Dragoon's Honor, page 1
DRAGOON’S HONOR
THE SCIENCE OFFICER
VOLUME 13
BLAZE WARD
KNOTTED ROAD PRESS
CONTENTS
Kranieafim
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Yu’Urid
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Sovereign Nakhimov
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Qadir
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Excalibur
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
The Thief
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
The Setup
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
The Sting
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Trouble
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Getaway
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Read More
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
KRANIEAFIM
PART 1
Javier would lie if confronted.
Evade.
Disseminate.
Bullshit with the best of them.
Second nature by now.
He was, however, alone in his quarters, cursing under his breath as he typed things into the search box, rabbit-holed the results, then cursing some more and starting over.
“You could always just ask,” Suvi announced over the room’s speaker.
He looked up and grinned, wondering how long she’d been looking over his shoulders metaphorically and cursing herself, because he hadn’t asked.
Wouldn’t, but that was because it had turned into stubbornness by now, and this crew understood how stubborn he could get.
Still had that replacement coffee mug he’d had made for him, after he’d sent the original home with ’Mina, all those years ago. Wardroom gremlins simply couldn’t lie and say they thought it belonged to someone else.
Not when it had THE SCIENCE OFFICER in bas relief block letters down one side.
Not messing around here.
“Are you even listening, or should I send in a medical team?” she sassed him.
“It was before your time, kiddo,” Javier finally answered her.
Evading. Disseminating. Bullshitting.
“I’m older than you are, youngster,” she fired right back, reminding him that she was his daughter.
Of the soul, if not the flesh. He’d taken her and transformed her from a simple electronic Concord Yeoman in command of a Probe/Cutter and turned her into…a pirate.
A dork, really, but also a pirate.
Kinda like him.
And she’d outlive him, as long as her ships survived.
Ships?
Sure. He’d make sure to pour her into something more modern and automated, next time around, but for now, he’d needed the last First-Rate Galleon still in service. Maybe not the firepower equivalent to the most modern Warmasters, but certainly their teacher for sneakiness.
He wondered where she’d gotten it, though, grinning.
“Yeah, but you were still a spit and polish sailor in those days,” he said, sighing and leaning back from the screen. Probably would have to ask for help, much as it galled him.
“Someone corrupted my databoards, apparently.”
He laughed.
It was possible to reprogram a Sentient system. You had to have knowledge, patience, tools, and something desperately wrong with your personality to do it.
Fortunately, he’d fit, at least in those days.
And maybe still today, but we don’t discuss those things in areas where statutes of limitations might not have run out yet.
“So, what are you looking for?” she practically demanded. “I have fifty-three million books in my datacore at present, including no fewer than twelve thousand encyclopedia sets of various age, region, and accuracy.”
Read that: More books than you can even skim in the rest of your life, old man.
He sighed and shrugged, which turned into everything above his kidneys popping loudly.
How long had he been sitting?
Javier looked at the clock. Goggled. Looked again. Stood up.
Too long.
“Hey, where are you going?” she asked sharply. “Come back here.”
“Follow me,” he said, bending over to touch his toes to pop the rest of things loose.
He’d been down that rabbit-hole for three hours.
“I need something hot to drink,” Javier continued. “Meet you in the wardroom. Wanna make me some chai?”
“Gotcha,” Suvi replied. “Coming right up.”
And the room went that special sort of silent it got when she wasn’t present. Only monitoring with a mere shard, instead of a full avatar.
His chai was steeped and steaming when he got there. Middle of the ship’s afternoon, though it felt like the middle of the night.
Ships ran around the clock. Even Sentient ships, where Suvi controlled just about everything, had to have folks on duty.
She’d just needed a much smaller crew than most warships this size.
And he didn’t trust any of those militant bozos one damned lick.
His daughter was special.
And a dork.
Javier considered the wardroom as he sipped his chai, then surrendered to entropy and left again.
“Would you make up your mind?” Suvi exasperated as he traversed a hallway.
“Bethany awake?” he asked. “Might as well only explain this once.”
“She is currently cataloging…music from the thirty-fourth century, after we got a big dump of the stuff on Nausi at the last stop,” Suvi said. “In the library. I’d suggest she might be as bored as you.”
He chuckled and kept walking forward.
He liked Bethany. Had recruited her originally on Dorn’s recommendation, and she’d finally opened up and relaxed around the crew. Every ship needed a Librarian. Especially the Sentient ones, who had access to as much data as could be loaded, and no flipping clue what any of it meant.
Which was why he’d reprogrammed Suvi to be a person, instead of a highly responsive decision-tree matrix.
None of those grumps composed music. They could shit out notes, but not tell you what it meant. Or make you cry.
He entered the library and found Bethany already paying attention. Yup, probably bored.
Bethany Marie Durbin. Bryce Academy graduate (Class of ’79). Concord Navy retired. Still tall and lean as thirty got close. Blue eyes. Pretty face. Light brown hair that couldn’t decide if it was dirty blond or mousy brown.
Smarter than him, which honestly didn’t describe that many people on this ship, though he’d lie if challenged.
Didn’t have to bullshit Bethany. Yet another reason he liked having her around.
“And what dreadfully stupid idea has infected our terrible pirate overlord today?” she asked in a voice equally dripping with sass and honey. And a face to match.
Also why he liked her.
Javier couldn’t help but give up and smile. Moved to sit across the table from her, because he knew that as soon as he started talking, she’d be diving into the datacores for tidbits as fast as she or Suvi could work.
That was what Librarians did, and she was really the best he’d ever met at it.
Took a long sip of chai, just to torture both women, because the panel by the door lit up with Suvi’s face. Her presentation, anyway. Blonde hair with bangs and a French braid. The same sharp, blue eyes as Bethany. The same brains.
The same sass.
“I’m looking for a ghost,” Javier began.
PART 2
Javier leaned back and realized that his chai was gone. And his jaw hurt. And he’d been talking for close to an hour, an explanation that had reversed into both women interrogating him within an inch of his sanity.
What there was of it.
“A party barge?” Bethany finally asked. Mostly confirming all those details, then translating them into whatever her matrix of understanding necessitated.
Javier shrugged.
“It’s a lot more than that,” Javier replied. “But, yeah, you might not be too far off with such an assumption.”
“Why?” Bethany asked.
“Because where we are right now triggered something in my head,” Javier said. “Some old story I remember from Academy myself, however bloody long ago and that many beers and arrest warrants since. We’ve been on the road for a year now, and I felt like maybe this was a good time to stop and have some R&R without anybody shooting at us. Plus, if we went this way, I don’t have to travel anywhere close to Neu Berne or Da Xing to deal with either sets of those yahoos.”
“Call it twenty-five years, then,” Suvi offered. “Maybe twenty-eight. I find a few records of attempts at such an engineering project, but none of them apparently succeeded.”
“That’s because they were trying to make money,” Javier nodded. “Hard to do, when mining on that scale.”
“But hollowing out a small, dead moon?” Bethany asked. “Attaching engines and even JumpDrives? Flying it???”
“If you don’t care where you’re going, you ain’t lost,” Javier said. “Rune’s Rule, and a damned good one for explorers. Or rich folks looking to party. I remember references to them starting a party on board something like four hundred years ago. About the time they had enough space hollowed out inside to install stuff. After that, you keep carving out the walls by boring inwards like a worm inside an apple. If you dump ore after you extract useful metals, it gets lighter over time, which makes it faster, though something like this has the overall speed and maneuverability of an iceberg on a planetary ocean.”
Bethany got that thousand-light-year stare in her eyes, so he shut up.
“Suvi, look in the social register,” she ordered. “Notes for a traveling caravan or possibly a circus.”
“What?” Suvi pipped. “Oh, hey, there’s something. Hang on. Gotta unpack some bits and digest it. Ship’s name is Sovereign Nakhimov. Okay, that’s weird. Bethany, coming up on your screen.”
Javier nodded.
Suvi thought at something like fifty thousand times the speed of a normal person, when she could focus on something. He’d programmed her verbal tics and delays in such a way that she wasn’t offended at having to wait for him to actually finish a sentence before replying.
She’d probably spent half a day of her time reviewing and cataloging whatever thing she’d just uncovered, in the process of that sentence.
Javier rose and moved around to loom over Bethany’s shoulder. She wasn’t wearing any scent other than clean and healthy.
Smelled nice.
Fortunately for him, she was focused on the screen.
Megastructure, indeed. Monstrous thing.
Small, as moons went. Only maybe forty kilometers across the equator. Enough mass that it had originally formed into a sphere. Then been kicked out of some planetary system sometime in the distant past instead of being captured.
Long enough that most of the internal heat of radioactive decay had faded, leaving a cool lump of iron and nickel, wrapped in a thin layer of carbon and stuff.
And flying.
“I’d ask how that was possible, but obviously somebody had enough money and pissiness,” she observed.
“You haven’t been around enough rich people,” Javier laughed. “And Behnam doesn’t count, because she’s the exception to most of those rules.”
“How so?” Bethany asked.
“Most of them are men,” Javier nodded as she turned to look up at him. “They have ego problems.”
“Sound like somebody I know,” Suvi offered dryly as color commentary.
“Bad ego problems,” he corrected himself, then waited for both women to stop laughing. “Anyway, they have to show off their wealth. That asshole with the Land Leviathan before we stole it. Somebody got the bright idea to do this thing. Paid a stupid amount of money and accomplished it. Nobody else could compete at that point, because they’d be an also-ran, even if they built something bigger and badder. Original guy gets all the credit.”
“And to fund it, he built a casino?” Suvi asked from her corner.
“Among other things,” Javier nodded, studying the readout on the screen from a purely social standpoint, after the engineer in him was done drooling over the actual work. “I presume that at this stage, they have ships running back and forth to whoever is nearby on a regular basis, hauling exotic goods and consumables. Plus some of the best recycling systems you can manage. Not like space is a problem, unlike most ships.”
“Agreed,” Suvi said. “Would it be Sentient?”
“I don’t seem to remember it being so,” Javier replied. “But your kind only got really sophisticated in the last century or so, and you’re several generations ahead of all your cousins, on top of that. Likely just incredibly smart systems, automated, as though living on the surface of a moon instead of inside it. Eventually, they might even finish hollowing all the stone off the outside, and turn what’s left into a giant space station that moves. Several more centuries, I’m guessing.”
“At a minimum,” Suvi said. “I’ve read the logs of a ship that visited eighty years ago. They have a ways to go.”
“But yes, a moving party,” Javier said. “Plus, I need to see the interior.”
“I can get you scans that aren’t that far out of date,” Suvi said, flickering Bethany’s screen.
“Social interior, kiddo,” Javier replied. “I want to see how resilient the personality systems are in a place like that.”
“Why?” Bethany asked, honestly confused now, but her mind worked in logical patterns.
Librarian stuff.
She didn’t take enormous leaps of faith without a lot of prodding.
Not like him.
“The Rising Storm,” Javier quoted, circling back to Dorn’s theory that the galaxy was on the verge of unraveling again.
And soon.
PART 3
Zakhar had learned to sit there with a growly look on his face when Javier got one of those wild hair ideas. Listen without interrupting. Digest. Fire off some pithy one-liner with perfect comedic timing when the man was done in order to deflate whatever pomposity his Science Officer had come up with this time.
Djamila beat him to the punch.
“We going into the casino business?” she asked in that moment when all things serious hung in the air, like the sound of artillery at the top of the arc, just before it started whistling down on you.
Zakhar liked the way Javier’s face screwed entirely sideways as his head snapped around to look at her.
They were all seated forward in the main lounge, sipping whatever they preferred. As good a place as any, and they weren’t eating, or they might have done this down in the Bistro instead.
Him, Djamila, Afia Burakgazi, Bethany Durbin, Suvi, Javier.
The Rogue’s Gallery, though he’d deny membership if pressed.
Senior crew council, maybe.
Same thing.
Zakhar let his seriousness melt off into amusement. Javier deserved it.
“What?” Javier demanded.
Demanded might be too strong a word, though.
“Why do we need to stop at this casino?” she asked. “By definition, it fails at the primary purpose of being a self-contained entity that might evade and avoid your coming war. Unless you expected most of the personnel aboard to vacate at some point?”
Man’s mouth moved like a fish. Open. Close. Open. Close.
“Maybe,” Javier finally managed to say. “It has purely engineering benefits, by being a mobile base, however slowly it might move. Ready source of metals and some minerals, because a thing that big has a tremendous amount of volume, whatever is left to hollow out. Life support might be an issue, but it’s easy enough to mine nearby comets and planetary system debris for carbon and oxygen if you don’t have what you need immediately at hand. You can usually find it in the form of dirty ice that can be cracked down to elemental components. That’s not why I want to see it.”
