Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civillised nations.
Thomas Jefferson
16th June 822 – New London System, Bretonia
Stars blurred past the shire’s displays, a maddening mosaic of colour in the dark of the ship’s interior. Sarah McFarlen raised a hand to her red-rimmed eyes and tried to rub the weariness clear. Nothing. She sighed and dialled down the display instead, ignoring the indignant mumbling of a technician four seats over. They’d been on the lanes for what felt like the past day, ever since a shuttle had sailed in alongside the Galley and an all-too-cheerful first officer had bundled them aboard the latest in her long string of ships. Lucan was a Bowex-owned heavy transport, partially converted for human cargo. A small upper deck played host to Leslie, Sarah, and a handful of technical specialists, most sprawled across one or two seats in varying stages of sleep, while the ship’s cargo bay ferried a load of equipment that Sarah didn’t recognise but positively reeked of expensive.
Henry Morrison was bringing his latest potential employees home to meet the family.
Bowex had, at Sarah’s prompting, agreed to transport the pair from Cambridge to New London with one of their convoys. Economically it felt like a win, but it was hard to miss the subtext behind the apparent favor. We can put a ship wherever we want to, whenever we want to. Bowex had delayed the launch of the convoy for a whole quarter-hour to make certain the shuttle from the Galley made it aboard Lucan in time. The casual disregard for the monetary expense would have had any one of the Big Three frothing at the mouth and demanding lawyers, accountants, and blood. Lucan’s smiling first officer had shown them to their seats without so much as mentioning it.
“I don’t like this.” Sarah prodded at Leslie, Adventure Galley’s lanky captain apparently asleep next to her, settled neatly into her chair as though she’d been born to it. Unlike the Galley, the Lucan maintained a semblance of gravity in the crew areas. Sarah wouldn’t have wanted to try skipping in it any time soon but if you dropped a datapad it would, eventually, drift to the ground. The whole thing felt terribly unnatural to Sarah. She’d raided the Galley’s medical cabinet for antiemetics before they left, but her stomach still lurched and twisted every time the ship’s computer tugged down a few degrees forward or back. “It doesn’t feel right. They’re too nice.”
Leslie lazily opened an eye, peering at Sarah. Having at least some gravity was a welcome relief to her, she was not a space-dweller like Sarah yet. The Galley’s captain resorted to her trademark gesture, a shrug. “Grandma Company,” she offered, reminding Sarah of their conversation earlier.
“This isn’t grandma. This is full-on Father Christmas-level charity we’re talking about here.” Sarah nodded to the floor under them, and immediately regretted it when her guts swirled in response. She closed her eyes and waited for the nausea to retreat. “They’re running gravity generators en-route. Can you imagine how much that costs them? Messing with mass as you’re firing the engines. That’s, like, gilt-on-the-toilet-seat type excess. There’s something going on here. No-one’s that nice. No company’s going to care that much. Remember how I said we shouldn’t have come?”
Leslie smiled wanly and patted Sarah on the shoulder reassuringly. “I had an internship at Interspace for a few months. HR used to have me book the Northern Atlantic whenever we really wanted to nail someone to the f****** wall. I imagine Bowex has some pressing need of us, and it’s probably got something to do with the war.”
“Internspace.” Sarah quipped. Leslie merely groaned at the horrible joke.
“Been awhile since I last heard that,” She said. Smoothing a few creases that had developed in her business suit, she nodded, business-face on again. “They won’t be able to slide a quick one past me. They’re toddlers compared to the wolves at Interspace.”
“Toddlers with more money than God.” Sarah glanced nervously around the shire. It was difficult with her eyes half-closed against the swirling lights on the display, but she just about managed it. The last contact she’d had with corporations had been at the wrong end of a laser array. “I don’t know. It just feels a little like we’re walking into the lion’s den. And, with these guys playing with the gravity, I'm not feeling up to a whole lot of running.”
Leslie swatted Sarah on the head lightly.
“Man up, Engineer. We can’t have you throwing up over their expensive carpets when we get there.” Her expression softened and she held Sarah’s arm in reassurance. “This is my territory, just trust me and follow my lead, and we’ll either come out of this with a fat paycheck or a learning experience.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Sarah managed a wan smile. “It’s not like they’re asking us to go fight off the Unioners or anything like that. Could be worse, right?”
Technicians shuddered in their seats as the ship slipped back into realspace with another tug at Sarah’s already-battered stomach. On the viewscreen the stars were, once again, bright points stationary against the black sky. Even as an experienced spacer, Sarah had never really got used to trade lanes. You just learned to live with them, and tried to ignore the sensations that came with superluminal travel. Sarah shook her head, but her headache doggedly remained in place.
Klaxons wailed from the wall, a steady screeching drone. The noise jerked the handful of unfortunate passengers that had slept through the lane exit into consciousness, hands flailing first for alarms, and then over their ears. Sarah’s heart skipped a few beats. Every spacer knew that alarm. Knew it, and never wanted to hear it. Targeting laser. Someone was staring at the Lucan down the barrel of a gun.
“Leslie.” It wasn’t a whisper, but it was as close as she could manage over the alarms. Sarah cursed, hands twitching for controls that weren’t there. “That’s a-”
“Ledon, this is Suffolk.” A voice boomed over the Shire’s speakers, tense and tired, made almost comically tiny by the aging audio system. Somehow, that only made it seem more inhuman. “Halt for cargo inspection. Acknowledge, over.”
Another shudder run through the ship as Ledon’s forward thrusters fired, dragging the heavy transport to a lumbering halt. Sarah was jerked forward in her seat, hands sliding away from the display on the transport wall. Ledon didn’t have much velocity to kill coming out of the lane, but boy was the captain dumping it quickly. Sarah wasn’t sure she blamed him. She got her hands back on the display, gave a silent cheer of triumph, and turned to Leslie.
“Get a look at this.” She nestled further back in her chair so the other woman could see the display. Red and gold hung silhouetted in the black like a royal banner, the battleship expanding until it filled the screen. Turret barrels wide enough to fly a fighter down pointed across the intervening kilometres to pinpoint Ledon. It was practically knife-fight range for a battleship. Sarah grinned like a child at the fair, nausea forgotten. “Dunkirk-class dreadnought.”
Leslie whistled appreciatively.
“That’s one hell of a ship,” She said, craning her head to get a better look. She shuddered inwardly, thinking of all the destruction one mistimed salvo could cause.
“Mhm.” Sarah nodded in turn as the klaxons fell silent. Someone on the bridge was apparently saying the right things. “Heaviest armor in the colonies. That thing can shrug off antimatter. Not in huge quantities, I mean, but still. More than it'd take to burn a city. I’d give an arm to know how they built it.” She raised an eyebrow. “Do you think they’re looking for an engineer?”
“Don’t bail on me now just ‘cause you saw a well-built ship.” Leslie’s look was sly. “Is that your fetish? Hulking engines of mass destruction?”
“A girl can appreciate a well-designed railgun on it’s own merits.” Sarah winked. “You know what they say. Sometimes a kinetic warhead is just a kinetic warhead.”
Leslie looked away, suppressing a grin.
“Suffolk means we’re close then.” She gathered her briefcase, which was leaning on her chair until now. “Clean yourself up, it’s time to meet the boys.”
“You’re just morally opposed to fun.” Sarah waved back at the display. “Five more minutes?”
But she picked herself up anyway, started towards the cramped bathroom to wash the sleep from her eyes. Strange, considering she didn’t remember drifting off on the way. Life just wasn’t fair. She reached into her bag, popped a cocktail of teriparatide and painkillers, and braced herself for the closest thing she’d seen to full gravity in years. No two ways about it. This was going to hurt.
Beneath her feet, the deck shuddered as the shire’s engines rumbled back to life, pushing her towards Canary Wharf.
"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."
- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.
“Almost. It was your bloody fault anyway. You and coffee machines- I swear I’m going to have to file a harassment form on behalf of one of those.”
Dressed in sharp company business attire, Peterson stood but a short distance beyond the security scanners of mooring point 4-C. Every now and then, he would glance at the man slouching against one of the support pillars with displaying a certain level of distaste. Peterson was looking unwell in general terms, but whether that was due to Clarke’s proximity, sleep deprivation or the slightly lower than terrestrial gravity field was hard to tell.
“What have I done now?” Clarke asked, no longer able to pretend not to notice. He sloppily adjusted one of the bands holding the lower part of his orange flightsuit so it sat slightly closer to his neck.“Better now? I’m wearing a rather nice shirt for this.” He exclaimed semi-proudly before lounging back against the pillar and returning to his inevitably acidic coffee. “Besides, some of us have a bloody job to do.”
Peterson gave him a sullen look, black bags under his eyes underlining his silent point. “If only you knew. It’s all well and good for you, gallivanting around and blasting things and having a jolly good time. HQ has worked out how to kill a man with a thousand paper cuts. I bloody well miss my days as a flight instructor.” He immediately snapped at Clarke who was staring pointedly at the Combine logo on his lapel. “And it wasn’t a demotion!”
Clarke looked towards his own uniform and started smugly pretending to brush some imaginary dirt off his left sleeve. “You know, I could always put in a good word and ask for you to be promoted to Flight Instructor again. Granted, this would mean you’d have to work under me, but what’s a few coffee runs between friends?” Thinking about the hypothetical situation became somewhat entertaining for him, and he added “even more so, what’s a few salutes between friends? Right? Surely you wouldn’t mind.” Highly amused by the thought of what could be, he turned yet again to his hot beverage, taking another sip from the sealed bulb.
As Peterson prepared to spit back a retort, klaxons around the airlock started blaring - proximity alerts for an incoming transport. As a heavy set of mooring clamps hit the station with a loud thump, a shudder passed through the deck plating. Clarke swiftly stood up and took a position next to his colleague. “Right, time for Bowex’s finest representatives to lead an interview.” Half-way through the sentence, his facial expression shifted to a somewhat confused one.
A member of the public might have wondered if there were indeed finer representatives aboard the station - or more appropriate ones at least; perhaps a recruitment manager from HR? Bowex employees, the cynical and jaded creatures that they tended to be, would instead have recognised the situation as an act of delegation to a miscellaneous pair of dogsbodies. In any case, this was not going to bother Clarke. In his mind, they had an important job to do and their guests were already making their way through security.
“What do you think they’re worried about?” Sarah shuffled into the queue forming between the narrow ramp a pair of dockworkers had pushed up alongside Lucan and a harried-looking woman with ‘security’ stamped across her chest and a datapad in one hand. God, her legs ached. Sitting waiting on the transport while dockworkers and drones milled about unloading it had been uncomfortable enough. She braced an arm on Leslie’s shoulder and wished she’d thought to take the painkillers a little earlier. “We came in on one of their transports.”
Leslie did not seem overly worried, patting Sarah’s arm for reassurance. “They’re a losing nation at war, Sarah. I expect some paranoia to be justified.” She looked around. “So where are we supposed to be going?”
“It’d be nice if they could be paranoid somewhere that’s not around us, though.” Sarah shrugged, shuffled forward, resisted the impulse to push off the floor and float over the intervening crowd. “Morrison wasn’t exactly specific. He just said that they’d have someone here to meet us.”
She raked her eyes across the meagre crowd shuffling past the security checkpoint and caught a glimpse of black. “I’m guessing the suit over there’s our man. Unless Bowex have really stepped up the dress code for their maintenance crews.”
Leslie gave the man a critical look, and after a moment tutted discontentedly. “Seems like they’ve sent a freshman, Sarah.”
Sarah grinned, despite the discomfort in her legs. The Bowex rep was lurking behind the checkpoint, chatting away to someone hidden behind a thin steel column. He didn’t look like he was enjoying the conversation. “All the better for us. What was it you said? Toddlers, right?”
Leslie shrugged, a resigned expression on her face. “It invalidates my earlier theory though. They wouldn’t send freshmen if they intended to negotiate big.” She smiled. “We’ll take what we can get though, right?” She smoothed out her suit subconsciously.
“Not like we’ve got a choice.” Sarah smiled and trudged forward with the crowd. “Considering they’re at war, avoiding the big time’s probably not a bad thing. Call me old fashioned, but I’m still a little...Er… Attached to all my limbs. Sounds like he’ll-” She nodded across the room to the suited rep. “Be a pushover for you, raised in the wilds of Liberty and all.”
“Hold there please, ma’am.” The hawkish security woman raised a hand, frowning at the datapad. “I don’t have you on the complement. New employee?”
“Not exactly. Sar- Er, Sparks and a plus one.” Sarah gave her most winning smile. “Henry Morrison should’ve booked us in to discuss work.”
The woman frowned at her datapad for a moment before she waved the pair through, eyes that looked as tired as Sarah felt already sliding wearily on to the next new arrival. Sarah turned back towards Leslie let her arm drop away from the other woman’s shoulder. “Least I can do to arrive under my own power. Go get ‘em, wolfie.”
Leslie’s smile was almost benign. “To war, then.”
She walked up to the representatives and stopped a few paces away, inclining her head. “Mr. Henry Morrison? Leslie Durant. I’ve come with Sarah to participate in your discussion.”
Her smile was demure as she extended a hand, after a brief glance at Sarah. The engineer gave a subdued thumbs-up that almost offset the sickly pallor settling into her face.
“Very pleased to meet you, Gentlemen,” Leslie said after exchanging handshakes. “If you’ll be so kind as to lead us to your offices, we can get this show on the road.”
"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."
- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.
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