicity about the whole environment that appealed to Philip, he realised as they headed towards the small crowd. The thicket of trees at one end of the field and the long river running down to the sea would produce years of enjoyment for a child. He rather wished that he’d had somewhere like it when he’d been growing up on Avalon.

The wind blew across the field, reminding him that all he wore was a pair of shorts and exercise shoes. Tam’s second had contacted him two hours after Tam had issued his challenge – presumably after his father had tried to talk him out of actually fighting Philip man-to-man – and explained the rules. Neither fighter was allowed anything that could be used as a weapon; their near-nakedness was a precaution against smuggling any weapons into the field. It also added a certain homoerotism to the entire scene, Philip told himself in the privacy of his own mind. Tam might find the thought of beating someone half to death arousing. He’d met too many bullies like Tam before, while he’d been struggling through his teenage years.

“Perhaps he’ll be smart and back down,” Philip said, although he knew better. Tam, like many other bullies who used their size and strength to intimidate people, wouldn’t be brave enough to back down. Philip rolled his eyes at such an attitude, although – in honesty – he had to admit that he had something of it himself. A smarter man might have backed away from Ashfall and whistled for something a little bit heavier than a destroyer…

But then you wouldn’t have been able to get a nice battlecruiser or two, he reminded himself, dryly. All you could have done was summon another destroyer – and that wouldn’t have improved the odds too much.

“I very much doubt it,” Schifrin said. There was a crowd of men on the other side of the field, surrounding Tam. Many of them were slapping him on the back and wishing him luck, although there was a certain insincerity about it that made Philip shake his head in disgust. It was tempting to wonder just what Tam and his friends did when they were sporting together, even though it would be nothing that was forbidden in the Commonwealth. But what would his father think if his son liked other men? The thought was almost amusing. Tam’s anger and his firm belief that Tanya was his might have been nothing more than a cover for his true sexuality. “I wish you’d let me put the Marines on standby with their armour.”

Philip shook his head. He’d been tempted, but in truth it would have looked dreadfully unfair. And besides, four of the spectators on his side of the field were Marines. Their uniforms were designed to provide more protection than homespun cloth and, even unarmed, they were the deadliest men on the field. Philip’s orders had been clear; they were to do nothing, unless Tam’s friends decided to join in on his side. If that happened, they could hand out a beating that the bullies wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

He caught sight of Tanya, standing with her father some distance from the proceedings. Her face seemed pale, yet almost unreadable. What was she thinking? Philip had no idea; did she fear for him, or did she blame herself for getting him into this mess? Or was she secretly enjoying the spectacle of men fighting for her? Or was she terrified of what would happen if Tam won?

What would Tam do if he won? There was no way to know, but Philip could think of a number of appalling possibilities. Maybe he’d just grab her and take her away to be ravished, or…but what would her father do? <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Barrington</st1lace></st1:City> had said nothing to Phillip, beyond wishing him good luck. Which way would he jump once the **** hit the fan?

Tam strode onto the field, swinging his arms to show off his muscles. The umpire blew a whistle and beckoned Philip onto the field, while moving the spectators back as quickly as possible. Tam’s second, a wiry youth with a grim smile and bright blew eyes, had explained that there were no sissy rules that barred the combatants from running, or smashing into the spectators. It was merely considered bad form. The thought made Philip smile, despite the situation. He met Tam’s leer with an unworried grin of his own. The swaggering brute didn’t know it, but he was in for a shock.

“Tam Farnham,” the umpire said. “You have the right to…”

“No,” Tam barked, before the umpire could finish. The challenger, it seemed, did have the right to withdraw his challenge. Philip was mildly surprised; on Avalon, the challenger had no right to withdraw. A number of high-profile legal cases had determined that to the satisfaction of the civil authorities. “I will fight and…”

“In that case,” the umpire said coldly, “let the best man win.”

He jumped backwards and blew his whistle. Tam posed, just for a second, and then lunged at Philip, who stepped to one side. He hadn’t expected Tam to start posturing, for crying out loud; if he’d known, he would have taken the opportunity to slip in a punch before Tam realised that his opponent was being unsporting. Tam snarled and lashed out with his fist, telegraphing the move minutes in advance. Philip had no trouble avoiding the blow, all the while weighing up his opponent. His basic impression of Tam hadn’t changed. The young man was strong, but he was still a basic brawler, used to leading with his fists.

Tam stepped back, his eyes never leaving Philip’s face. Philip feinted, measuring Tam’s skill, and watched him move to cover himself a moment too late. No one had taught him to avoid telegraphing his moves to his opponent, allowing Philip to deduce what he would do before he actually did it. Unless…no, Tam didn’t seem capable enough to telegraph false moves. Outside the Marines, Philip hadn’t met many people who could do that without distracting themselves. It could be fatal if done badly…

He saw Tam’s plan a moment before he moved, jumping up and lashing out with his foot. It looked good, Philip realised as he moved back himself, but it was right out of a bad martial arts movie than real life. He nipped in as Tam landed and struck out twice at his chest. Hitting Tam was like hitting a brick wall, but he had the satisfaction of hearing him grunt in pain and try to lunge at Philip again. Philip stepped back and lashed out, slapping Tam’s arm. Tam bellowed with rage, realising that he was being mocked, and threw himself at Philip, who stuck out a foot. The bruiser tripped over and fell face-down on the grass.

Philip could have jumped on him and broken his back, or his neck, but instead he let Tam struggle to his feet. Grass stains covered his chest and shorts, while his face had gone an angry purple colour. He knew that his life had been spared. A smarter man might have backed off, but a man as prideful as Tam wouldn't be able to endure knowing that someone hadn’t pressed his advantage to the bitter end.

“You...” Tam choked out. “You utter...”

He charged, angrily. This time, Philip didn't quite move fast enough and Tam clipped him, hard enough to hurt. Philip lashed back, wheeling around and delivering a haymaker into Tam’s shoulder. If he’d hit Tam’s throat, the fight would have been over then, but Tam was moving too quickly. Philip pushed the pain aside and kept moving, daring Tam to try to hit him again. Tam seemed to have given up on the idea of a direct attack; instead, he was circling Philip carefully, looking for an opening.

Philip grinned and deliberately dropped his guard, daring Tam to launch another attack. Tam ignored him, watching his face carefully. Philip watched him back, remembering the last time he’d faced a Marine, back when he’d been trying to drink himself into a stuphor. Tanya had pulled him out of the bar and given him a new mission, a new reason to live. And she was worth fighting for.

Tam lunged forward, fists clenched as if he intended to box. Philip hopped back, lifted his own fists, and launched a quick jab at Tam’s defence. Tam swung out at him, but he was too slow to catch Philip – and he’d committed himself. Philip saw the opening and threw a punch at Tam’s nose. He felt bones breaking under his fist and saw a splash of blood falling from his target. His fist hurt, but it was clear that Tam was hurting worse. Philip held back, waiting to see if Tam would back out after blood had been shed. He didn't really want to kill him any longer, not after the entire city had seen him beaten bloody. Tam would certainly no longer be able to press for Tanya’s hand...

Or would he? Philip watched Tam carefully, considering what he might do. Perhaps he’d ignore the result of the bout and keep pressing away at Tanya, or perhaps he might push for Barrington to disinherit his daughter after the demise of his dynastic plans. It would be better, part of Philip’s mind insisted, for Tam to die here and now, on the field of battle. But if he killed people because their survival was inconvenient, how was he any better than the pirates?

Tam roared and threw himself forward with sudden energy. Philip dodged, only to see Tam coming right at him. He’d guessed which way Philip would move, or he’d read Philip’s posture. Either one was possible. Tam almost caught Philip before Philip managed to dodge back, slamming a punch into Tam’s arm as he moved. At least Tam had the sense to keep his groin and chest guarded. A single punch there would end the fight.

“I have had enough of you,” Philip said, so quietly that no one apart from Tam would be able to hear him. “Walk away now and I won’t have to press it any further.”

Tam ignored him and threw himself at Philip again. This time, Philip stepped in under his guard and slammed two quick punches into his chest. Tam stopped, almost as if he’d been shot in the head and his body hadn't quite realised that he was dead, and then he bellowed in pain. Philip ignored him and slammed the flat of his palm into Tam’s jaw. He felt something dislocate within Tam’s chin before he lashed out one final time, kicking Tam with all of his strength in the knee. There was an audible crack as his leg shattered under the blow, before he fell to his knees, gasping in pain. Philip was almost impressed; he’d seen people screaming and losing their heads completely with lesser injuries...or maybe Tam was just too stupid to know how badly he’d been injured.

Philip walked forward and around Tam, watching carefully. Tam looked too badly hurt to be considering an ambush, or trying to lure Philip into arm’s reach, but it was well to be careful. Overconfidence was a poor servant and a worse master. Up close, Tam reeked of sweat, mingled with urine and blood. Philip realised that he’d never been so badly hurt, for all that he’d been a boxer. Boxing had rules that Philip had never bothered to learn, let alone fight by. What was the point in fighting fair when the idea was to disable or kill your opponent as quickly as possible?

He put his hands around Tam’s head and held it, firmly. “Give up,” he said, sharply. Tam’s skin felt sweaty and vile. He was probably on the verge of shock. “Give up or I break your ****ing neck.”

Tam’s body shuddered. “I give up,” he said. It was barely more than a whisper. He needed medical attention, fast. “I...mercy!”

Philip didn't smile. “You will not go anywhere near Tanya again,” he said, flatly. “If you do, you die. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Tam said, between gasps. “Please...”

Philip released him and stepped back, nodding to the umpire. “Tam Farnham yields,” the umpire said, formally. “Commodore Larson is the winner!”

The crowd didn't go wild, somewhat to Philip’s disappointment. A surprisingly large number of people seemed to be concealing smiles, mainly among younger people who would have had to deal with Tam on a daily basis. They wouldn’t be so scared of him after they’d seen him lose a fight so decisively. Who know – maybe his father would find himself forced to disinherit his son. Tam’s allies seemed to have decided to leave the field, rather than watch their leader take a fall. Philip couldn't blame them.

“You need to go to sickbay,” the Marine corpsman said It struck Philip suddenly that he didn't even know the man’s name. “You might have been injured and...”

“Never mind me,” Philip said, shortly. Now he was coming off the rush from the fight, he was painfully aware that his body was aching and felt sore. “Worry about getting him to hospital and some proper treatment.”

“Damned if I’m wasting good nanites on that arsehole,” the corpsman said, crossly. Two of the city’s doctors were already pouring over Tam, who was twitching unpleasantly, yelping. Philip, who had seen men with far worse injuries remain stoic in the face of such unpleasantness, wasn't particularly impressed any longer. The fight was over and Tam had lost. “Do you think I should just introduce him to the joys of battlefield medicine?”

“Go do your job,” Philip said crossly, and looked around for Tanya. She was still standing next to her father, a strange – almost vulnerable – expression on her face. Or maybe she didn't quite believe her eyes. Tam’s suit, pressed with all the boorishness that one could expect from a man born to believe that the world existed to serve him, had been a part of her life for so long that perhaps she couldn't quite grasp that it was over. “Marie...?”

The Marine commander didn't look like a Marine; she was wearing a pair of white shorts and a shirt that was at least two sizes too small for her. In fact, she looked surprisingly attractive, but the muscles rippling along her bare arms were a reminder that she was probably the deadliest person in the system. Her eyes were oddly concerned, even though she had seriously suggested simply having Tam assassinated – and had even expressed a willingness to do the job herself.

“You could have ended that a great deal quicker,” she said, flatly. Philip didn't bother to disagree with her. She was right, but he’d felt that it was better to hand out a lesson rather than kill Tam – or cripple him beyond recovery. Time would tell if he’d been right not to hand out a violent and utterly one-sided beating. “And I think you should be more careful whom you invite into your bed.”

Philip looked up at her, sharply. There had always been a divide between starship crews and Marines, but that was a little harsh – and unpleasant. Marie was always free with her advice, and yet...

“I have the same problem with some of the cherries,” Marie said, when Philip said nothing. “They graduate and become Marines – and then they hook up with girls who enjoy getting them into fights. The bitches get some sort of pleasure from watching men fighting for them. Would you like to know how many records I’ve had to smooth with the Shore Patrol because some sexy tart told her boyfriend that some thick-headed thug had insulted her?”

“You’d think Marines would know better,” Philip said, crossly.

“So would I,” Marie said. “I’ve had to bust more than a dozen Marines for fighting when off-post and it’s always a pain in the ass. And the worst of it is that they’re not actually bad Marines when on deployment; they’d just dumb ****s thinking with their dicks when they’re off-duty. I have to bust their chops anyway.”

She leaned forward. “I don’t pretend to know what’s going through that girl’s head, but you might want to watch your back,” she added. “Maybe she just wanted you to fight for her, or maybe she likes to play with men, or...”

“...Or maybe she just wanted rid of him,” Philip snapped.

“And then she could have just left the planet,” Marie pointed out. “Her degree is good anywhere in the Commonwealth.” She shrugged, expressively. “I cannot dictate your personal life to you, of course, but I’d suggest making it a great deal less complicated. And you really should have snapped the bastard’s neck.”

***​

“You don’t need to cheer,” Philip said, two hours later. Back on Dasher, he’d had a shower and inspected his bruises. Nothing looked particularly serious – besides, the other guy was still in hospital. Marie’s corpsman had sent him a note saying that Tam would need several weeks to heal, at least with the medical technology on Asher Dales. “I’d just like you to remember it when you are next late with your efficiency statements and flypaper reports.”

There were some chuckles at a joke that dated all the way back to pre-space Old Earth. “We leave in twelve hours,” Philip continued. “The Foolish Genius will carry most of our men; remember, some of the planetary militia have never been in space before, so go easy on them. If all goes to plan, we should have an intact pirate base at our mercy.”

He smiled. “And if all doesn't go to plan, the **** will hit the fan rather quickly,” he concluded. “It's time to start working on contingency plans.”

 

Very entertaining story!!THANK YOU!!
Matt