The Red Admiral, page 8
Big Bad Red Admiral prolly though he were bein’ all sneaky’n’stuff, sending the captain with them, but Desianna’d done snift it all out pretty early. And made sure everyone but Jessica were enough in on it that nobody’d say nor do nothing stupid, like make a pass at the man.
Not that Willow would. Too non-professional. And Moirrey had Digger to look forward to in another few weeks. Marcelle found her own fun on the flight deck, entertaining Gustav, the pilot known as Eel, of all people. Er, maybe being entertained by him. Marcelle weren’t gonna settle for no selfish lovers.
Bird-house-keeper collected the little burrowing owl by bribing her with a caterpillar. Moirrey figgered they’d been gone long ’nuff.
“Seen enough, Lady Casey?” she asked all nice like.
Casey might be a princess back home, and a bad-ass here, but she were still only eighteen, and had never really been out of the palace. Had no idea how to sneak past watch geese or nothing.
Not that Moirrey was gonna teach her today. That could wait a few weeks. Certainness.
“I believe so, Lady Moirrey,” Casey fired back with an evil grin, catchin’ the zoologist folks sideways. She’d been sneaky, introducing the tall, blond girl as important folk and leaving herself out of things. Trust Casey to play rough.
Crap.
Everyone were staring at her now, like she done growed another head.
Moirrey scowled as hard as her giggles would allow, but let the good people fawn o’er her fer a bit. T’weren’t no schedule today besides sun. And maybe ice cream when it got warmer.
’Cause, you know, ice cream. Real stuff, too, and not the bulk containers Mendocino brought them, regular as clock-work out in the deep cold.
Took another five minutes to finally get clear of the owl and raptor folk. Didn’t need no more birds-on-fists. Fed enough critters to enough hunters, thankyouverymuch. Gots places to go, peeples to see.
Finally.
Sunlight and air. Barn weren’t bad, just weren’t sky. Couldna have no windows open, er the birds’d fly off quick-like.
‘Sides, the prey she were trackin’ were sittin’ over here on a bench, all calm and unknowing and stuff. He saw them coming, nodded at her sister, and put down his right hand.
Moirrey watched him lurch to his feet in one quick, ugly motion, like a turtle finally getting upright after fallin’ off a log in the terrarium.
Moirrey knew’d there was a stump there, and a little pocket the captain stood up inta. Hook on a few places like a one-sided garter belt, pull up yer pants, walk like nothing at all. From the lines around Captain’s eyes and cheeks, were right painful today.
“Got a silly, technological question fers ya, Captain Wald,” she said as they all gathered back up, four of them with two satellites wandering around being armed and dangerous.
“Yes, ma’am?” the captain said.
Once he got to walkin’, ya couldn’t tell, but standing up and that first step were dead giveaways.
“Why a peg-leg?” Moirrey asked. “Why don’t Fribourg do a modern, computerized version like we do?”
She’d spent enuf time ’round the captain to know this were safe ground. His silence now were mostly lookin’ fer words. Translatin’ cultures, which he were good at.
“The single greatest threat to humanity that Fribourg can imagine is an AI, a Sentience, the kind that nearly destroyed us all, Lady Moirrey,” he began.
He looked close at her. Eyeballin’ her soul, Ma useta say.
“There is something worse,” the captain continued. “Something from the very early days of technology. Humans used to implant computers directly into their bodies, madam. Cybernetic systems capable of replacing your eyes with artificial sensors, or your limbs with enhanced, robotic versions. Or worse, connecting your brain directly to the Sentience itself, turning you into a member of a giant hive, like a worker ant.”
“We’re talkin’ ’bout a leg, Captain,” Moirrey retorted lightly.
Some peoples were just too serious about things.
“We’re talking about the first step towards evil, Lady Moirrey,” he replied. “Would I like a leg that worked thoughtlessly? Painlessly? Absolutely. Wire it right up and let me at it. If I was never going home again, I would seriously consider investigating the state of the art in the Republic. But this is just a mission. I would have to give up everything and be completely ostracized. Never go home. That will never be worth it.”
Moirrey felt her mouth screw up kinda sideways as she stared at the man.
Thinkin’.
She’d done some research afore now, just to talk tech with the dude, but hadn’t expected that level of calm No.
Figured. Man weren’t no slouch, er the Red Admiral, the other Red Admiral, the Grand Admiral, woulda never tried a stunt like this.
They had stopped walking. Well, she had, and everyone else had kinda petered out with her.
Whoops.
“Not wired, I get that,” she finally said after a second. “There’s gotta be a better way to do it, though.”
“Shades of evil, Lady Moirrey?” he asked in a tight voice.
“Shades of stupid, Captain Wald,” she snapped back. “Ya lives in near-constant pain, ’specially since planets ya visits’ll have a wacko gravity field and atmospheric pressure. Kin only ’magine what a storm’d be like. Is unnecessary. Makes it a bad design solution.”
Man weren’t dumb, just stubborn. Of course, weren’t like nobody within two meters weren’t stubborn, too. If they coulda distilled it, she’d be rich.
Moirrey stepped back one stride to see his leg better, to visualize things. Captain Wald stood stock still and faced her, as stubborn a guy as even Digger, which were high praise. Moirrey blocked out everyone else.
There. Huh. Maybe? Dancin’ on the edge, but this side, so even the captain oughts to not bitch much. And I can always yell at the Grand Admiral and Karl VII about it. Start a new trend. Something more civilized.
Moirrey smiled up at him.
The stubborn had been replaced with concerned. Kinda sideway looking at her, which meant he were smarter than he let on, too. Knew she were up to something. And knew her rep as a crazy woman.
Whole damned Empire knew that.
“So,” she said in a voice that had stolen every cookie out of the jar when mom weren’t looking. “Wired neuro-implants is out. Got that. What’s about a pure osseointegrated solution?”
“A what?” he asked.
Moirrey liked the way everybody got that confused look, but remained silent. This were just the two of them, at least until her sister needed to come rescue the poor guy, him being out-numbered five to one, ’n’all.
She turned to Casey, included her in the grin.
“So’s,” Moirrey continued. “Ya implant a hunk of something, traditionally an alloy of titanium, usually with a threaded end, like a screw, and an open structure, kinda mesh-like. Bone’ll grow around it, given time. Other end sticks out the stump, right out of the skin, with a connection socket at the far end.”
Casey nodded slowly, aware that she might suddenly be on the hooks in an official-like capacity n’stuff.
“With you so far,” she said warily.
“With us, we attach a custom limb with artificial muscles and wire it all to the existing nerve endings,” Moirrey chirped. “After about six months, you can walk like normal, once all the bone stabilizes and yer brain rewires itself. After that, you can start training fer marathons, if’n yer crazy enough.”
“Okay?” Casey continued.
“What if we left just the stump and the socket bits?” Moirrey asked. “Build him a detachable titanium peg-leg with a foot. And maybe some racing stripes, but no electronics. No cybernetics. Just chrome.”
It were fun, watching everybody’s face go confusered. Moirrey decided that were her cookie of awesomeness fer today, and just started walking. Let them catch up, physically and metaphorically.
If’n they could.
Seriously? The Fribourg Empire were all about black and white, some days. Useful, but stoooooopid.
Moirrey already had three-quarters of the design built in her head. Only real question were if he were right-hand dominant, like a lesser being, or a lefty, like all right-thinking people. Drop a hex-head bolt in and add a cute little carrier for the wrench right into the shin.
And maybe some flames.
Chapter XI
Date of the Republic August 23, 399 Fleet Headquarters, Ladaux
The light was subtly wrong, Jessica decided. About half a notch too dark for her preferences. It gave the bridge an ominous cast that just unsettled her.
Probably by design, she decided after a moment of thought. Keep everyone just a shade off center. She checked her control boards once more and looked around, pulling her sleeves down for the umpteenth time.
Jessica hadn’t worn one of her old black and green command centurion tunics in years, and this one was tight in the torso. She decided that maybe she hadn’t spent enough time in the gym and the pool, or on the dojo floor. Time to shave off those last three kilos she’d never gotten around to.
And maybe two more after that. Get back down to her original Academy graduating mass, two decades on.
This was not her lovely flag bridge on Auberon, all round with the big display in the center of the conference table. It was instead long and shaped like an arrowhead with the very tip chopped off blunt where a display screen showed Ladaux’s horizon turning below them.
RAN VI Ferrata. Meaning Iron-clad. Trust an outsider like Yan to out-Roman a culture that had consciously shaped itself after one of the greatest cultures in history, naming the first Expeditionary Cruiser after one of Rome’s most famous legions, rather than using the normal naming schema for a ship in the battlecruiser class.
Of course, Jessica wasn’t sure that the battlecruiser designation fit, either. Yan had called it a pocket dreadnought, among other things, including fire-breathing dragon. An all-big-gun, fast, super-heavy cruiser with only energy weapons, against a foe that specialized in some sort of power absorption system, rather than the traditional ship’s shields everyone else used.
Jessica shook her head and focused. She knew he was out there, lurking. In that, she had an advantage over the average ambush those bastards sprang. And she knew she was facing what Fribourg called a Mako. All of Buran’s ship classes were named after terrestrial sharks. Makos were pure, energy-weapon-based, heavy cruisers, unlike the new type that had bombed St. Legier, the missile-and-bomb-armed variant called a Roughshark.
She knew looking for it would be a waste of time. Even this deep in a gravity well, the damned thing could blink on old-fashioned JumpDrives, like an electron hopping from one valence shell to the next. You could do that when your ship was Sentient. It was just a massive math problem to navigate across the gravity well.
Jessica would have thought it impossible for a human to accomplish, until she met the Twins: Asra and Saša Binici. Neon Pink and Rocket Frog. Two of Queen Jessica’s best pilots, trained by Pops Nakamura to do the impossible.
No, it was just patience and planning, two things Jessica also excelled at.
“Tactical,” she called to the young man who was her First Officer today. “Confirm all batteries are cleared and charged.”
The man looked at the two officers facing him across a small area on her right. Gunnery and Defense Centurions with serious faces. Quick words flowed back and forth.
“Confirmed, Command Centurion,” the man called back less than a second later. “Bubble gun is holding a charge in the tube. Type-1-Pulse are set for incoming missiles and fighters. Type-3-Tuned are charged. Two are set for long range, the rest for close work. Both Type-4’s are cleared and charged.”
“Pilot, bring us up five and accelerate a touch,” Jessica ordered. “Make him chase us a little.”
The waiting was the most frustrating part. Dark space around her and a thief in the night.
Only this one was holding a knife and measuring her kidneys, rather than trying to flee.
“Contact,” the science officer yelled across the space. “Ship just appeared off our port bow.”
“Engage,” Jessica ordered.
She had already briefed her new crew, but this wasn’t the team she had spent years building.
Honing.
Denis would have been a half-breath ahead of her, giving the order, and even that would have been too long. Aleksander and Nina would have opened fire as soon as Giroux made a sound, confident that nobody innocent was going to just appear on their sensors.
Because they made very little sound themselves, each weapon was coded to a tone so the bridge crew could identify them as they fired. The Music of War, some wag had called it, once upon an epoch ago.
The defensive array, a series of Type-1-Pulse beams on the flank, chirped like an angry squirrel as they fired. The Type-3 beams were lower, individual notes down a half octave or so as they joined the symphony. VI Ferrata didn’t have primaries, but the Type-4 beam sounded like a truck horn, angry and compelling. Jessica appreciated the penetrating nature of the sound, but she would have had them redone as something more like a tuba after this.
Less likely to induce headaches.
“Pilot, shut down and execute your roll,” Jessica ordered over the rising din.
The Expeditionary Cruiser had been designed, in part, for Alber’ d’Maine to fly into battle. High-Energy-Turns, pivoting an entire warship on an axis to bring weapons to bear at a target that thought he was safely behind you.
The Mako unleashed his mauler, the weapon called a Mag-Shear that went through standard shields like a knife through warm butter. The Expeditionary Cruiser had very light shields for a ship this size, basically what a normal, smaller heavy cruiser would array, relying instead, in part, on insulation and physical armor plating on the outer hull itself to protect them.
Everything lit up at once as the Mako’s Pulse beams and Flicker beams ripped into VI Ferrata’s hull like a school of piranha. Smoke and sparks filled the bridge and it sounded like Surtur, the bringer of fire himself, was trying to beat the door down with an axe.
And then darkness.
Jessica had made sure she was strapped in, which was good, since they lost gravplates and she found herself pushing upwards against the seat belt.
Emergency lights came on in places, showing one crew member floating helplessly in space across the way, cursing like the sailor he was.
“All hands, stand down,” a voice cut through the noise and smoke. “This exercise is complete.”
“Damn it,” Jessica said, grinding her teeth together to keep the longer string of profanities inside her head. These people didn’t need to see her rage.
“Lights up, please,” Yan Bedrov’s voice was easier to hear now, as people quieted. “Bring the gravplates to five percent until our little bird lands safely.”
That brought a round of laughter as the blushing man dropped. Hopefully, his belt had broken in the excitement, and he hadn’t just forgotten to attach it.
Of course, the whole point of a training exercise like this was to knock all the bad habits out of people in controlled circumstances.
“Good,” Yan continued, rising effortlessly from his station in a rear corner as Jessica turned her head to look. “Gravplates to standard.”
Air systems had already gone into overload to suck out the fake smoke and ozone from the air as the lights came back on.
Yan was holding a clipboard in one hand, taking notes. He reminded her of Navin the Black, Jessica’s long-time Security Centurion who did everything on paper first, and only entered it into a system later. Jessica did the same thing.
Notes on paper were personal, until she chose to commit them to eternity.
“Good news,” Yan said as he strode close.
Jessica tried not to snarl at the man in frustration.
First Lord Kasum was here as well. He had been manning the Science station. His voice had called the encounter.
“How could that be good?” Jessica was exasperated.
“You just got the second highest score of anybody going through this training exercise,” he smiled evilly at her. “Forty percent.”
Ouch. Everyone else had been even lower?
“Who has first place?” she asked, naturally competitive, especially in her field of expertise, combat maneuvering.
“Me,” he grinned as he leaned on the side of her chair.
“You cheated,” she fired back. “You wrote the scenario.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I only programmed it. It runs itself along a very sophisticated decision matrix, once you fire it up.”
“So how do you beat it?” another voice joined in.
Petia Naoumov. First Centurion, Home Fleet. Previously seated quietly in a rear corner, watching. And learning. A tall woman with long, black hair and Japanese ancestry. Jessica’s boss. Everybody’s boss as senior flag officer serving, answering only to the First Lord himself. And the person most likely to replace that man when he retired.
Yan grinned. He looked almost like a weasel spying a lame chicken.
“You people are fantastic tacticians,” he said, encompassing Petia, Nils, Jessica, and the rest of the bridge crew with one hand. “But you have never been pirates. And never had to out-think them.”
“Pirates?” Nils asked, coming up to form the fourth side of the diamond.
“Correct, First Lord,” Yan replied. “You think in Cartesian space. Maneuver to optimum position for your shields and guns. Overwhelm the other guy when he finds himself out of position and facing the wrong way.”
“So what’s the answer to Buran?” Jessica asked, knowing that Yan wasn’t just showing off. Although there was an element of that, as well, this pirate from the galactic fringes getting to show up the rich cousins.
“We pirates never want to kill the other guy, Your Majesty,” he replied with a sardonic look. “Why bother going to all the effort? No, we want to sneak up on him, disable the bastard, and steal all his stuff. You had the right idea at St. Legier when you suckered that Roughshark in by flying Kali-ma too far off the Blackbird’s flank, putting us out of close escort. You have to think like a pirate here, as well. He’ll do the same thing. At least until he learns better.”
