Per Ardua, Ad Astra - Part 3
"Sir," the Bizi Kei officer said, getting his superior's attention. He was a young officer, straight out of training academy, and had the attentive focus of someone out to prove himself. Charlotte was an out of the way intelligence and data center, but it was also well away from the front lines and an ambitious deployment for a new tech officer's first tour of duty.
"Report." Kazuno moved to stand behind the young man's chair, looking over his shoulder as he gestured to his console.
"We've cleaned up the data Commander Taka sent as much as possible. They're still very fuzzy because the recorder they left in the Nera system appears to have been damaged by space debris." He realized he was rambling when Captain Kazuno cleared his throat slightly, letting him know to get on with his report. "Anyway, sir, we don't have much, but the energy emissions seem consistent with readings for two Manta 52 freighters, but we don't have anything concrete other than that. The visuals didn't come through well at all. Tohya is still working on them, but we don't expect much."
"Good work, Umi. Keep me updated." Umi practically glowed with the pride of a job well done. His superior officer would forward the information up the command chain. His work was helping the Bizi Kei Alliance win a decades' old war; countless lives might be saved because of the job he had done. He was going to tell his mother and father about this the next time he wrote home. They would be so proud of him.
***
The next few weeks were a little slow, the One Piece running standard bulk-good delivery jobs, mostly. They could have gotten more jobs closer to the hub of the galaxy this time of year, but Tegoshi had run a cost-benefit analysis and concluded that it would take more money in terms of food, air, and fuel to get there than anything they were likely to make once they'd arrived. Still, they turned a profit, and they worked their way slowly through the cut of systems on the border between the Jimsho Confederacy and the Bizi Kei Alliance, where they based their business.
They caught a week and a half as gimpa fruit transporters during the height of the season, signing on as independent contractors with the largest--and only--producer in the Fod System. The entire second planet was one giant agro-business and pretty inherently sketchy. Still, low-life scum or not, they were hiring and the run from Fod Produce, which was the officially registered name of the planet, and the actual inhabited planets--fourth and fifth from the small sun--in the system was short and easy. As far as the transport business went, it was fairly steady work. All they had to do was get the shipments to the customs space stations twirling lazily around each planet, and they could collect their paycheck for the job. You had to move gimpa fruit quickly or it went bad, and there wasn't much market outside the system for it, so it was short-term, but it kept them occupied.
Once the Fod Produce job was over, Ryo took the One Piece back to Wilson's Station in the Nojiri-Espisoto System. NEWS was a little free-standing station, not attached to any inhabited planets, in a system just over the Jimsho border from the Independent Territories. It might actually be the Independent Territories now; the border was always shifting in that part of the galaxy, and the only people to really take notice were putting together chartography textbooks for civics classes. Temporary inclusion or exclusion from a political power thousands of light years away didn't make much difference out here on the border, and the station had always defended itself from the dangers of space.
NEWS was where they went for downtime and repairs, refueling and negotiations. The One Piece kept a berth there permanently; it was as close to home as they had, outside the freighter itself. Jimsho Confederacy credits were high on the exchange scale compared to NEWS system currency, so when they made port and finally exchanged most of their Jimsho credits for NEWS system currency, they made another three percent over their payment for the Nera run. It was nice, having that unexpected cushion in the bank, and Ryo and Yamapi gave everyone a week off while they started planning what kinds of jobs would be most likely to turn a profit in the next few months.
***
Toma probably knew just about everyone in the businesses of transport and trade. Sometimes Kame thought he might actually know everyone, not just in transport and trade, but in that swath of the galaxy. He'd worked with everyone at some point or another, arranging routes, setting up suppliers, transporters and buyers, and completing deals for all kinds of exotic and mundane goods. Everyone he worked with, it seemed, took a particular liking to Toma, and added to his list of contacts. Toma was a good kind of guy--he threw business your way if it was the sort of business you wanted with a kind of easy charm, so you found yourself returning the favor when you could. If you were ever looking for something specific, he was your best first bet and probably your best last.
Kame hadn't stopped by for business though; he usually let Jin take care of negotiations because he had a natural flair for it. Kame, like several of the other visitors Toma had in the half hour he'd been there, had just dropped by to say hi since he was in-system, and if you were stationside anyway, not seeing Toma at all wasn't really an option. Most people didn't stay long, just enough for a 'Hey, how's business? We're doing good. Should probably get back to the ship, actually--need to crash. Just letting you know we're here.' Half promised to come by later, looking to resupply or for help closing a deal. Half left it like that, knowing Toma would know where to find them if he came across something they'd be interested in.
Toma wasn't technically in the shipping business, which might be one of the reasons everyone liked him so much--no direct competition. Toma was a supplier at heart, where spacers got their necessities. He carried everything from atmosphere to engine parts in small quantities, and of course, he knew where you could get just about anything, if you were willing to wait a few days. He kept his shop front in the business district, sandwiched in between a noodle place and strip club, opposite a used clothing store. It was a spacer kind of area, which made sense for a business neighborhood on a space station, whole station a port town of sorts, everything about it aimed at the transitory, services for people who hopefully wouldn't be staying long enough to make real trouble. Kame liked it because it somehow managed to have a relaxed, down-home feeling to it, even if it was, on the surface, just like any of a dozen similar districts on a dozen stations in fifty of the nearest systems.
Kame had come to make his usual 'greet, then sleep' visit to Toma--the other members of the crew would be by around later to do the same--but when he'd gotten there, Toma had asked him to stay a few minutes because "Pi had left a package for him." Kame had frowned. He couldn't see any reason why Yamapi would want to send him anything. He didn't owe Yamapi anything, the One Piece didn't have anything from the Space Queen, they weren't friends; they were, for better or worse, business rivals, and not very much more. Someone else, a kid really, that Toma had called Morimoto before asking after a slew of other individuals, had dropped by before Toma could dig out Kame's package though, and then another person, and then a pair of younger women who looked a little too adorable to be really dangerous except they gave Toma a set of tiger claws from Claus Nebula and promised to tell him the story later. And so, Kame was still waiting. The flurry of activity made sense because a lot of ships came in during station night but couldn't get their docking credentials processed until the morning. Customs would be open in twenty minutes--thirty from when Kame had first arrived at Toma's little store front--and the new arrivals would be flocking to the office so they could start conducting business. You could move around the station without checking in with customs as only planetside officials cared about the movement of people, but you couldn't get any real work done until you cleared your ship. The hubbub would die down eventually, and then maybe Kame could get his whatever it was from Toma, stop by customs himself, and then head back to the ship for a little bit of well deserved sleep.
"Right, sorry," Toma said, finally, after bidding the two women goodbye, dropping a small parcel wrapped in packing paper on the top of his counter.
"Popular guy," Kame jibed, pulling the package towards him. Toma grinned and shrugged self-deprecatingly, as if he had no idea why everyone seemed to like him so much. "Any idea what's in it?"
Toma shrugged again, a little less sly this time, and said, "No idea. Pi was here about a week ago and came by to shoot the breeze. He came and dropped that off for your ship before they left the station."
"Well, thanks," Kame said, holding up the parcel before sticking it in the front of his coat. "Gotta drop by the customs office. If this thing gets me arrested, I'm fingering you for it." Kame grinned, and Toma's cheerful laughter followed him out the door.
***
It was a data disk, wrapped up in a little emergency blanket, the kind that were stocked in every ship by the dozens in case you ever lost heat. The disk had been tucked into the blanket carefully, presumably to serve as a little extra protection for the disk. Surprisingly, Ryo's face spread across the screen when Kame popped the disk in the reader, and he looked even less happy to 'see' Kame than usual.
Ryo's image on screen cleared his throat. "We might have a problem."
***
Yamapi had stopped by Toma's late in the day. It was an off hour, and just about every other shop on the street was closed. Toma's was closed too, technically, little cheap plastic sign flipped to 'closed' hanging up in the doorway of Johnny's Junior, but Toma's place was never really closed as long as he was inside it. Toma had opened the door to Yamapi's grinning face, then shut it again quickly to undo the chain, before pulling it wide for Yamapi to slide inside past him.
"Pi! Finally back in my neck of the woods, I see!" Toma greeted him enthusiastically.
"Seems so," Yamapi grinned back. "Brought you a present," he said, dropping two slightly past ripe gimpa fruit on the edge of the counter as he walked past it, then hoped up to sit on the surface from the inside. "Promised your mama I'd take care of you when you moved way out here."
"I'm pretty sure the conversation went the other way, with me and your mom," Toma laughed, then pulled a face when he saw the fruit. "Ew, those things are disgusting. Dunno how anyone eats them."
Yamapi laughed. "But I brought them all the way from Fod just for you! Don't be ungrateful! I'll tell your mama, just you watch me."
"When you go to tell her, why don't you bring her those," Toma jerked a thumb at the fruit sitting on his counter. "She'll tell you I did the right thing. So how long you in for?" Toma asked, switching subjects.
Yamapi kicked his legs gently against the cabinets below him. "Few days, maybe less. Ryo's got us something lined up in SR88, so we're looking for work that will swing us out that way, try and make enough to offset the run out that way. Know of anything good on station right now? Need to move something worth the fuel it takes to haul it."
"Oh hey!" Toma blurted out, suddenly remembering something. "You're in a Manta 52, aren't you? Bizi Kei's been looking for a couple of Manta 52s lately, started putting out feelers about, oh, mid last week. Bet it was you they're looking for. Knock off a couple Bizi Kei officers or something? Double cross them out by the Nera System lately?" Toma laughs, clearly joking. No one knew the One Piece had been in the Nera System, no one except the crew of the Space Queen, and the officers from the Arashi they'd rescued from one of the moons there. Yamapi laughed back, but his blood ran cold. Frap. Bizi Kei was looking for them. Maybe Bizi Kei didn't know it was them yet, but eventually they would. They were in trouble.
***
"More than a problem, I'd say!"
Koki was ranting. He paced back and forth on one side of the galley, behind a row of chairs that had been neatly pushed under the galley table in the middle of the room. Mostly he muttered to himself angrily, though sometimes the volume picked up a little, and occasionally he'd flail his arms around in half-aborted, angry gestures. Koki wasn't reacting well to the fact that they were probably all going to die.
Kame couldn't really say he blamed him. Beside him, Shige fidgeted uncomfortably. The crew of the One Piece was just as unsettled by the rumors they'd heard about Bizi Kei's hunt for two Manta 52s.
"It's really not that bad, though," Koyama interjected into Koki's tirade. Koki didn't stop pacing, but he did stop talking in order to listen. "I mean, there are lots of Manta 52s in the galaxy. If 'Manta 52' is all they're going by, there's no reason for them to think it's us." Koyama had a point. The Manta series was popular particularly among individuals or small business owners because ships much bigger started getting prohibitively expensive to finance unless you had access to government funds or a multiplanetary corporation's checkbook. Even for deeper pockets, smaller freighters could get in places bigger ones simply didn't fit, so even large, expensive cargo fleets tended to sport a few in the Manta series. 52s in particular had proven to be reliable ships so the make was especially popular, and would continue to be--if only because they lasted longer in the first place.
Freighters, even ones that weren't under the same ownership, often traveled in groups of two or three. Some jobs were one-ship jobs, sure--if your job was a special order or dealt in curios, you didn't even really need the whole hold, much less another ship, and could use the other space for side jobs or fill it with extra goods you knew you'd be able to offload easily somewhere--but, most jobs had more than enough potential cargo for a single ship to handle. If you owned more than one ship you could handle the whole job yourself, but if you didn't, chances were good that your buyers were also hiring someone else to take what you couldn't. Traveling together was safer, so unless you had a particular reason to dislike your cargo buddies, you might as well fly the route together and keep an eye out on each other's tails. Finding a specific set of two Manta 52 freighters without any further details would be next to impossible; you had better odds with the proverbial needle in the haystack. Space was limitless--at least the haystack ended eventually.
Also reassuring was the fact that they hadn't seen any official warrants yet either, and they might not be forthcoming. If 'Manta 52' was all the Bizi Kei Alliance had to go on, that wasn't too surprising--a tenth of all mid-sized freighters fell into one of the Manta lines--but it might also speak of a desire to keep things under wraps as long as possible on Bizi Kei's end of things. As long as that lasted, at least, it was a good situation for them. As long as there weren't any open prices on their heads, it would keep the two ships from falling victim to less-than-upright acquaintances turned eager bounty hunters handing them over for a few bucks. It wasn't hopeless. It wasn't hopeless--provided Bizi Kei didn't actually know who they were.
It started getting complicated when it came to records of their whereabouts in the past few weeks. There wasn't anything to tie them to the Nera system in either ship or their recent ports of stay, not directly. Not unless Bizi Kei had more information up their sleeves than they were letting on. Not unless they got more information from somewhere else, because maybe there were no civilian records of where they'd been those few days, but there was almost certainly something somewhere in Jimsho command that could place them there. Order records, Takki's data transmission, a receipt for the pay they got for the haul innocently sitting on some accountant's desk somewhere, anything like that got to Bizi Kei and they were so much space junk. They weren't in the clear either.
And Bizi Kei was relentless. That was how they'd engineered control of the largest chunk of galaxy in history. Frankly, that wasn't a chance Kame really wanted to take.
***
"No," Ryo slammed his hand down on the table. "No, absolutely not. That's idiotic." He had a point. If Bizi Kei didn't know who they are, if they had no real way of figuring that out, it would be one of the stupider moves they could make. Going back to Kefera, talking the crew from the Arashi into getting them to Takki, getting further tangled up with Jimsho military when those ties were the last thing they needed. Kind of like painting a really big target on their backs and dancing a jig in front of Bizi Kei command while singing an upbeat dance number titled 'Here I am, shoot me.' On the other hand, if Bizi Kei didn't know who they were yet but they could find out, this was the best thing they had. Otherwise they'd just be running, running for the rest of their lives, taking small jobs, keeping a low profile and wondering if five years down the line Bizi Kei wouldn't put the right set of dots together and realize that the One Piece and the Space Queen were sitting right there, hoping no one would notice.
"We're in the shipping business, not the getting shot at business," Shige joked, driving his point home. "This thing is kind of out of our league." Ryo didn't want to hear any of it though, and smacked him down with a smarting comment that seemed to be aimed more at past personal interactions than the issue at hand. It was not the best way to win an argument, but Kame--like most of the rest of the group gathered in the galley--already had his opinions on the issue.
If what it was going to come down to was just a matter of time, then Kame would much rather be proactive about their inevitable encounter than wait for Bizi Kei to surprise him. He wasn't stupid. He knew any kind of situation where the Space Queen and its crew went up against one of the two largest militaries in the world, it was not going to go well for them--particularly if Bizi Kei were the ones who were ready for it. Yamapi was with him for once, though he'd been quiet since his initial siding with Kame. Shige agreed with him too, but Koki was nodding along with everything Ryo said about how it was the fastest way he'd ever heard to get them all killed when they could live long, happy lives with Bizi Kei none the wiser.
They were pretty evenly split, all told: six for, five against, and Ueda holding out as undecided.
***
Ueda prevented the seemingly imminent tie by refusing to come down on either side, leaving the vote at six to five in favor for making Jimsho clean up what they unanimously agreed was Jimsho's mess. Ryo grumbled about not being willing to let everyone get a vote if they were going to vote against him, and it was such a petulant complaint that Kame had to laugh. That broke the tension still swirling around the galley from the earlier flaring tempers.
"Takki or that crew we rescued at Nera?" Yamapi asked into the lull, and there was a little flurry of much more friendly debate about who would be more able or willing to help them. In the end, it came down to the simple fact that they knew where they'd dropped off the crew of the Arashi, and Takki was at some secret Jimsho military base Brahe only knew where. "Call them when we're closer," Yamapi told Koyama. "Guess we're setting a course for Kefera."
Pikanchi had been a remote surveillance outpost under Jimsho control for several years--up until the last six months it had been almost completely unimportant, and so defense capabilities hadn't been an issue. No one was going to attack Pikanchi Base because there was almost literally nothing there, the outer space equivalent of a planetside weather tower. The planet itself was habitable and temperate, but low on natural resources profitable enough to bother developing and a little too far from anything of import to make upgrading the station or planet really worthwhile.
In recent months, the garrison stationed at Pikanchi had more than tripled in preparation for a number of operations that would take place all across that sector, including minor forays past the Bizi Kei border. The base itself had been expanded extensively to house all the new personnel, and while the surface-to-space rocket launchers hadn't been upgraded, the new buildings and bunkers were constructed to be able to withstand a brutal beating; the old ones had been reinforced enough to take nearly as much damage while still protecting the fragile human lives housed inside. The base had still had that new construction feel when they'd dropped the crew from the Arashi off there before, but now, only a few weeks later, it already looked like it was settling into its new skin.
"Well," Matsujun smirked up from the floor of the docking bay, "Didn't expect to see you again." Kame knocked his shoulder against Jin's, so while Jin scowled at the Jimsho officer, he didn't rise to the bait.
"I know we got permission to land, but permission to disembark?" Kame asked, still from the authority of the lowered cargo door of the Space Queen. Matsujun waved Kame down, the other members of the crew following behind him, and escorted them to a briefing room to wait while the One Piece landed. Another twenty minutes, and the other crew had been escorted to the same conference room. Matsujun left them there, briefly, after asking them not to leave the room, to go talk to his "superiors." Kame really hoped Ohno was in command of this base. It would probably make things easier. In a pinch they could probably have Yamapi appeal to Takki, but first they had to get him on a line somewhere. Yamapi had left him a veiled message at T&T Supplies, but they hadn't gotten anything back before they'd started for Kefera. They'd done their best to drop off the map a little before starting the run at the system to make it harder to track their movements back to them, so it was entirely possible that Takki--through Tsubasa, his intelligence officer--simply didn't know exactly where they were at the moment.
Koki settled against the wall to wait. He didn't look happy to be there, but he wasn't protesting any longer. Once they'd started in on this location, they were pretty much locked into this course of action anyway. He wasn't stupid. If it came down to a choice between getting shot at in a two-gun freighter in vacuum, or getting shot at in a reinforced bunker on a planet with atmosphere, Koki was going to pick the planet.
It wasn't long before most of Pikanchi command--the former bridge crew of the Arashi as it turned out, now settled into reassignment at a planetary base--filed into the room. Pretty big brass to meet some lowly freighter drivers. Saving a life seemed to be worth something after all. "So," Commander Ohno said, looking around the room. "What can we do for you?"
Kame glanced briefly at the others before explaining the rumors they'd been hearing, how Bizi Kei was looking to finish the job they'd started at Nera by wiping them off the charts too. The Jimsho officers listened patiently, Aiba with open curiosity, and Matsujun with a pinched look on his face that was probably Jin's fault for existing.
"Take the Love So Sweet up to get Takki," Ohno ordered Matsujun, who, for the first time, stopped looking prissy in order to follow his leader's orders. "The Love So Sweet is the Storm-class cruiser attached to this command," he explained to the freighter crews. He seemed completely oblivious to the twelve almost identical looks of shock and horror that his information inspired. Trust these guys to have named one of the most kill-efficient battle ships in the galaxy the Love So Sweet.
"We need to corroborate this information, of course," Nino cut in smoothly when it looked like Ohno was done, and then they were gone, leaving the spacers to themselves in the conference room again to wait.
***
"Pull back! All forces pull back." It crackled through the comm, emphatic, but no hint of panic in the ensign's voice, thanks to Bizi Kei's superior training. Taka knew enough now to realize that his father's stint in Emiromisaki's Independent Protection Force had been full of heart, but light on resources for actual training. They taught you how to fly and how to shoot, and if you lived past your first few engagements, you were considered trained. Bizi Kei was nothing like that. "Repeat, all forces pull back," buzzed through the comm again, and as Taka hit the fighter he'd been dogging, he fought his way to the edge of the fray.
Ilana. Taka realized it as he pulled away from the swarming cloud of fighters. As space opened up in front if him, some space cleared in his mind and he knew. Alex.
He knew, but he turned around in his pilot's seat anyway, back twisting, neck straining to look into the chaos of battle behind him, just like he'd done in real life then, but now with the added dread of knowing what was about to happen. There was the dogfight, where he'd just been, and 'above' it relative to Taka's line of flight, the capital ships lobbed barrage after barrage into each other. Skating along the edge of the capital ships, far closer to the Ilana base Jimsho forces than they should have been, were two small fighter craft--Alex and Toru, flying close to the skin of one of the larger vessels, trying to pick off gun emplacements. They got the order to retreat the same moment they all had, and Taka watched the exact moment they began to disengage, then the moment they began pull away from the fight.
They were nearly out, sliding agily between the much, much bigger, much less maneuverable capital ships, Toru in the lead, and Alex flying wing. Suddenly Alex's fighter began to dip and shake, changing course suddenly to a vector off into nowhere. The controls were dead--the controls or the pilot. Taka couldn't see the actual spray of bullets that must have hit Alex's ship--he was too far away, but he'd seen the sparks flashing from the nearest capital--a relatively small frigate, "Arashi" painted large on the side. Later Toru, much closer when it happened, would confirm this. The Arashi had killed Alex's fighter--had killed Alex.
Then, right before Taka's eyes, Alex's fighter broke up entirely, pieces spinning off the cockpit, exposing the pilot to the unforgiving vacuum, wings torn away with the engines that couldn't be shut down. A bright splash of color floated free of the center of the debris--it had to be Alex, whole or dead already. In normal circumstances, they'd have sent a medishuttle to pick him up, rescue him, alive or dead. If he were still alive, they could start treatment on the shuttle itself as he was transported to a full medical facility. If he weren't, they'd at least be able to lay him to rest properly.
But they weren't under normal circumstances--they weren't even under typical battle conditions. They were in the middle of a full-scale retreat, and the line of flight that Alex's fighter when he--when the controls went dead--had taken, sent him back towards the Jimsho capital ships. There was no way they'd be able to get a medishuttle in there. Trying would be suicide.
It had all really happened in the space of half a minute, but Taka had replayed every moment over in his head so many times since then, searching for something they could have done differently, anything that might have saved Alex. A handful of seconds stretching out into an eternity, but at the end of it Alex was dead.
Taka woke with a start, sweat cold and clammy clinging to him under his shirt. He threw off the covers, suddenly smothering him, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Leaning forward, he scrubbed his hands over his face as though trying to scrub away the nightmare. He'd had it countless times since Ilana, watching Alex die again and again, and knowing there was nothing he could do about it.
He'd killed the Arashi in Nera. The gunner who'd gotten the frapping lucky shot that had hit Alex was almost certainly dead, most of the frigate venting atmosphere before what was left crashed into the moon, breaking up as it bounced across the surface. He'd probably never even made it to the moon's surface.
Someone had gotten out though--those two freighters had been in system far too long to just be surveying the damage, and no reports of mass destruction had been reported to the judiciary who, on paper anyway, controlled Nera. Someone on the Arashi had survived, been rescued, had it hushed up. Taka needed to find out where they were. He owed it to Alex to finish the job.
***
"You were right," Nino said when he came back to the room they were keeping the freighter crews in. They owed them for their lives, perhaps, but Pikanchi, the base on Kefera, was still a military installation. Civilians didn't get to wander around it at will. "Bizi Kei does have feelers out for a couple of Manta 52s, based on proximity to the Nera system during a two week time frame--"
"Let me guess," Ryo interrupted, "With the day we were there smack dab in the middle of it?"
Nino turned to face Ryo directly. "That's right. They are just feelers though, and really light on actual info. Usually they've got more of a dossier together before they put something out, but these don't look like they're coming through official channels. I don't think they've got any more info on you than that right now, and judging from the rumors that are circulating, I don't even think they're really looking for you. It's more like they know someone was there, they know what kind of ships you were flying, and they know you got out again, but since they don't have enough to narrow it down yet, they're just going to start floating the nets out. Probably they won't catch anything yet, but if they get just a little more information, and then next time, they get just a little more information, and keep at it, eventually they might start after you in earnest. They don't even have digital images, as far as we can tell, and it's still all back door chatter."
"If they don't have digital, how do they even know what you were flying?" Aiba asked then. He had more on the ground expertise than intelligence background, and his technical prowess lay very firmly in the area of explosives.
Shige spoke up to answer. "Engine emissions, probably." Koki nodded from where he was leaning against the wall by the door. "Ship manufacturers use them all the time. They're designed to be pretty portable, so they're not big. If you didn't want to transmit the information anywhere, you could just use the standard industrial model, hook it up to a data recorder, and still be able to fit the whole thing into a shoulder bag."
Koki nodded again, picking up the explanation. "Wouldn't be too hard to swing back to the system once you thought it was clear and pick up your surveillance device. Manta 52, any ship really, you'd be able to tell what it was by the engine specs. It's how you know if your ship's running properly. A 57 might fall into standard 52 specs sometimes, if it was really in bad shape, but a 57 with an engine working like that, you probably couldn't get it out of the system anyway," he added.
Jin cleared his throat. "So. They don't know it's us, but they'll probably figure it out eventually if we give them enough time." Looking around at everyone else, Jin received a few half-hearted nods. It was depressing stuff. Even if everyone realized that was most likely how things were going to play out, acknowledging it was still difficult. "Now what?"
There was a pause when Nino looked at Aiba, who frowned back. "We should get Sho," Aiba finally said, reluctantly.
"And then we should get in contact with Tsubasa," Nino added. "We'll need him."
***
The problem was that Sho's idea was insane. Not just insane, suicidal. That was the problem with these military types, they were always trying to throw their lives away. Ryo was not too keen on the idea, less keen on his friends, both on the One Piece, and grudgingly now on the Space Queen, throwing their lives away, and particularly vehemently against the possibility of endangering his baby.
The other problem was that they didn't really have many options at this point. One, they could crawl back out of the base with their tails between their legs, pretending they had never heard of the Nera System, much less had actually been there, rescuing Jimsho frigate bridge crews from the jaws of death by suffocation or starvation or hypothermia. The main problem with the 'run and hide' approach was that it had to last forever, or at least until they all managed to die of something else first. They'd pretty much beaten that horse to death though, and it wasn't any more likely to succeed now than it was ten hours ago. Two, they could stay on Kefera, pull their heads into their metaphorical turtle shells and hope nothing too bad happened while they did it. That wasn't really a life though, particularly for a spacer. They weren't Jimsho military, and they weren't planning on becoming Jimsho military, so their movements would be highly restricted on the base. They couldn't rely on the Arashi's crew's gratitude forever, either, and eventually they'd accrue rent for their berths on base, or their ships would have to be moved elsewhere, two convenient Manta 52s in close proximity to a semi-secret military base. They'd have to give up their lives and their livelihoods, unable to take on jobs or make runs while they tried to outwait Bizi Kei interest in their involvement in an ambush-and-destroy mission when Bizi Kei was renowned for their long memories. Or three, they could go along with Sho's suicidal ideas, let Tsubasa shore them up with support and resources when they finally made contact with him, and pray for the best.
With choices like that, Ryo didn't really have a choice. He'd have to talk it over with everyone--this kind of decision you couldn't make for anyone else--but he was willing to bet most of them felt the same way. They were true blue spacers at heart. It was about the flying, and being able to keep moving, going wherever they wanted and their ship happened to take them. That was probably why they'd gotten into the freight business in the first place, the desire to be the ones deciding where they got to go. Hiding, on the base or out on their own, wasn't ever really an option, because hiding meant surrendering the ability to see where their luck took them. And he had to admit to himself that he had--they all had--pretty much committed to doing whatever it was the Command at Pikanchi Base, or Takki and Tsubasa, or whoever it was that bloody got them into this mess in the first place decided would be best to get them out again.
It wasn't a very complicated plan, at its heart, and there were things to be said for simple plans being the least likely to go awry. They would, in essence, be decoys--bait for Bizi Kei's hooks in Jimsho's systems. They'd concoct very rigid bits of information about the two ships, their crews, their whereabouts, and pump it through their own communications network on specific paths. Then they'd watch the Bizi Kei Alliance as they refined the data they had about the two Manta 52s they were searching for. Depending on the information they put out in their feelers for the ships, and when they got each piece of information relative to what they already had, they'd know where the main leaks were coming from. They'd be able to figure out if there were gaps in security, or if someone on an outpost somewhere was taking bribes and, in addition to that, the relative locations of the leaks in realspace.
The two freighters would have to do a little legwork themselves--which was where the danger came in--because unsubstantiated rumors flowing through Jimsho's communications systems might tip Bizi Kei off to the fact that Jimsho was looking for the holes their information was getting out and cause them to shut down operations until the hunt died down. That meant the Space Queen and the One Piece would have to do a little flying around, a little being seen--if Bizi Kei was looking--providing a little bit of truth to prove the unsubstantiated information coming in through Bizi Kei's network. Sho was vague about the exact details of Jimsho's systems, which was understandable. Temporarily working together they were, perhaps, but half the freighters' crews weren't even able to claim Jimsho citizenship. He was up front about the potential dangers the ships and their crews would face, as though they weren't already aware that Bizi Kei Alliance ships would get to them before Jimsho back-up could arrive, or of the very real possibility that Bizi Kei would shoot first and look for survivors only to ensure that there weren't any. That type of brutality wasn't common in this war--it simply wasn't sustainable. No one believed it was going to be short war any longer, and neither side could afford to kill neutral civilian parties wantonly--but the attack on the original convoy served as a grim reminder that the usual standards weren't applied to every situation.
Takki was a bit more mercenary when he gave the official go-ahead. "You have a problem, we have a problem. We can work together to solve both of them, and I think we can call it even then," he'd said while drafting orders and signing requisition forms: documents for their newly commissioned mission. Of course, he was right. They had a government that spanned half the galaxy out to get them for the simple misfortune of showing up late to a massacre, and Takki and Tsubasa, well, they had a very embarrassing leak in their communications and intelligence systems which, more than simply being an embarrassment, was actively dangerous to everything they were working for. Security was compromised, soldiers and civilians were killed, bases were infiltrated, all very problematic for Sector Command. Takki wasn't going to let a chance to turn that situation around go to waste. "We'll get you all set up."
***
Shige couldn't really say no to the alterations--additions, really--they wanted to make to the One Piece. Jimsho was offering to upgrade just about everything, from the engine to the gun fixtures to the hull strength. Some of the parts they were offering, for free, would have cost them five years' salary, not just Shige's, but every single member of the crew put together. The guns they wanted to install civilians couldn't even buy--not legally, at any rate. He just didn't want any strangers poking around in his baby. Ryo and Yamapi flew the One Piece, and like all pilots, had an overly strong sense of propriety over the ship, but any mechanic could tell you that the one with real ownership, real stake, in a ship was her mechanic. Shige's job was to take her apart and to put her together; he knew all of her little quirks; he kept her in the air. All the work they wanted to do to her, it could take his ship and make her into someone else that just happened to look a little like the One Piece on the outside.
Well, that and he'd promised Yamapi that he wouldn't let anyone find the smugglers' holds they had stashed a few places around the ship. It would be very difficult to keep Jimsho techs from finding secret compartments if they insisted on taking half her hull off.
"Look, don't do too much to the engine, all right? I know we need more horsepower to move the thicker hull, but the specs have to stay more or less the same or we're not going to look like the ships they're after." Not to mention that a Manta 52 souped up enough to be a military transport could get them in trouble with port authorities all across the galaxy. More mass in the hull would mean they'd need more power to travel the same distance. They might be weightless in space, but mass was mass, and it took energy to move. The thicker hull would let them take more bullets before they had to worry about venting critical atmosphere, but it would also either take enough extra fuel to run them out of business, or they'd have to upgrade the engine enough to compensate for the extra mass without drinking them dry of fuel every thirty minutes.
Shige left a couple of techs to work on the engine--heart of his ship though it was--because there wasn't too much they could do to it that he couldn't set straight, and there weren't any secrets he was supposed to be keeping in there for them to stumble over. He'd have Koki in with him to help him look at their work later. Koki was just a little bit paranoid, going over every inch of the equipment and parts the Jimsho techs wanted to install on the Space Queen. He didn't like strangers futzing with his ship like Shige, sure, but more than that, he didn't trust them--not to do a bad job and he'd have to deal with his ship falling apart seventy thousand feet up, but to add a few extra pieces, courtesy of military intelligence. You could trust other spacers to steal your deals, to cheat you for the price of parts, but you didn't have to worry about hidden tracking devices or slave circuitry, or kill switches. Shige thought Koki was a little extreme, but Koki had more reason to dislike the military than he did with the way Jimsho had recruited his little brother. A spacer's life was dangerous; there were any number of ways to die on a small ship, from freak engine accidents to pirate attacks, but it wasn't the same thing as eventually having trained soldiers shoot at you. There was no way Koki could protect his brother from everything he'd come up against in Jimsho's navy, and he didn't like how young they'd pulled his brother in. That extra motivation meant Koki was extra vigilant. He wasn't missing anything they did to either ship.
***
It took several days to make all the alterations to the two freighters that Pikanchi Command wanted to make, and another handful to test all the revamped systems. The engines had been rehauled--though not as entirely as some of the techs would have liked. They were good guys, who cared more about structural stability and engine efficiency than war zone loyalties and did a good job, even if they couldn't see why anyone wouldn't want to have an entirely new engine in some experimental design. Koki let them get away with less than Shige had, but they could both probably fly rings around every other Manta 52 in the galaxy at this point; the hull was thicker, and the cockpit and the gunnery ports had been treated with military-grade bullet-proofing--the viewports where designed to withstand minor impacts without shattering, but bullets traveled at higher velocities and could still pose a problem. To counteract this threat, spray-on resins had been developed that would harden after application and give viewports extra strength without obscuring sightlines through them.
The entire gunnery system had had to be pulled out and replaced: the new guns Jimsho had installed packed a stronger punch, but they fired a different caliber than the Manta 52 was designed to carry. Ammo feeders had had to be replaced, and the wiring to operate the new guns wasn't compatible with the wiring already on the little ships, and had had to be replaced as well. Tegoshi was excited about his new firepower; everyone else was terrified of Tegoshi's almost innocent cheerfulness and his delighted expression as he brutally tested the new SPAS-12 on the One Piece.
"Don't you have something else you can install instead?" Koyama had asked Sho anxiously after watching Tegoshi with his new gun.
"We'd have to rip everything out again, but we could put in a p90. I'm not sure you're cleared for anything else." Sho answered. Koyama just shuddered and said they were fine with the current guns after all. Tegoshi did not need regular access to a ship with a submachine gun.
The whole idea of the refits was to make the One Piece and the Space Queen tougher nuts to crack than Bizi Kei was anticipating, should they run into trouble before Jimsho could intervene. Any real warship could still take them down, but hopefully they wouldn't think to send a frigate or battle cruiser for a couple of dinky freighters. Even if they did come up against something stronger than they could take by themselves, the extra firepower should buy them a little more time--maybe enough time for Jimsho to swoop to the rescue.
The down time also gave Tsubasa time to set up his information network. Spreading information was basically the same as keeping it secret--ultimately it was all about managing what the enemy had access to, and Tsubasa was an expert when it came to that. He was focused and reserved, without his partner's easy air of command, but while Takki garnered loyalty with his personable demeanor, Tsubasa was arguably the more dangerous of the two.
"Normally you control how much and what kind of information your enemy knows by controlling points of access to information about your operations," Tsubasa explained. "We can't do that in this case because don't know where our leaks actually are--that's what we're aiming to find out with your assistance. Of course, you have to plan for leaks in every system, no matter how tight you keep your security. People are only human, after all, and every computer program has weaknesses that can be exploited; but you shouldn't have these kinds of holes just suddenly opening up in your security net without notice. The kinds of cyber attacks that can rip a hole like this, well, you can see them coming, or you see them happen. The idea is to overwhelm a system's defenses and snag as much information as you can before the system can patch the hole," Tsubasa broke down the logistics of the operation for the civilian crews present.
"What we have here, it's like the bottom draining away in a well. We don't know how or where they got in--there's absolutely no trace of an attack--and so we don't know where we need to fix. We do know there's some kind of hole in the communications route that was used to set up the Nera System. We also know that the private line Takki used to video message Kame on the Space Queen shortly before the attack at Nera did not seem to be compromised because the attacking ships didn't know to stick around for your arrival." Yamapi nodded at that. Bizi Kei had left passive monitoring devices, but from what Nino had explained before Takki and Tsubasa had arrived, that was fairly standard practice. Bizi Kei thought they'd killed the convoy at Nera, packed up, and left.
"We've been doing a test run of Pikanchi's comm systems, circulating your presence here through the base's computer network to see if Kefera's been compromised while you were working on your ships." Tsubasa held up a hand to forestall any outraged exclamations. "They already think you have Jimsho connections, and Pikanchi's got enough firepower to take out anything they could send our way on short notice. They don't seem to know you're here though, which implies that wherever our holes are, Pikanchi's network isn't suffering from them. Next we're going to circulate a little misinformation about your ships' appearances through the network we used to plan the Nera op. We're pretty sure they'll get it, but the data will have a little something extra coded into it, which will hopefully flag the collection method--light it up the holes in our system like glitter and sequins. That'll give us an idea of how they're doing it, and then we can use that information to test the rest of our communication systems.
"We'll go on from there with you in the air, giving you some orders about systems to show up in, supplies you can move for us, that sort of thing. If they bite, we'll know they're getting our information on the wider network and we need to do more patching; if they don't, at least we'll get some supply runs in." Tsubasa didn't discuss payment. It was implied that they were taking the upgrades done to the ships out in trade.
It wasn't a great plan from Ryo's point of view, but it wasn't going to get them automatically killed, and that was about all they could hope for. Ryo just hoped Jimsho figured out their leaks quickly--too many free jobs for Jimsho and the upgrades wouldn't be worth it.
***
Pikanchi's communications system and security net checked out--after a week and a half of no changes in Bizi Kei's Manta 52 profile even after both ships were fully operational, Tsubasa finally pronounced the network clean. Takki celebrated by sending them to Izanaizuki to pick up a shipment of medical supplies. Ryo wasn't thrilled about the idea because it was essentially money out of their pockets, but it turned out that Takki had already bought and paid for the supplies, so it was purely a pick up and deliver job. That smarted a lot less, and Ryo kept his grumbling to a minimum--or, well, at least under his breath.
It wasn't a hard run, but it was nerve-wracking, waiting for the possibility of attack, and the extra tension had Kame sniping at Ryo over the ships' tightbeam vidview, and Ryo snarking right back. They showed up in system right on schedule, the One Piece slightly port and aft of the Space Queen. Getting docking permission on the station was no more or less difficult than usual, though needing to ask for adjacent ports was unexpectedly jarring for both crews; they were used to working alone. Loading went smoothly, the vendors transporting crates of vaccinations and bundles of bandage tape to their loading docks after Ryo and someone from the Queen video messaged them to confirm they were the shippers T&T Supplies had sent to pick up the cargo. They were heading back out system in less than sixteen hours, with Yamapi flying and Ryo sleeping fitfully in his bunk, waiting for the first shaking impact of bullets on their hull.
Those bullets never came, and Ryo spent the entirety of the flight back to Kefera in his berth messing with the guitar he hadn't taken out of its case in far too long; otherwise he'd waste all his time pacing circles in the galley, driving everyone around him batty. They landed in the same covered docking spaces on Kefera they'd vacated only a few days before, and then let Pikanchi Base staff do the unloading.
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