It was a brilliant ship, not even repurposed. Emile had signed a contract, put his name under the dark man's, and been handed such a ship, leased straight from Bowex Headquarters. She'd be their home for the next few months, if they were lucky, and then they'd be rich folks, off of Leeds, in the possession of a ship, far and away.
Chrisopher Wren walked him out of the bar, rolling the contract as they went. They hired a quick skiff to the station, darting through the smog of Leeds, over growing military embankments and refugee centers. The pilot chattered happily at first, but neither Emile nor Wren had the charm to keep it going, they were at serious business, and it showed in their poise. By the time they arrived, the pilot was mumbling about snotty lords and their uppity hangers on. Wren paid him, a flourish of a credit chip and a brisk nod, a mumbled "sir." With that, they continued on foot, between towering ships, shrouded in fogs and vapors.
They'd said that Emile, Lucy, and crew would be provided with a ship, and with such a vauge promise, they'd expected nothing more than a shambling wreck, a trawler with guns mounted to its main lines and a jumped up drive pulled rotting from a scrapyard, and looked forward to it. They'd put together funds, and bought themselves the best air purifier they could, hoping to pump out the stench of Leeds and breathe the cleanest air available for weeks at a time. Some of the gun crew had sold everything they owned, down to the clothes on their back, just to put their share into that contingency. And it was an excellent scrubber, bought firsthand from a tiny Berlin production facility which focused exclusively on producing the Air Filtration Systems for the ALG Golems...a treasure worth over a million sirius credits.
Emile assumed they were cutting through this ship's landing bay, at first. He expected, at any moment, for Wren to adjust his course just away from the ship, to skirt around it toward something suitable for piracy and fraud, a second rate ship for this risky, and somewhat stupid venture. Wren stopped in front of it, a few meteres off, and Emile was rather confused, coming to a stop in something of a stuttering slide, his mouth open.
"You allright, sir?" Emile thought there couldn't be harm in asking. Wren was old, and he'd been breathing Leeds atmosphere a bit heavily. Wren nodded, and waved his arm in an expansive gesture, including the ship.
"It looks allright, doesn't it? That's the ship, Carina's Revenge. Top of the line ship for fending off pirates, and if you can beat the predators themselves, well now!" Wren chuckled, grinning. He was enjoying this. "If you can fight off the predators, then you can certianly eat the prey."
Emile nodded, stunned. The thing was huge, many times the height of a man, painted a fresh red, displaying golden highlights, probably real gold. This sort of ship ran for tens of millions of credits, on resale...He hadn't the slightest what it was worth, new. "Its been painted recently, sir? Looks quite sharp." He was only just begining to guess what sort of backing Wren had. Something phenomenal, surely.
"Its a fresh ship, just checked and test flown, painted and gilded and marked last week, just after the last bolt was layed. Hull cost was a hundred million credits, the ablative plating another fourty-eight million, the guns and shields bring it up to a hundred, fifty-five million, total." Emile blanched. That was more money, than...a single million had been a fourtune, pulled together by the crew of seven. A hundred and fifty times that, well, Emile hoped space was profitable. "Its a good ship," Wren continued, "Reliable and strongly built. Handles well and will be able to see you out of plenty hard situations, with a full hold and atmosphere intact. I wish you well out there."
"I, well, sir. I don't doubt you do, sir, if you're gambling that ship in this venture. I'll expect to do well with it." Wren grinned, slapping Emile on the back, as he began to turn away.
"Good man. And now, I've other issues. I'll be off, to catch a cab. Ship's in your name, as of a day ago. Papers were merely a formality. Its been a pleasure, Good day." Emile turned to thank him, and did so, but whisps of fog were already occluding Wren from view, and probably muffled his words before Wren could hear them.
Mumbling his astonishment, Emile walked around the ship, to an open gangway leading into the darker bowels, and flipped open his comm, dialing Lucy, his mate.
"Hey, Luce, you're never going to believe what I'm sitting in, right now!"
She'd come from a family of smelters. They'd both come from families of smelters, really, grown up in the same neighborhood, where the only real work was smelting. Their father's had left in droves every morning, some of them alongside their wives, dressed in heavy boots, wearing thick protective aprons folded over the ties at the waist, their mitts in thier hands or their bags. People who came home dirty, and tired, and then played or fought themselves to an early exhaustion. While she was young, she'd never really understood clean. She'd showered, and scrubbed, of course, but she lived in a family of smelters, surrounded by other smelting families, close enough to the forges and the trains that the ash and the dust never settled. It wasn't untill she'd moved out of that little town, deeper into the city, for the sort of expensive eduaction her parents had come to Leeds to be able to afford, that she'd every seen a clean room, or showered long enough to feel at peace in one.
She was feeling that same way, again, like she had never been clean, as she stepped off the gangway, across the airlock, and into its hold. It was pristine, white, glowing with fresh paint and the smell of clean, amonized scrubbing still lingering in the air.
Though the hull was painted with a dull red ochre which blended into the smog at dusk, obscuring the size of the ship, the gangway gleamed, white finish polished to a mirror shine, reflecting the dull lights of the shipyard at dusk, and her boots as she walked in beneath the engines.
The livable space aboard the ship began, from the outside, under the engines, at the only airlock, a downward facing monster of a thing tucked between the rearmost cargo containers, from which the gangway extends. Inside the airlock, a lonely hallway is strung under the main bulk of the ship, suspended along the inside of the main strut from which the cargo compartments were attached. The hallway contained the access ports to the cargo compartmetns, eight ladders leading upward in pairs quarterly along the hall. The hall ended in a staircase which fanned outward as it rose, culminating in a ring which led to hab compartments, the galley, the wreck room, internal drive controls, and at the rear, a spiral staircase up the conning tower toward the bridge and weapon arrays.
Shires were generally spacious ships, but this one had had much of the internal space filled, or interfered with, by numerous iridium spokes strung across the living sections as part of its extended armour complement, giving it something of a eery glow where the white finish reflected the darker, pitted material.
Across the entire ship, the finish was a white with a shine aproaching silver, glowing with such a virosity that one could claim the ship was finished and walled in mirrors. Luce quickly realized that she'd have to exchange her skirts for leggings on such a vessel.
Emile was a decent pilot, and an even better organizer. Luce had simply the sweetest voice...she'd sung in bars for her dinner, back in 812, when the college collapsed and she couldn't find a single real job...at the same time, Raj had been tearing apart junked skiffs for their working parts, which he'd shine and sell to repair shops as premium out-of-production stockpile bits. Caleb and Nate, twins, had grown up on the streets, picking pockets.
One didn't expect an excellent bump and pull or a quick pocket draw would lend itself to a fair hand at the big guns, but they did. Hand eye coordination was hand eye coordination, and even when you're not actually looking at your mark's wallet, having quick hands and living off of them gave them a brilliant edge. Tie a pair of pickpockets into the ships neuralnet, plug them into the guns, alternating up and down the hull rather than each to a side, and you've youself an excellent chance for the sort of arms coverage you could barely get on a Fleet Battleship. They could each shoot in two directions at once, because they'd grown up using each hand to a different purpose..and because they were used to working with their eyes looking the other way, they only needed to mark the trajectories, or changes in trajectories, of oncoming targets. Mostly a wasted talent, of course, when you're pinging transports from less than a thousand meters with all twelve turrets while Luce demaded they drop their cargo in that sweet, innocent, singsong voice of hers.
That voice was what really pulled it all together, once they were out in Tau. Luce made friends of the GC, and then of the crews they were pirating, just with the smiles dripping off her voice, she lured trains an haulers and transports of every sort into their grasp, they bought their beers on freeports with her songs.
'Course, if it hadn't been for Raj putting bits and peices back on, Emile wouldn't have a ship to captian, or deals to cut, Caleb and Nate would have fried in their interfaces, and Luce would be singing her way home from Freeport 10..So things all came together, and they were making something of a profit, even against the lease.
Raj hadn't any idea what was going on outside his deck. Really didn't have the time to notice the sounds, reminicient of hail, echoing down the hall, or much of the shouting sputtering from comms.
He didn't have time, simply, because the ship was not moving. Dead in the water, putting out just enough energy to hold the sheild at full. There were warning lights over his monitors, and a few klaxon blared. Somewhere, something'd been hit, and he had to reroute coolant from...anywhere else, really, to get the engine running again.
As he dashed across the bay, the grav stuttered, and things drifted upward, his spine extended as his magboots engaged, and then thunked as it dropped him back to the ground. Cables and tools slapped back onto the ground all around him. He smeared one sort of goop over a hole, and twisted off a tube. Auxilliarary pressure vavle 16, if anyone had the time to notice. It had a simple clamp sleeve, and so he tortched a section of the main intake out of place with his saw, and simply squeezed Pressure Valve 16 over the engineside hole...Blue antifreeze dribbled out of the cut pipe.
He ran back over to the main comp, smashed in the buttons, and Pressure Valve 16 stretched open, and taunt. Something was running through it, at least....and with an luck, he wasn't feeding hydrogen into the coolant tanks.
Raj closed his eyes, for a moment, hoping Kali'd miss him once again. He did deserve to die for claiming he was a competent mechanic, at this point. Wincing, he opened his eyes, first the right, and then the left, to a vision of a blue screen, displaying ship status in soothig tones. They weren't dead...just yet.
Sweat was stinging Colin's eyes as he leaned into the guns. He was half out of his chair, squinting, and something had gone wrong with the atmospherics. He was tracing up shots on a Corsair fighter of some sort, at the best of times letting loose with twelve blue pulses, but usually only six, and landing less. It certianly didn't help that whenever Emile slewed the ship from a bolt of antimatter, he'd lose his lock on the ship, and he spent his joules in open space as he rotated the cannons back around. Things were messy, and he only had clearance to hit one target: They wanted to negotiate away from the Kusari, and, of course, everyone was yelling.
"No, I don't know why there's a Gaian!" Luce shouted over the dribble of light fire on the hull, just before the shield crackled back online.
"Bloody hell, Luce, get us some clear skies! Do something! Nate, why aren't you to downing that thing yet? Fire!" Emile was livid. Terrified, of course, but mostly livid. Corsair merc deathbird thing, sure. Kishiro, sure. KNF bomber, of course. And then a Gaian? This was turning to a bloody furball mess, and his crew was the center of it. Not at all happy circumstances.
"Kusari wants us to holdfire and drop cargo...Kishiro wants five million offa us!" Luce shouted around her headset, one earphone slewing down across her neck.
"Of bloody course they're not together. Offer to work with the KNF if he gets his man off our ass. And Colin, kill that corsair!"
So Colin squeezed more shots into space, burnt more joules, and managed, finally, to land a stream of bolts across the fighters belly, six from nose to snout, and two to either edge of the shield. The thing flickered, and the bubble lit up like it was hit by lighting, crackled, and faded from the screen. Colin's instruments showed nothing but the residue of spent gravitons.
There weren't many places to land a Shire in Kusari. The Revenge could moor at a few, if Luce were on good terms with the GC, who she often miffed about one thing or another, her lewd Bretonian Jingoism often coming up against their inherently Kusari sensibilities. There were other stipulations than just Luce's recent statements on the table manners of slant eyed barbarians, like whether or not they spiked the Hokkaido gate from New Tokyo and led a pack of behind them, guns still flashing, and of course, they had better be ready to pay a steep fee for such mass as a Shire, whether in goods or in credits.
Having surrendered out of combat, their hold was empty and they were mighty short on cash, having spent a great deal on bribing the Hogosha's guns silent, even after Luce's protestations that they were "naught but streetside scoundrels, childish pikers with little pocket change" and "down to our last two pence, gov's, since the last set of blighters shook us down". Luckily for them, beyond expensive moors and well patrolled lanes, Kusari consisted of deep nebulae, smacked flush against the tradroutes.
There they slept, their portholes nearly painted in the blue mist, ship powered down and silent, radiating just what heat it would lose until they woke and go to work on engine repairs. Out there, the gas consumed their leaking radiation and blazing signatures, and though patrols drifted through the smog, nothing short of visual contact would reveal their presence in Shikoku, deep where they shouldn't have been anyway.
Breakfast would be cold slop, proteins fed through a blender with milk added, and the week would be filled with tense watches of the scanners while crew crept along the hull, torches and maglocks in hand, buckled down by cables attached to netting on the pods. They needed to shake down a cargo of hull panels, or super alloy, and fast, but first they needed a ship that more than crawled, less than screamed, and who's guns could lay down more than stutters.