Harrington-Wing: Chapter #1: Delivery (part 1/2)
The saga begins! Well, it already began in the bits of backstory we've written up so far, but this is the first bit of the main mass of it... and boy is it ever a mass! It just kept spooling out until we had over 13k words, and I'm not certain whether to be delighted or horrified. ;P
Harrington-Wing ‘verse, Chapter 1: Delivery.
“I’m so pleased to finally meet you,” the blonde woman said in emphatic tones as she sat down, dimpling at Solo and Duo impartially. “I’ve wanted to thank you for saving Quatre ever since he told me the story, and of course I’m delighted that he’s now financing you. Piracy is such a terrible thing, and too many people just assume that someone else will take steps.”
“Wow.” Duo blinked at her. “You can make platitudes sound awesome, and deliver them with a straight face. How d’you do that?”
Relena blinked back at him, startled, and Quatre choked on a snicker beside her. “I told you they wouldn’t sit still for your blonde airhead act, love.”
“Yes, you did,” she admitted, smile broadening into something less polished and more sincere. “You can’t blame me for trying it, though, can you?”
“Nah,” Duo grinned, leaning back in his chair. “Gotta keep in practice with all your weapons, right?”
“Ooh, you understand!” she exclaimed, batting her eyelashes at him and briefly switching back into the ‘dewy-eyed innocent’ expression she’d started the conversation with. “I like him, Quatre. Can we keep him?”
Quatre was laughing too hard to answer, leaning on the table and reaching for his water glass. Solo lifted one eyebrow, face admirably straight even though Loki seemed to be coughing up a hairball beside him. “I thought you were keeping us. Buying us shiny toys and everything.”
“Toys? Keeping us? Don’t tell me we got adopted again,” Duo snickered. “And I’m not calling Q ‘daddy’, all right?”
“Not even ‘sugar daddy’?” Relena inquired sweetly, and Duo cracked up.
“Oh, man, you are totally not the person you play on the vids,” he gasped out, coughing to clear his voice. “Do they give out trophies for that? Best actress in a political role?”
“Unfortunately not,” she said dryly, pouring more water for Quatre. “If anyone figures out that it is an act, you’re automatically disqualified. I wouldn’t mind getting a nice shiny statue, though; when I’m forced to sit in the House of Lords and listen to someone droning on about a topic they patently do not understand, I could sit there with a smile on my face thinking about polishing it. Or hitting them with it.”
“Those things are nicely balanced for clubbing, aren’t they?” Solo mused.
“Yes,” Relena agreed, eyes narrowing. “I could get in such a nice swing at… ah… certain people who shall remain nameless. *ahem* Let’s not talk about politics. Do the new ships meet all your expectations?”
“Now there’s a subject change I like,” Duo grinned, raising his glass to her. “They’re gorgeous; I think Hilde is still patting her shiny new command console and drooling. We’ll have to do some tuning during the shakedown cruise, and there’s always something that turns out to need more than tuning, but everything I’ve been able to get my hands on so far is nine nines and shiny.”
“And by the time we’re done with the shakedown, he’ll have got his hands on everything else,” Solo added.
“What does your accountant think?” Quatre asked, winking at Shinigami. The dark treecat sat up in his high chair and waved the stalk of celery he was clutching, starting a long, involved series of ‘bleek’s and chittering noises. He finished with a satisfied purr, returning to chewing the stringy end of the stalk.
“That sounded positive,” Relena said uncertainly.
“It was,” Quatre assured her. “He’s happy with the build, especially since it was brought in under budget.”
“How do you know?”
“Uh…” He blinked, puzzled. “I just do?”
“He’s right,” Duo shrugged, leaning back in his chair again. “Q gets ‘cats. I’m surprised you’ve never been adopted yourself, dude.”
“And I don’t understand how you know, either,” she persisted, mock-frowning at him. “When most people talk to their treecats, it’s very obviously one-sided. You have actual conversations, complete with pauses for them to answer.”
“Uh.” Duo and Solo exchanged an odd, half-amused half-wary glance. “We just do?”
She sighed, eyeing all three of them tolerantly. “Well, I’m sure Loki and Shinigami would object if you were making up their side of it--”
Loki chirped smugly and nodded at her.
“--so I’m just going to accept it and move on. Are you sure you don’t have time to come down to Manticore and have an actual holiday? It seems a shame for you to just turn around and leave again after coming all the way from Silesia.”
The two captains exchanged another glance, and shook their heads in unison. “Sorry,” Solo replied, sounding genuinely apologetic. “We really do need to get going. There’s the shakedown phase on the way back, and then we have some Sweepers-specific mods to install--”
“Which Hauptman Yards are still trying to find out about,” Quatre muttered into his glass.
“--and then we can get out and about and start using these ships the way they’re intended to be used,” Solo finished, grinning coldly.
“Besides, no offence, but we’ve been living on stations and ships all our lives,” Duo added. “Being dirtside makes us twitchy.”
Relena blinked. “Twitchy? May I ask why? Most people I know who express a preference say they’re more comfortable on-planet, because there are fewer things that can go catastrophically wrong.”
“Yeah, that may be true, but try telling that to our instincts.” He rolled his eyes expressively. “To them, a wind means there’s a seal blown and we’re decompressing. Funny smells mean the scrubbers aren’t working. Temperature changes mean the environmental systems are completely down. Bugs mean holy crap, there’s an infestation in Hydroponics and we’re going to be eating ration paste for a month while we get it under control. Thunder means someone misjudged their thrust and rammed the station, and rain is just freaky weird. Atmospheric controls are not meant to have the humidity turned up that far, man.”
“Well, in that case I understand,” she said, a little sadly. “It seems like a shame, though.”
“You just want to introduce them to my sisters,” Quatre smirked.
Her sad expression dropped away like another mask, and she shot him a pointed look. “If you’d make them stop nagging me to find them dates, I wouldn’t have to try to shanghai every attractive man who comes within tractor range! My own brother won’t come home for holidays any more, and I didn’t even arrange all those ‘accidental meetings’ and ‘coincidental visits’!”
“Yeeeeah we really need to get going,” Duo said hastily, putting his glass down and starting to push his chair back.
“Sit!” Relena pointed at him imperiously. “You are staying for dinner, as planned! Quatre’s sisters are not on the station and they don’t even know you exist, so stop panicking.”
Still relaxed in his own seat, Solo picked up his glass and grinned as his brother reluctantly resettled himself at the table. “We didn’t know these sisters existed until now, either. Are they older or younger than you, Quatre?”
“Older,” the slender young lord said calmly. “All fifteen of them.”
Solo choked on his wine and sputtered helplessly as Loki helpfully thumped his back with one true-hand and a midlimb in counterpoint. Duo froze in mid-movement, eyes wide. “Fifteen?!”
“Fifteen,” Quatre confirmed.
“I thought you were the heir?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re older?”
“Yes.” Quatre grimaced slightly. “The Winner barony is one of the few remaining Manticoran peerages that is still entailed in the male line. My parents held some… old-fashioned… beliefs about not modifying or sex-selecting offspring, and just kept conceiving naturally and tubing each foetus in turn until they came up with me. I’m fairly sure they relaxed those beliefs after fifteen girls, but Mother isn’t around to ask any more and Father would never admit it if it’s true.”
Duo stared at him incredulously. “Dude.”
“Yes.” He smiled faintly. “I’d break the entail in a heartbeat, but it requires a unanimous vote from all the current generation of potential heirs, and none of my sisters want to inherit.”
“They do, however, want to marry,” Relena chimed in dryly. “Or at least date. This desire does not appear to extend to finding their own partners. That seems to be my job.”
Solo coughed, wheezed, and finally found his voice again. “Why?!”
“That’s one of the other old-fashioned beliefs my parents held. Well, my mother,” Quatre corrected himself. “She passed it on to the older girls. Apparently, an extremely old-fashioned, restrictive, Anglo-centric belief, hailing from an area of Old Earth that we aren’t even descended from so Allah only knows why she picked it up, says that women shouldn’t marry before their elder sisters. Some of my sisters are interpreting that to mean that I -- not a woman, please note -- cannot marry before them -- again, note that the literal interpretation is ‘should’ not, not ‘can’ not -- and therefore it is my fiancée’s duty to find them partners before they will graciously allow us to tie the knot.”
“Your sisters are nuts,” Duo said bluntly.
“Only half a dozen of them,” Quatre said cheerfully. “I just ignore those ones. The rest are quite sane and rather nice, really.”
“They won’t let me ignore them,” Relena sighed.
“I keep telling you, threaten them with a restraining order and they’ll shut up to avoid the scandal.”
“I can’t threaten your sisters with a restraining order!”
“Why not? I did.”
* * * * *
“Awright! Ready to move out?” Duo half-sang, stretching his legs out in front of his newer, shinier, bigger, comfier captain’s chair.
< < Yep, > > Solo replied laconically.
< < Been ready for an hour, > > Hilde chimed in. < < Slowpokes. > >
“Hey, you were invited to dinner!” Duo pointed out. “It was awesome, too.”
< < Lady Peacecraft had mine boxed up and sent to me, > > she said smugly. < < I got the noms without having to dress up and practice my manners. > >
“Your loss,” he shrugged. “Lady Relena’s pretty cool, and once we got past the bit about Quatre’s crazy relatives we had some fun conversation.”
< < The bit about the crazy sisters was fun, too, once we were sure they weren’t going to jump out of an airlock at us, > > Solo put in.
< < Say what? > >
“Tell you later. If we’re all good to go, let’s head out. What stupid name were you calling your ship again, Solo?”
< < It was christened and registered three months ago, bro, it’s a bit late to be snarky about it now. > >
“It’s never too late to be snarky, you know that! What was it again?” Duo asked, grinning broadly.
< < *sigh* Hellscream. > >
“Oh, yeah, that’s right, you named it after an asshole. I forgot.”
< < There’s more than one Hellscream. It’s not like I named it ‘Garrosh’. > >
“And yet you know exactly who I’m talking about.”
< < Duo, either cut the crap and get our departure clearance or I’m doing it myself, > > Hilde interrupted.
< < At least I’m not running a Blood Elf as my main, > > Solo muttered, barely audible. < < Has he broken a nail recently? > >
“He’s got a manicure kit built into his Gnomish Army Knife, dude, keep with the program.” Still grinning, Duo switched from the private intership link to a channel connecting to the station. “Hey there, Yard Control, this is the Deathscythe requesting an outbound course for a three-ship group, Deathscythe, Hellscream, and Forsaken, heading for the Junction. Got a nice plot for us? Over.”
< < Roger that, Deathscythe, > > the local area controller called back. < < We’ve got an immediate outbound window if you’re all ready to go, over. > >
“We were born ready, Control. Over.”
< < Good to know, Deathscythe, > > the controller laughed. < < Course plot sent; you’ll need to hand over to Junction Central to get your lane information. Over. > >
“Roger, Yard Control. So long, and thanks for all the shinies.”
----------
< < So, did the magic smoke come out of any bits of your ship yet? > > Hilde sent as the three ships cruised into the Basilisk system.
“No,” Duo said, eyeing her image on the screen dubiously. “Not obviously, anyway. Is there a reason you’re asking?”
She grimaced. < < We’ve had to shut down a beta node; it developed a serious flutter when we reconfigured from sails to wedge. Early indications are that the tuner has blown. > >
< < Well, that’s what a shakedown cruise is for, > > Solo pointed out. < < The yard can’t test everything at full power. > >
< < I know! It’s just… a little bit of the shiny has come off my ship already, > > she pouted.
“Awwww. Never mind, Hilde, we’ll get you a nice new shiny tuner when we get to the Toolbox,” Duo soothed. “Or would you rather stop and swap it out now? We’ve got the spares, it won’t take long.”
< < Nah, I’ll wait, > > she told him, a little mollified. < < It won’t affect our accel, so we might as well stick to the schedule and fix everything that shows up at once. > >
“Gotcha. Keep an eye on the others in case it was a bad parts batch, though.”
< < Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Maxwell. > >
----------
Three systems later, Hilde was swearing as they dropped out of hyper. < < --damn substandard lowest bidder mass-produced shitty parts, I am gonna write Hauptmann Yards a letter and it is going to be nasty-- > >
“Ah, crap, not another one?” Duo asked.
< < Two this time! > > she raged. < < That makes five! > >
“Okay, we have officially reached the point where I tell you that we’re stopping and making repairs now,” he said seriously.
< < I’m not arguing, > > she growled. < < However. Could you both please check your beta tuner spares, and tell me what batch numbers they have? > >
“Ooh.” Duo winced theatrically as he started calling up the damage control parts database. “So it is a batch problem?”
< < Yup. They’re all from batch #375-PT104. And so are all the spare tuners on board the Forsaken. > >
< < Ouch, > > Solo said. < < Okay, we have three spare beta tuners from that batch, I’ve red-listed them. All the rest of our spares are from batch #375-PT099, and… all the beta tuners currently in use on Hellscream are from batches ending in 099 and 098. > >
“No 104s here,” Duo confirmed. “All 097 and 098. I guess we know what order Hauptmann stocked our spares in, hey?”
< < Yup. Most of our installed tuners are from batch 103 and they’re fine so far, > > Hilde sighed. < < And given that the Forsaken was the last one finished, we’re probably the first ship out of the yards to do a full-power run with the bad batch. > >
< < Guess so. Maybe they’ll give us a credit note or something for reporting the problem to them before they send out half a dozen custom yachts with the same tuners, > > Solo suggested.
< < If they don’t do something above and beyond replacing this shit at their own expense, I am gonna get rude-- > >
“Well, we’ve got the clean parts list, so I’ll send the tuners over now,” Duo interrupted. “D’you have any more installed from that batch? We should probably swap them now instead of waiting for them to fry next time you have to bring up the wedge.”
< < Two more, > > Hilde confirmed. < < That’d be peachy, thanks Duo. > >
“Not a problem. The sooner we get your nodes fixed, the sooner we can get home and you can send that letter,” he replied, eyeing the system display on the main screen.
With no inhabitable planets, no mining prospects, and a white dwarf primary that barely qualified as a star, the system they had stopped in didn’t even rate a proper name, just a catalogue number. The Hillman sector was one of the quieter parts of the Silesian Confederacy, and this was certainly a backwater among backwaters, Duo thought, listening with half his attention to his helmsman and communications officer coordinating the parts transfer with Hilde’s crew. Which of course made it the perfect place for a pirate ship to lurk, either hiding from notice or waiting for a merchant ship or two to bumble past, far from help.
He could feel Shinigami’s amusement in the back of his mind, edged like a smile barely hiding teeth, and grinned back. Well, we can hope.
----------
“Hey, boss? I’ve got a hyper footprint, fairly close,” Solo’s communications officer said. “One ship… man, they’re taking their time reconfiguring to wedge,” he added after a pause, sounding mildly scornful. “Sloppy buggers. Oh, there they go. About our mass, looks like, maybe a little lighter… ooh.”
“‘Ooh’?” Solo inquired, looking up from his datapad and switching off the book he’d been reading to kill the time.
“Ooh indeed,” the comms officer gloated. “Military acceleration levels, but they don’t have a military transponder; they’re squawking ID for a civilian freighter registered in Jarmon, name of Pretty Pretty Princess.”
Loki made a sniggering noise from his comfortable spot draped across the back of Solo’s chair, and his human partner put one hand theatrically over his eyes. “Now that is just sad. Sad and wrong,” he said, struggling not to laugh out loud. “Raise Duo and Hilde, would you? Whisker lasers, just in case they’re smarter than they look so far.”
“Deathscythe’s already calling in. One sec… you’re on.”
< < Are you seeing what I’m seeing? > > Duo’s voice broke in, merry with suppressed laughter.
“If you’re seeing relief from boredom wrapped in the most embarrassing cover identity ever, I guess so,” Solo grinned. “Hilde? How long will it take you to raise your wedge? Can you raise it?”
< < Stall ‘em for forty minutes? We’ve got three nodes half disassembled with bits all over the floor in here, they’ve got to at least close up before we do any manoeuvres. I can bring up the wedge with just the alpha ring after that, it won’t even hurt our accel much. > >
< < We’ll put our wedges in the way if they start anything sooner than that, > > Duo assured her. < < If they’re doing standard pirate tactics, they’ll want to get in close before showing their hand. > >
“Which is just fine by me,” Solo put in, “seeing as how we’ve got no torpedoes in the magazines yet. We need ‘em to come in close if we wanna take ‘em on with lasers and grasers. Or did you forget that bit?”
< < I forgot nothing, > > Duo said haughtily. < < I may have failed to bring it to mind immediately, but I didn’t forget. > >
< < There’s something else you might have failed to bring to mind, > > Hilde cut in. < < We’ve only got standard spares on board. All the specialty stuff is waiting for us at the Toolbox, along with the missiles. > >
< < So? > >
< < So, we’ve got no spare false hull plates, > > she explained patiently. < < And even if we had them on board, we don’t have any worksuits to install them with. Once we blow our plates to uncover our weaponry, we can’t go back under cover for the rest of the trip -- and our planned route takes us through the sector capital, and they will send a picket cruiser to look us over. > >
< < …Okay, I did forget that part, > > Duo admitted. < < Thoughts? > >
“We’re still taking them on if they try us,” Solo said definitely.
< < Hell yeah! > >
< < Duh. > >
“So running away without blowing the plates is not an option,” he continued. “The only reason we’ve been system-hopping the way we have is to check our navigational systems, and I for one haven’t found any problems. Have you?”
< < Nope, > > Duo shrugged, and Hilde shook her head.
“Then it’s simple. If we don’t take any significant damage in the fight, we just recalculate our route home to go all the way in hyper, without dropping out into realspace at all. If one of the ships takes enough damage to make that a bad idea, then we can reconsider… but I don’t think that’s likely.”
< < Sounds like a plan, > > Hilde agreed.
< < Done, > > Duo nodded. < < Now we just have to wait for them to come to the party. > >
----------
Andreas Lopez leaned back in his seat, gazing happily at the plum prize displayed on the main screen. “I cannot believe our luck,” he almost crooned, tucking his hands behind his head and relaxing completely. “Three merchies, and one of them has a drive failure, so all three of them are sitting at rest -- inside the hyper limit! They can’t even try to run!”
“Sir,” his exec put in, “we’re not supposed to be hunting--”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Lopez snapped, waving one hand dismissively. “Do the standard scans, check for pickets and patrols and pass on the signal and all that first, of course! But once that’s taken care of, there’s nothing to stop us picking up this little tidbit. In fact, you could argue that we should, just to eliminate witnesses!”
“Yes, sir,” the officer said in a colourless voice, and Lopez resettled himself, annoyed at the puncturing of his good mood.
“Hail the merchies,” he snapped, flicking his fingers at his comms officer. “Give them some nice friendly chit-chat, find out what’s going on and reassure them that we’re nothing to worry about.”
----------
< < You’d better talk to them, > > Duo sent, snickering. < < Hilde’s busy kicking her repair squads into high gear, and you know I’m not gonna manage anything even close to a poker face. > >
“No kidding,” Solo told him, rolling his eyes. “All right, but you owe me one. Put ‘em on my console screen, Bryan; no need for the rest of you to have to play patsy. Just don’t laugh out loud within pickup range.”
“Gotcha,” his comms officer said, flicking switches, and Solo’s console screen blinked as a new window opened, showing a neatly-groomed woman wearing tidy blue civilian shipknits.
< < Hello there, > > she said, smile colouring her voice but not reaching her eyes. < < This is the Pretty Pretty Princess, calling-- uh, the Hellscream? Is that right? > >
“That’s us,” Solo said easily, smiling back.
< < You’ve got kind of odd names, > > she pointed out after a few seconds of transmission delay. < < Hellscream, Forsaken, and-- how do you pronounce that last one? > >
“Lor’themar,” Solo supplied, mentally snickering at the false transponder data Duo had chosen for the trip. A lot of pirates had heard about the Deathscythe; his and Hilde’s new ships were still anonymous enough to go by their real data. “They’re all game references. I don’t suppose you play World of Warcraft?”
< < I’m afraid not. I think I’ve heard of it, though; is it fun? > >
“Yeah, but you don’t want me to spend three hours singing its praises to you,” he grinned. “Are you just passing through?”
< < We’re on charter, yes. It looks like your friend is having some drive trouble, though. Need a hand? > >
“Nah, they’re just tweaking some nodes,” he shrugged. “More time-consuming than anything, we’re going to be stuck in place for a while. Nothing to worry about, really.”
This time, the smile did reach her eyes. < < Oh, that’s good to hear. This isn’t a nice system to run into problems in. > >
“You’re right there,” he told her, feeling his own smile widen. “Well, we won’t keep you. Have a good trip!”
< < You too, > > she said sunnily, and in the moment before her transmission cut out he thought he saw her lips curl with contempt.
“Well, they think we’re sitting here all fat and happy,” he said after checking to make sure his own transmission had ended.
“Yup,” Bryan agreed. “And they just did something odd.”
“Odd how?”
“Flared their wedge strength type odd. They didn’t change acceleration or heading or anything, just… revved it up for a second.”
“Signalling?” Solo guessed. “That sort of flare would be detectable a long way out-system, and even into the lower hyper bands. If they’ve got friends on the way in, this could get sticky.”
“I dunno about that,” Bryan snorted. “Even without missiles, we’ve got a heavier weapon load than any pirate I ever heard of, and there’s three of us.”
“But there might be half a dozen of them,” Solo pointed out, then shrugged. “Oh well, we’ll find out. What’s their heading?”
“Cutting across the system parallel to the ecliptic, if you can call it an ecliptic when you’ve only got a couple of cinders and some dust to measure it by,” the nav officer told him, putting a diagram up on the main screen. “They’re going to pass well within laser and graser range, in-system of us; I’m guessing they chose that heading because it looks like they’re going towards the Tumult sector’s closest trading centres, and a stereotypical pirate course would put them out-system of us to box us in. If they do have friends on the way,” he finished, looking at the course plot with satisfaction, “they’re not waiting for them.”
----------
“Even if we were really merchants, we’d have to be suspicious by now,” Duo pointed out, rolling his eyes. “They’ve got to be pulling the lowest acceleration ever seen in this system. It wouldn’t be plausible as their normal operating speed even if we hadn’t seen ‘em boosting way harder when they first hypered in.”
< < Ah, but we’re supposed to be fat, happy, and stupid, > > Solo replied. < < Didn’t you know that all pirates are handsome, dashing ne’er-do-wells with brilliant minds, cruelly wounded and driven to a life of derring-do by an uncaring society, and all merchant shippers are overweight sloppy idiots? Haven’t you seen the vids? > >
“Damn, I’d better start eating more junk food in that case, or I’ll blow our cover just by being this shape.”
< < Finished! > > Hilde crowed in triumph as her com window opened. < < And we’ve only got two beta nodes that’re still down. The twerps can start the party any time now. What’s keeping them? > >
“Best as I can figure, they don’t want to blow past us at a high relative velocity and then have to decelerate and come back,” Duo shrugged. “So instead they’re crawling along like the universe’s first hyper-capable snail.”
< < We could always start it ourselves… > >
“Impatient much? Let ‘em get in range, sheesh!”
< < I bet I can make them get into range faster, > > she grinned.
< < How? > > Solo asked, one eyebrow lifting.
< < All I’ve gotta do is bring up the wedge. If they think we’re about to get away, they’ve just about got to declare themselves, or else give up on us. > >
“And since they’ve already gone to the trouble of pussyfooting halfway across the system to reach us, that’s not likely,” Duo agreed. “Do it.”
----------
“The third ship just brought up their wedge,” Lopez’s executive officer pointed out in his annoyingly flat, emotionless voice. “Looks like they finished tweaking their nodes.”
“I can see that, Bowman,” Lopez snarled. “Kick up our acceleration, and get that captain on the com.”
< < Hey there, Princess, > > the long-haired blond said cheerfully, popping up on screen. < < What’s up? > >
“Yeah, you know how we were talking before? About how this is a bad system to run into trouble?” the comms officer drawled. “So sorry for the inconvenience, but either you strike your wedges and stand by to be boarded, or we start shooting.”
< < Seriously? You’re pirates? With that ship name? > > the Hellscream’s captain scoffed.
“Ever heard of an alias? Yes, seriously,” she answered. “Now strike your wedges and--”
“Gunnery, fire a warning shot,” Lopez snapped impatiently. “You, whatever your name is, is this convincing enough?”
A single torpedo flashed out from the pirate ship’s chase tube, streaking ahead and exploding harmlessly some distance from the three civilian ships. On screen, the Hellscream’s captain leaned to one side, apparently studying a display.
< < Yeah, that’s a torpedo all right, > > he eventually admitted. < < Huh. Give us a minute, will ya? > >
The screen went blank as his transmission cut out, leaving both Lopez and the comms officer staring open-mouthed.
“Give him a-- Who does he think he’s dealing with?!” Lopez sputtered after a long moment. “Get him back!”
“They’re not answering.”
“I don’t give a shit if they’re not answering! Tell them if they don’t strike their wedges now, we’ll blow them to kingdom come!”
“They’re doing something,” Bowman announced, tapping keys to refine a scan. “Jettisoning cargo, maybe? There’s… debris…” His voice slowed and stopped, and his one visible eye narrowed.
“Gunnery, fire another--”
Alarms buzzed on the gunnery console, and the officer yelped in dismay. “They’re hitting us with targeting systems, radar and lidar-- they’ve got targeting systems? They’re armed?!”
“They just raised sidewalls!” somebody else shouted.
< < Hey there, Pretty Pretty Pirate Pricks, > > the blond man said cheerfully, reappearing on-screen. < < So sorry for the inconvenience, but like you said before, either you strike your wedge and surrender or we blow you full of holes. There’s three of us, there’s one of you, and I guarantee we’re faster and nastier than your incompetent asses. If you don’t believe me, consider this: My name is Solo Ramirez y Maxwell, and I think you’ve probably heard of my brother and I. > >
“Ramirez y Maxwell?” Lopez stuttered, staggered by the speed at which the tables had turned on him. “Wait-- I don’t--”
“Solo and Duo Ramirez y Maxwell,” Bowman told him, gazing calmly at the main screen. His hands had left his controls, dropping uselessly into his lap. “Co-captains of the Deathscythe.”
“Deathscythe… but, uh, that’s not…”
< < Ever heard of an alias? > > Solo grinned.
The three ships were spreading out, angling away from each other and moving to bracket the pirate ship at accelerations it couldn’t match. Gathering his wits, Lopez made a ‘cut’ gesture at his comms officer and turned to snarl at the helmsman.
“Flare the wedge,” he ordered. “Send the abort signal! Tell the other ships to stand off!”
“Don’t,” Bowman said, voice cold. There was a flechette gun in his hand now, aimed halfway between the captain and the helmsman. “Strike the wedge.”
“What the hell do you think you’re--”
The gun twitched to the right and spat a short burst, three darts, that slapped Lopez out of his chair and against the bulkhead with a sharp *hiss-crack*; then it swung back, aimed between the helmsman and the comms officer now.
“Strike the wedge,” Bowman repeated, almost gently. “And open the channel again.”
----------
“Their wedge is down,” Cheng-yi reported, hunched tensely over his console.
“Aw man, you mean we don’t get to shoot them even once?” Duo mock-pouted.
“Guess not,” his comms officer commiserated. “They’re hailing us.”
“Stick ‘em up on screen.”
The com window that opened showed a slender man with mid-brown hair styled in a smooth fall that hid one of his green eyes, aiming a nasty little flechette gun at someone off-screen.
< < Hello there, > > he said calmly. < < We surrender. > >
“I just bet you do,” Duo grinned, leaning forwards. “Where’s the other guy? The one who was ordering warning shots and all that?”
< < I’m afraid Captain Lopez is permanently indisposed. > >
“Who indisposed him? You?”
< < Yes. > >
“Huh.” Duo studied the quiet-voiced man, frowning slightly as he tried to reconcile his actions with the many other pirates he’d encountered since he and Solo began their personal crusade. “So. I gather you’re planning to come quietly?”
< < Oh, yes, > > the man agreed. < < And quickly, please. I have some information that you need. > >
“Oh really? Do you also have a reason why I should believe a single damn thing you say, mister pirate?”
< < Yes. > > The green-eyed man smiled faintly. < < Reason one, I’ve locked down all the ship’s weapons and controls, so that nobody on board can shoot at you or run away. You have a clear field to come in and take over. Reason two, I can back up all my information with data from the computers. And reason three… I’m not actually a pirate. > >
The flechette gun stayed rock-steady as he raised his free hand to his mouth and poked two fingers inside, prodding at his tongue. After a moment he winced slightly and pulled his hand away, holding a thin sheet of something opaque and flesh-coloured; then he turned his head fully towards the com pickup and stuck out his tongue, displaying smeared-looking black lines and dots like a blurred bar code.
< < Oh fuck, > > somebody whimpered. < < Audubon Ballroom. We’re screwed. > >
* * * * *
Genetic slavery might be technically outlawed in virtually every star nation, but in practice many governments either actively participated in the slave trade or looked the other way as it went on around them. In Silesia, it was almost expected. Not all of the ‘customers’ were prosperous enough to deal directly with Mesa and the huge Manpower conglomerate, but smaller corporations bought and re-sold ‘designer’ slaves across all the sectors.
The larger star nations with stakes in the Silesian confederacy -- Manticore, Haven, and the Andermani Empire -- did their best to quash the trade, but they were often hamstrung by the treaties under which they operated. Slavers they captured usually had to be handed over to local governments for trial, and it wasn’t uncommon for one set to be encountered again soon after they’d been ‘sentenced’ and ‘imprisoned’, in a new ship and back at their old trade. As a result, what the slavers really feared wasn’t being captured by a warship; it was being found by the Audubon Ballroom.
Made up of escaped and freed slaves, the Ballroom were -- again, technically -- terrorists. The governments who ignored the slave trade opposed them; the governments who genuinely worked against it tended to find reasons not to arrest Ballroom agents. The display of a barcoded tongue was both their identification, and a combined threat and insult to anyone involved in the trade.
* * * * *
“Okay, we’ve got the full pirate crew disarmed and under lock and key in their own cargo hold,” Solo reported, checking his notes. “Mystery dude here was telling the truth about having the whole ship on lockdown; half of them were stuck in isolated compartments, trying to get the doors to open. A few had personal sidearms, but the worst damage anyone took was a minor suit puncture, and since we were operating in atmosphere they didn’t even decompress. We got to the bridge with him opening doors for us along the way, and I have never seen a pirate so happy to be captured as that bridge crew. They were shitting themselves. Anyway, he gave us the codes to take over, and the Pretty Pretty Prick is all ours now.”
< < Sweet, > > Duo said over the com, eyeing the ‘mystery dude’ now standing next to Solo’s console. < < Explanations now? Are you really from the Audubon Ballroom? I thought those bar codes were supposed to be neater. > >
“My father was a genetic slave,” the green-eyed man said calmly. “My mother was a Marine on the ship that freed him. The barcoding breaks down pretty fast if you don’t have somebody tweaking it in utero.”
< < Right. So what’s this fantastically important information you have for us? > >
“The Princess was the lead scout of a two-ship team escorting a slave ship to Breslau. Lopez didn’t manage to warn them off, so the slaver and its remaining escort should be arriving in-system in less than two hours. There are five hundred slaves on board, and if the crew think they’re in danger of being captured they’ll space them all to get rid of the evidence.”
Solo, Duo, and Hilde all stared at him. He stared back.
< < …Well, shit, > > Hilde said eventually. < < This is gonna take some strategy. > >
----------
Duo sat back in his chair, feeling the comforting weight of Shinigami’s true-hand on one shoulder as the treecat snuggled close. “Damn,” he said mildly. “Okay, first of all, what’s your name? We can’t keep calling you ‘Mystery Dude’, and ‘Audubon Dude’ is just as bad.”
< < Trowa Barton. > >
“Trowa, huh. So you say you’ve got all the computer data and so on… can you give us a general idea of where these other ships are gonna come out of hyper?”
< < I can give you a fairly precise set of coordinates, yes. > >
“Cool. And how fast on the eject button are those assholes likely to be?” Duo persisted, thinking fast. “I mean, is it gonna be ‘well shit, there’s an armed ship we weren’t expecting, buh-bye’, or will they actually think about it for a few minutes?”
Trowa cocked his head, eyeing Duo thoughtfully. < < Most likely option two. The slaves represent a major investment for the seller, and the transport crew get a cut; they won’t get rid of them as long as they think they’ve got a chance to escape. They will make sure to eject them before another ship gets close enough to get visual scan records of them doing it, though. > >
“In that case,” Duo said, starting to grin nastily, “I think I have an idea.”
----- Originally posted at my Dreamwidth account, feel free to comment on either site!
Harrington-Wing ‘verse, Chapter 1: Delivery.
“I’m so pleased to finally meet you,” the blonde woman said in emphatic tones as she sat down, dimpling at Solo and Duo impartially. “I’ve wanted to thank you for saving Quatre ever since he told me the story, and of course I’m delighted that he’s now financing you. Piracy is such a terrible thing, and too many people just assume that someone else will take steps.”
“Wow.” Duo blinked at her. “You can make platitudes sound awesome, and deliver them with a straight face. How d’you do that?”
Relena blinked back at him, startled, and Quatre choked on a snicker beside her. “I told you they wouldn’t sit still for your blonde airhead act, love.”
“Yes, you did,” she admitted, smile broadening into something less polished and more sincere. “You can’t blame me for trying it, though, can you?”
“Nah,” Duo grinned, leaning back in his chair. “Gotta keep in practice with all your weapons, right?”
“Ooh, you understand!” she exclaimed, batting her eyelashes at him and briefly switching back into the ‘dewy-eyed innocent’ expression she’d started the conversation with. “I like him, Quatre. Can we keep him?”
Quatre was laughing too hard to answer, leaning on the table and reaching for his water glass. Solo lifted one eyebrow, face admirably straight even though Loki seemed to be coughing up a hairball beside him. “I thought you were keeping us. Buying us shiny toys and everything.”
“Toys? Keeping us? Don’t tell me we got adopted again,” Duo snickered. “And I’m not calling Q ‘daddy’, all right?”
“Not even ‘sugar daddy’?” Relena inquired sweetly, and Duo cracked up.
“Oh, man, you are totally not the person you play on the vids,” he gasped out, coughing to clear his voice. “Do they give out trophies for that? Best actress in a political role?”
“Unfortunately not,” she said dryly, pouring more water for Quatre. “If anyone figures out that it is an act, you’re automatically disqualified. I wouldn’t mind getting a nice shiny statue, though; when I’m forced to sit in the House of Lords and listen to someone droning on about a topic they patently do not understand, I could sit there with a smile on my face thinking about polishing it. Or hitting them with it.”
“Those things are nicely balanced for clubbing, aren’t they?” Solo mused.
“Yes,” Relena agreed, eyes narrowing. “I could get in such a nice swing at… ah… certain people who shall remain nameless. *ahem* Let’s not talk about politics. Do the new ships meet all your expectations?”
“Now there’s a subject change I like,” Duo grinned, raising his glass to her. “They’re gorgeous; I think Hilde is still patting her shiny new command console and drooling. We’ll have to do some tuning during the shakedown cruise, and there’s always something that turns out to need more than tuning, but everything I’ve been able to get my hands on so far is nine nines and shiny.”
“And by the time we’re done with the shakedown, he’ll have got his hands on everything else,” Solo added.
“What does your accountant think?” Quatre asked, winking at Shinigami. The dark treecat sat up in his high chair and waved the stalk of celery he was clutching, starting a long, involved series of ‘bleek’s and chittering noises. He finished with a satisfied purr, returning to chewing the stringy end of the stalk.
“That sounded positive,” Relena said uncertainly.
“It was,” Quatre assured her. “He’s happy with the build, especially since it was brought in under budget.”
“How do you know?”
“Uh…” He blinked, puzzled. “I just do?”
“He’s right,” Duo shrugged, leaning back in his chair again. “Q gets ‘cats. I’m surprised you’ve never been adopted yourself, dude.”
“And I don’t understand how you know, either,” she persisted, mock-frowning at him. “When most people talk to their treecats, it’s very obviously one-sided. You have actual conversations, complete with pauses for them to answer.”
“Uh.” Duo and Solo exchanged an odd, half-amused half-wary glance. “We just do?”
She sighed, eyeing all three of them tolerantly. “Well, I’m sure Loki and Shinigami would object if you were making up their side of it--”
Loki chirped smugly and nodded at her.
“--so I’m just going to accept it and move on. Are you sure you don’t have time to come down to Manticore and have an actual holiday? It seems a shame for you to just turn around and leave again after coming all the way from Silesia.”
The two captains exchanged another glance, and shook their heads in unison. “Sorry,” Solo replied, sounding genuinely apologetic. “We really do need to get going. There’s the shakedown phase on the way back, and then we have some Sweepers-specific mods to install--”
“Which Hauptman Yards are still trying to find out about,” Quatre muttered into his glass.
“--and then we can get out and about and start using these ships the way they’re intended to be used,” Solo finished, grinning coldly.
“Besides, no offence, but we’ve been living on stations and ships all our lives,” Duo added. “Being dirtside makes us twitchy.”
Relena blinked. “Twitchy? May I ask why? Most people I know who express a preference say they’re more comfortable on-planet, because there are fewer things that can go catastrophically wrong.”
“Yeah, that may be true, but try telling that to our instincts.” He rolled his eyes expressively. “To them, a wind means there’s a seal blown and we’re decompressing. Funny smells mean the scrubbers aren’t working. Temperature changes mean the environmental systems are completely down. Bugs mean holy crap, there’s an infestation in Hydroponics and we’re going to be eating ration paste for a month while we get it under control. Thunder means someone misjudged their thrust and rammed the station, and rain is just freaky weird. Atmospheric controls are not meant to have the humidity turned up that far, man.”
“Well, in that case I understand,” she said, a little sadly. “It seems like a shame, though.”
“You just want to introduce them to my sisters,” Quatre smirked.
Her sad expression dropped away like another mask, and she shot him a pointed look. “If you’d make them stop nagging me to find them dates, I wouldn’t have to try to shanghai every attractive man who comes within tractor range! My own brother won’t come home for holidays any more, and I didn’t even arrange all those ‘accidental meetings’ and ‘coincidental visits’!”
“Yeeeeah we really need to get going,” Duo said hastily, putting his glass down and starting to push his chair back.
“Sit!” Relena pointed at him imperiously. “You are staying for dinner, as planned! Quatre’s sisters are not on the station and they don’t even know you exist, so stop panicking.”
Still relaxed in his own seat, Solo picked up his glass and grinned as his brother reluctantly resettled himself at the table. “We didn’t know these sisters existed until now, either. Are they older or younger than you, Quatre?”
“Older,” the slender young lord said calmly. “All fifteen of them.”
Solo choked on his wine and sputtered helplessly as Loki helpfully thumped his back with one true-hand and a midlimb in counterpoint. Duo froze in mid-movement, eyes wide. “Fifteen?!”
“Fifteen,” Quatre confirmed.
“I thought you were the heir?”
“Yes.”
“But they’re older?”
“Yes.” Quatre grimaced slightly. “The Winner barony is one of the few remaining Manticoran peerages that is still entailed in the male line. My parents held some… old-fashioned… beliefs about not modifying or sex-selecting offspring, and just kept conceiving naturally and tubing each foetus in turn until they came up with me. I’m fairly sure they relaxed those beliefs after fifteen girls, but Mother isn’t around to ask any more and Father would never admit it if it’s true.”
Duo stared at him incredulously. “Dude.”
“Yes.” He smiled faintly. “I’d break the entail in a heartbeat, but it requires a unanimous vote from all the current generation of potential heirs, and none of my sisters want to inherit.”
“They do, however, want to marry,” Relena chimed in dryly. “Or at least date. This desire does not appear to extend to finding their own partners. That seems to be my job.”
Solo coughed, wheezed, and finally found his voice again. “Why?!”
“That’s one of the other old-fashioned beliefs my parents held. Well, my mother,” Quatre corrected himself. “She passed it on to the older girls. Apparently, an extremely old-fashioned, restrictive, Anglo-centric belief, hailing from an area of Old Earth that we aren’t even descended from so Allah only knows why she picked it up, says that women shouldn’t marry before their elder sisters. Some of my sisters are interpreting that to mean that I -- not a woman, please note -- cannot marry before them -- again, note that the literal interpretation is ‘should’ not, not ‘can’ not -- and therefore it is my fiancée’s duty to find them partners before they will graciously allow us to tie the knot.”
“Your sisters are nuts,” Duo said bluntly.
“Only half a dozen of them,” Quatre said cheerfully. “I just ignore those ones. The rest are quite sane and rather nice, really.”
“They won’t let me ignore them,” Relena sighed.
“I keep telling you, threaten them with a restraining order and they’ll shut up to avoid the scandal.”
“I can’t threaten your sisters with a restraining order!”
“Why not? I did.”
* * * * *
“Awright! Ready to move out?” Duo half-sang, stretching his legs out in front of his newer, shinier, bigger, comfier captain’s chair.
< < Yep, > > Solo replied laconically.
< < Been ready for an hour, > > Hilde chimed in. < < Slowpokes. > >
“Hey, you were invited to dinner!” Duo pointed out. “It was awesome, too.”
< < Lady Peacecraft had mine boxed up and sent to me, > > she said smugly. < < I got the noms without having to dress up and practice my manners. > >
“Your loss,” he shrugged. “Lady Relena’s pretty cool, and once we got past the bit about Quatre’s crazy relatives we had some fun conversation.”
< < The bit about the crazy sisters was fun, too, once we were sure they weren’t going to jump out of an airlock at us, > > Solo put in.
< < Say what? > >
“Tell you later. If we’re all good to go, let’s head out. What stupid name were you calling your ship again, Solo?”
< < It was christened and registered three months ago, bro, it’s a bit late to be snarky about it now. > >
“It’s never too late to be snarky, you know that! What was it again?” Duo asked, grinning broadly.
< < *sigh* Hellscream. > >
“Oh, yeah, that’s right, you named it after an asshole. I forgot.”
< < There’s more than one Hellscream. It’s not like I named it ‘Garrosh’. > >
“And yet you know exactly who I’m talking about.”
< < Duo, either cut the crap and get our departure clearance or I’m doing it myself, > > Hilde interrupted.
< < At least I’m not running a Blood Elf as my main, > > Solo muttered, barely audible. < < Has he broken a nail recently? > >
“He’s got a manicure kit built into his Gnomish Army Knife, dude, keep with the program.” Still grinning, Duo switched from the private intership link to a channel connecting to the station. “Hey there, Yard Control, this is the Deathscythe requesting an outbound course for a three-ship group, Deathscythe, Hellscream, and Forsaken, heading for the Junction. Got a nice plot for us? Over.”
< < Roger that, Deathscythe, > > the local area controller called back. < < We’ve got an immediate outbound window if you’re all ready to go, over. > >
“We were born ready, Control. Over.”
< < Good to know, Deathscythe, > > the controller laughed. < < Course plot sent; you’ll need to hand over to Junction Central to get your lane information. Over. > >
“Roger, Yard Control. So long, and thanks for all the shinies.”
----------
< < So, did the magic smoke come out of any bits of your ship yet? > > Hilde sent as the three ships cruised into the Basilisk system.
“No,” Duo said, eyeing her image on the screen dubiously. “Not obviously, anyway. Is there a reason you’re asking?”
She grimaced. < < We’ve had to shut down a beta node; it developed a serious flutter when we reconfigured from sails to wedge. Early indications are that the tuner has blown. > >
< < Well, that’s what a shakedown cruise is for, > > Solo pointed out. < < The yard can’t test everything at full power. > >
< < I know! It’s just… a little bit of the shiny has come off my ship already, > > she pouted.
“Awwww. Never mind, Hilde, we’ll get you a nice new shiny tuner when we get to the Toolbox,” Duo soothed. “Or would you rather stop and swap it out now? We’ve got the spares, it won’t take long.”
< < Nah, I’ll wait, > > she told him, a little mollified. < < It won’t affect our accel, so we might as well stick to the schedule and fix everything that shows up at once. > >
“Gotcha. Keep an eye on the others in case it was a bad parts batch, though.”
< < Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Maxwell. > >
----------
Three systems later, Hilde was swearing as they dropped out of hyper. < < --damn substandard lowest bidder mass-produced shitty parts, I am gonna write Hauptmann Yards a letter and it is going to be nasty-- > >
“Ah, crap, not another one?” Duo asked.
< < Two this time! > > she raged. < < That makes five! > >
“Okay, we have officially reached the point where I tell you that we’re stopping and making repairs now,” he said seriously.
< < I’m not arguing, > > she growled. < < However. Could you both please check your beta tuner spares, and tell me what batch numbers they have? > >
“Ooh.” Duo winced theatrically as he started calling up the damage control parts database. “So it is a batch problem?”
< < Yup. They’re all from batch #375-PT104. And so are all the spare tuners on board the Forsaken. > >
< < Ouch, > > Solo said. < < Okay, we have three spare beta tuners from that batch, I’ve red-listed them. All the rest of our spares are from batch #375-PT099, and… all the beta tuners currently in use on Hellscream are from batches ending in 099 and 098. > >
“No 104s here,” Duo confirmed. “All 097 and 098. I guess we know what order Hauptmann stocked our spares in, hey?”
< < Yup. Most of our installed tuners are from batch 103 and they’re fine so far, > > Hilde sighed. < < And given that the Forsaken was the last one finished, we’re probably the first ship out of the yards to do a full-power run with the bad batch. > >
< < Guess so. Maybe they’ll give us a credit note or something for reporting the problem to them before they send out half a dozen custom yachts with the same tuners, > > Solo suggested.
< < If they don’t do something above and beyond replacing this shit at their own expense, I am gonna get rude-- > >
“Well, we’ve got the clean parts list, so I’ll send the tuners over now,” Duo interrupted. “D’you have any more installed from that batch? We should probably swap them now instead of waiting for them to fry next time you have to bring up the wedge.”
< < Two more, > > Hilde confirmed. < < That’d be peachy, thanks Duo. > >
“Not a problem. The sooner we get your nodes fixed, the sooner we can get home and you can send that letter,” he replied, eyeing the system display on the main screen.
With no inhabitable planets, no mining prospects, and a white dwarf primary that barely qualified as a star, the system they had stopped in didn’t even rate a proper name, just a catalogue number. The Hillman sector was one of the quieter parts of the Silesian Confederacy, and this was certainly a backwater among backwaters, Duo thought, listening with half his attention to his helmsman and communications officer coordinating the parts transfer with Hilde’s crew. Which of course made it the perfect place for a pirate ship to lurk, either hiding from notice or waiting for a merchant ship or two to bumble past, far from help.
He could feel Shinigami’s amusement in the back of his mind, edged like a smile barely hiding teeth, and grinned back. Well, we can hope.
----------
“Hey, boss? I’ve got a hyper footprint, fairly close,” Solo’s communications officer said. “One ship… man, they’re taking their time reconfiguring to wedge,” he added after a pause, sounding mildly scornful. “Sloppy buggers. Oh, there they go. About our mass, looks like, maybe a little lighter… ooh.”
“‘Ooh’?” Solo inquired, looking up from his datapad and switching off the book he’d been reading to kill the time.
“Ooh indeed,” the comms officer gloated. “Military acceleration levels, but they don’t have a military transponder; they’re squawking ID for a civilian freighter registered in Jarmon, name of Pretty Pretty Princess.”
Loki made a sniggering noise from his comfortable spot draped across the back of Solo’s chair, and his human partner put one hand theatrically over his eyes. “Now that is just sad. Sad and wrong,” he said, struggling not to laugh out loud. “Raise Duo and Hilde, would you? Whisker lasers, just in case they’re smarter than they look so far.”
“Deathscythe’s already calling in. One sec… you’re on.”
< < Are you seeing what I’m seeing? > > Duo’s voice broke in, merry with suppressed laughter.
“If you’re seeing relief from boredom wrapped in the most embarrassing cover identity ever, I guess so,” Solo grinned. “Hilde? How long will it take you to raise your wedge? Can you raise it?”
< < Stall ‘em for forty minutes? We’ve got three nodes half disassembled with bits all over the floor in here, they’ve got to at least close up before we do any manoeuvres. I can bring up the wedge with just the alpha ring after that, it won’t even hurt our accel much. > >
< < We’ll put our wedges in the way if they start anything sooner than that, > > Duo assured her. < < If they’re doing standard pirate tactics, they’ll want to get in close before showing their hand. > >
“Which is just fine by me,” Solo put in, “seeing as how we’ve got no torpedoes in the magazines yet. We need ‘em to come in close if we wanna take ‘em on with lasers and grasers. Or did you forget that bit?”
< < I forgot nothing, > > Duo said haughtily. < < I may have failed to bring it to mind immediately, but I didn’t forget. > >
< < There’s something else you might have failed to bring to mind, > > Hilde cut in. < < We’ve only got standard spares on board. All the specialty stuff is waiting for us at the Toolbox, along with the missiles. > >
< < So? > >
< < So, we’ve got no spare false hull plates, > > she explained patiently. < < And even if we had them on board, we don’t have any worksuits to install them with. Once we blow our plates to uncover our weaponry, we can’t go back under cover for the rest of the trip -- and our planned route takes us through the sector capital, and they will send a picket cruiser to look us over. > >
< < …Okay, I did forget that part, > > Duo admitted. < < Thoughts? > >
“We’re still taking them on if they try us,” Solo said definitely.
< < Hell yeah! > >
< < Duh. > >
“So running away without blowing the plates is not an option,” he continued. “The only reason we’ve been system-hopping the way we have is to check our navigational systems, and I for one haven’t found any problems. Have you?”
< < Nope, > > Duo shrugged, and Hilde shook her head.
“Then it’s simple. If we don’t take any significant damage in the fight, we just recalculate our route home to go all the way in hyper, without dropping out into realspace at all. If one of the ships takes enough damage to make that a bad idea, then we can reconsider… but I don’t think that’s likely.”
< < Sounds like a plan, > > Hilde agreed.
< < Done, > > Duo nodded. < < Now we just have to wait for them to come to the party. > >
----------
Andreas Lopez leaned back in his seat, gazing happily at the plum prize displayed on the main screen. “I cannot believe our luck,” he almost crooned, tucking his hands behind his head and relaxing completely. “Three merchies, and one of them has a drive failure, so all three of them are sitting at rest -- inside the hyper limit! They can’t even try to run!”
“Sir,” his exec put in, “we’re not supposed to be hunting--”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Lopez snapped, waving one hand dismissively. “Do the standard scans, check for pickets and patrols and pass on the signal and all that first, of course! But once that’s taken care of, there’s nothing to stop us picking up this little tidbit. In fact, you could argue that we should, just to eliminate witnesses!”
“Yes, sir,” the officer said in a colourless voice, and Lopez resettled himself, annoyed at the puncturing of his good mood.
“Hail the merchies,” he snapped, flicking his fingers at his comms officer. “Give them some nice friendly chit-chat, find out what’s going on and reassure them that we’re nothing to worry about.”
----------
< < You’d better talk to them, > > Duo sent, snickering. < < Hilde’s busy kicking her repair squads into high gear, and you know I’m not gonna manage anything even close to a poker face. > >
“No kidding,” Solo told him, rolling his eyes. “All right, but you owe me one. Put ‘em on my console screen, Bryan; no need for the rest of you to have to play patsy. Just don’t laugh out loud within pickup range.”
“Gotcha,” his comms officer said, flicking switches, and Solo’s console screen blinked as a new window opened, showing a neatly-groomed woman wearing tidy blue civilian shipknits.
< < Hello there, > > she said, smile colouring her voice but not reaching her eyes. < < This is the Pretty Pretty Princess, calling-- uh, the Hellscream? Is that right? > >
“That’s us,” Solo said easily, smiling back.
< < You’ve got kind of odd names, > > she pointed out after a few seconds of transmission delay. < < Hellscream, Forsaken, and-- how do you pronounce that last one? > >
“Lor’themar,” Solo supplied, mentally snickering at the false transponder data Duo had chosen for the trip. A lot of pirates had heard about the Deathscythe; his and Hilde’s new ships were still anonymous enough to go by their real data. “They’re all game references. I don’t suppose you play World of Warcraft?”
< < I’m afraid not. I think I’ve heard of it, though; is it fun? > >
“Yeah, but you don’t want me to spend three hours singing its praises to you,” he grinned. “Are you just passing through?”
< < We’re on charter, yes. It looks like your friend is having some drive trouble, though. Need a hand? > >
“Nah, they’re just tweaking some nodes,” he shrugged. “More time-consuming than anything, we’re going to be stuck in place for a while. Nothing to worry about, really.”
This time, the smile did reach her eyes. < < Oh, that’s good to hear. This isn’t a nice system to run into problems in. > >
“You’re right there,” he told her, feeling his own smile widen. “Well, we won’t keep you. Have a good trip!”
< < You too, > > she said sunnily, and in the moment before her transmission cut out he thought he saw her lips curl with contempt.
“Well, they think we’re sitting here all fat and happy,” he said after checking to make sure his own transmission had ended.
“Yup,” Bryan agreed. “And they just did something odd.”
“Odd how?”
“Flared their wedge strength type odd. They didn’t change acceleration or heading or anything, just… revved it up for a second.”
“Signalling?” Solo guessed. “That sort of flare would be detectable a long way out-system, and even into the lower hyper bands. If they’ve got friends on the way in, this could get sticky.”
“I dunno about that,” Bryan snorted. “Even without missiles, we’ve got a heavier weapon load than any pirate I ever heard of, and there’s three of us.”
“But there might be half a dozen of them,” Solo pointed out, then shrugged. “Oh well, we’ll find out. What’s their heading?”
“Cutting across the system parallel to the ecliptic, if you can call it an ecliptic when you’ve only got a couple of cinders and some dust to measure it by,” the nav officer told him, putting a diagram up on the main screen. “They’re going to pass well within laser and graser range, in-system of us; I’m guessing they chose that heading because it looks like they’re going towards the Tumult sector’s closest trading centres, and a stereotypical pirate course would put them out-system of us to box us in. If they do have friends on the way,” he finished, looking at the course plot with satisfaction, “they’re not waiting for them.”
----------
“Even if we were really merchants, we’d have to be suspicious by now,” Duo pointed out, rolling his eyes. “They’ve got to be pulling the lowest acceleration ever seen in this system. It wouldn’t be plausible as their normal operating speed even if we hadn’t seen ‘em boosting way harder when they first hypered in.”
< < Ah, but we’re supposed to be fat, happy, and stupid, > > Solo replied. < < Didn’t you know that all pirates are handsome, dashing ne’er-do-wells with brilliant minds, cruelly wounded and driven to a life of derring-do by an uncaring society, and all merchant shippers are overweight sloppy idiots? Haven’t you seen the vids? > >
“Damn, I’d better start eating more junk food in that case, or I’ll blow our cover just by being this shape.”
< < Finished! > > Hilde crowed in triumph as her com window opened. < < And we’ve only got two beta nodes that’re still down. The twerps can start the party any time now. What’s keeping them? > >
“Best as I can figure, they don’t want to blow past us at a high relative velocity and then have to decelerate and come back,” Duo shrugged. “So instead they’re crawling along like the universe’s first hyper-capable snail.”
< < We could always start it ourselves… > >
“Impatient much? Let ‘em get in range, sheesh!”
< < I bet I can make them get into range faster, > > she grinned.
< < How? > > Solo asked, one eyebrow lifting.
< < All I’ve gotta do is bring up the wedge. If they think we’re about to get away, they’ve just about got to declare themselves, or else give up on us. > >
“And since they’ve already gone to the trouble of pussyfooting halfway across the system to reach us, that’s not likely,” Duo agreed. “Do it.”
----------
“The third ship just brought up their wedge,” Lopez’s executive officer pointed out in his annoyingly flat, emotionless voice. “Looks like they finished tweaking their nodes.”
“I can see that, Bowman,” Lopez snarled. “Kick up our acceleration, and get that captain on the com.”
< < Hey there, Princess, > > the long-haired blond said cheerfully, popping up on screen. < < What’s up? > >
“Yeah, you know how we were talking before? About how this is a bad system to run into trouble?” the comms officer drawled. “So sorry for the inconvenience, but either you strike your wedges and stand by to be boarded, or we start shooting.”
< < Seriously? You’re pirates? With that ship name? > > the Hellscream’s captain scoffed.
“Ever heard of an alias? Yes, seriously,” she answered. “Now strike your wedges and--”
“Gunnery, fire a warning shot,” Lopez snapped impatiently. “You, whatever your name is, is this convincing enough?”
A single torpedo flashed out from the pirate ship’s chase tube, streaking ahead and exploding harmlessly some distance from the three civilian ships. On screen, the Hellscream’s captain leaned to one side, apparently studying a display.
< < Yeah, that’s a torpedo all right, > > he eventually admitted. < < Huh. Give us a minute, will ya? > >
The screen went blank as his transmission cut out, leaving both Lopez and the comms officer staring open-mouthed.
“Give him a-- Who does he think he’s dealing with?!” Lopez sputtered after a long moment. “Get him back!”
“They’re not answering.”
“I don’t give a shit if they’re not answering! Tell them if they don’t strike their wedges now, we’ll blow them to kingdom come!”
“They’re doing something,” Bowman announced, tapping keys to refine a scan. “Jettisoning cargo, maybe? There’s… debris…” His voice slowed and stopped, and his one visible eye narrowed.
“Gunnery, fire another--”
Alarms buzzed on the gunnery console, and the officer yelped in dismay. “They’re hitting us with targeting systems, radar and lidar-- they’ve got targeting systems? They’re armed?!”
“They just raised sidewalls!” somebody else shouted.
< < Hey there, Pretty Pretty Pirate Pricks, > > the blond man said cheerfully, reappearing on-screen. < < So sorry for the inconvenience, but like you said before, either you strike your wedge and surrender or we blow you full of holes. There’s three of us, there’s one of you, and I guarantee we’re faster and nastier than your incompetent asses. If you don’t believe me, consider this: My name is Solo Ramirez y Maxwell, and I think you’ve probably heard of my brother and I. > >
“Ramirez y Maxwell?” Lopez stuttered, staggered by the speed at which the tables had turned on him. “Wait-- I don’t--”
“Solo and Duo Ramirez y Maxwell,” Bowman told him, gazing calmly at the main screen. His hands had left his controls, dropping uselessly into his lap. “Co-captains of the Deathscythe.”
“Deathscythe… but, uh, that’s not…”
< < Ever heard of an alias? > > Solo grinned.
The three ships were spreading out, angling away from each other and moving to bracket the pirate ship at accelerations it couldn’t match. Gathering his wits, Lopez made a ‘cut’ gesture at his comms officer and turned to snarl at the helmsman.
“Flare the wedge,” he ordered. “Send the abort signal! Tell the other ships to stand off!”
“Don’t,” Bowman said, voice cold. There was a flechette gun in his hand now, aimed halfway between the captain and the helmsman. “Strike the wedge.”
“What the hell do you think you’re--”
The gun twitched to the right and spat a short burst, three darts, that slapped Lopez out of his chair and against the bulkhead with a sharp *hiss-crack*; then it swung back, aimed between the helmsman and the comms officer now.
“Strike the wedge,” Bowman repeated, almost gently. “And open the channel again.”
----------
“Their wedge is down,” Cheng-yi reported, hunched tensely over his console.
“Aw man, you mean we don’t get to shoot them even once?” Duo mock-pouted.
“Guess not,” his comms officer commiserated. “They’re hailing us.”
“Stick ‘em up on screen.”
The com window that opened showed a slender man with mid-brown hair styled in a smooth fall that hid one of his green eyes, aiming a nasty little flechette gun at someone off-screen.
< < Hello there, > > he said calmly. < < We surrender. > >
“I just bet you do,” Duo grinned, leaning forwards. “Where’s the other guy? The one who was ordering warning shots and all that?”
< < I’m afraid Captain Lopez is permanently indisposed. > >
“Who indisposed him? You?”
< < Yes. > >
“Huh.” Duo studied the quiet-voiced man, frowning slightly as he tried to reconcile his actions with the many other pirates he’d encountered since he and Solo began their personal crusade. “So. I gather you’re planning to come quietly?”
< < Oh, yes, > > the man agreed. < < And quickly, please. I have some information that you need. > >
“Oh really? Do you also have a reason why I should believe a single damn thing you say, mister pirate?”
< < Yes. > > The green-eyed man smiled faintly. < < Reason one, I’ve locked down all the ship’s weapons and controls, so that nobody on board can shoot at you or run away. You have a clear field to come in and take over. Reason two, I can back up all my information with data from the computers. And reason three… I’m not actually a pirate. > >
The flechette gun stayed rock-steady as he raised his free hand to his mouth and poked two fingers inside, prodding at his tongue. After a moment he winced slightly and pulled his hand away, holding a thin sheet of something opaque and flesh-coloured; then he turned his head fully towards the com pickup and stuck out his tongue, displaying smeared-looking black lines and dots like a blurred bar code.
< < Oh fuck, > > somebody whimpered. < < Audubon Ballroom. We’re screwed. > >
* * * * *
Genetic slavery might be technically outlawed in virtually every star nation, but in practice many governments either actively participated in the slave trade or looked the other way as it went on around them. In Silesia, it was almost expected. Not all of the ‘customers’ were prosperous enough to deal directly with Mesa and the huge Manpower conglomerate, but smaller corporations bought and re-sold ‘designer’ slaves across all the sectors.
The larger star nations with stakes in the Silesian confederacy -- Manticore, Haven, and the Andermani Empire -- did their best to quash the trade, but they were often hamstrung by the treaties under which they operated. Slavers they captured usually had to be handed over to local governments for trial, and it wasn’t uncommon for one set to be encountered again soon after they’d been ‘sentenced’ and ‘imprisoned’, in a new ship and back at their old trade. As a result, what the slavers really feared wasn’t being captured by a warship; it was being found by the Audubon Ballroom.
Made up of escaped and freed slaves, the Ballroom were -- again, technically -- terrorists. The governments who ignored the slave trade opposed them; the governments who genuinely worked against it tended to find reasons not to arrest Ballroom agents. The display of a barcoded tongue was both their identification, and a combined threat and insult to anyone involved in the trade.
* * * * *
“Okay, we’ve got the full pirate crew disarmed and under lock and key in their own cargo hold,” Solo reported, checking his notes. “Mystery dude here was telling the truth about having the whole ship on lockdown; half of them were stuck in isolated compartments, trying to get the doors to open. A few had personal sidearms, but the worst damage anyone took was a minor suit puncture, and since we were operating in atmosphere they didn’t even decompress. We got to the bridge with him opening doors for us along the way, and I have never seen a pirate so happy to be captured as that bridge crew. They were shitting themselves. Anyway, he gave us the codes to take over, and the Pretty Pretty Prick is all ours now.”
< < Sweet, > > Duo said over the com, eyeing the ‘mystery dude’ now standing next to Solo’s console. < < Explanations now? Are you really from the Audubon Ballroom? I thought those bar codes were supposed to be neater. > >
“My father was a genetic slave,” the green-eyed man said calmly. “My mother was a Marine on the ship that freed him. The barcoding breaks down pretty fast if you don’t have somebody tweaking it in utero.”
< < Right. So what’s this fantastically important information you have for us? > >
“The Princess was the lead scout of a two-ship team escorting a slave ship to Breslau. Lopez didn’t manage to warn them off, so the slaver and its remaining escort should be arriving in-system in less than two hours. There are five hundred slaves on board, and if the crew think they’re in danger of being captured they’ll space them all to get rid of the evidence.”
Solo, Duo, and Hilde all stared at him. He stared back.
< < …Well, shit, > > Hilde said eventually. < < This is gonna take some strategy. > >
----------
Duo sat back in his chair, feeling the comforting weight of Shinigami’s true-hand on one shoulder as the treecat snuggled close. “Damn,” he said mildly. “Okay, first of all, what’s your name? We can’t keep calling you ‘Mystery Dude’, and ‘Audubon Dude’ is just as bad.”
< < Trowa Barton. > >
“Trowa, huh. So you say you’ve got all the computer data and so on… can you give us a general idea of where these other ships are gonna come out of hyper?”
< < I can give you a fairly precise set of coordinates, yes. > >
“Cool. And how fast on the eject button are those assholes likely to be?” Duo persisted, thinking fast. “I mean, is it gonna be ‘well shit, there’s an armed ship we weren’t expecting, buh-bye’, or will they actually think about it for a few minutes?”
Trowa cocked his head, eyeing Duo thoughtfully. < < Most likely option two. The slaves represent a major investment for the seller, and the transport crew get a cut; they won’t get rid of them as long as they think they’ve got a chance to escape. They will make sure to eject them before another ship gets close enough to get visual scan records of them doing it, though. > >
“In that case,” Duo said, starting to grin nastily, “I think I have an idea.”
----- Originally posted at my Dreamwidth account, feel free to comment on either site!