Inside the central habitation module of the newly under construction starbase named Melbourne Station, a few small offices had been constructed and furnished. One was shared between the Ministers of Engineering, Finance, and Services for the time being. Another was solely utilized by the Minister of Intelligence, Victor Delacroix, though he would hesitate to call it a proper office due to its size and hasty installation. A third was that of Harold Kane, Minister of Relations.
In it, Kane had set up the best approximation he could of his old office on Seasons Base, which to his continued lamentation had become run down and was abandoned almost a year and a half ago. It was the first true symbol in his attempt to move his people in a peaceful direction, but also the first symbol of his failure to that end. Yet still, it was a goal he had not given up on. They had attempted to colonize what soon became a warzone. The obvious step up was to attempt to colonize a system that was once a warzone until the invading forced realized there nothing there apparently worth fighting over.
Melbourne Station faced the sun of the Tau-44 system from high in orbit of Planet Borneo. Kane’s office, however, faced the frigid ocean planet below. The Crayter Republic had intent of colonizing the planet and setting up large-scale mining operations under the surface and had extended an offer to the Natio to help with the settlement efforts. A mighty tempting offer, but at what cost? Borneo was a world of hostile ecology and little land, none of which was suitable for farming without biodomes or planetwide terraforming. Natio citizens had already attempted to colonize a planet, an effort that ultimately fell apart when the settlements could not be supported under siege and blockade alike. The collapse and subsequent exodus of the Natio people was disastrous for morale. A second failed attempt would fracture and destroy the fledgling nation-state.
Kane spent hours some days staring out the window at Borneo. It reminded him of New Westminster, oceans dominating its surface, shimmering in the glow of Tau-44’s twin suns above. It represented a potential home and future for his people.
His people.
An odd thing to say, he often thought to himself. His people were pirates. Mercenaries. Smugglers. The nation he had founded was built by the former Vagrant Raiders, a fleet of former criminal elements variously aligned to Maltese and various Robin Hood-like influences in Liberty and the Independent Worlds. A group that he joined almost a decade ago under the leadership of a son of the Petrucci family of Malta. They struck Libertonian corporate elements, quarreled with the Navy, and supported the Orange Dream directly and indirectly all the way from the cardamine fields on the homeworld to the distribution points in the houses. And while he was never particularly fond of some of the Raiders’ dependences on the drug, nor a user himself, he could not turn down the money. Risk was natural to him – his family had long been sympathetic to Malta and her struggle to be a true, united nation in the Edge Worlds – and a paycheque the size of the ones he was receiving from the smuggling ventures was more than an equal reward.
When John and the flagship VCS Metropolis disappeared after the Battle of Freeport One, the fleet fell apart. Its shambling corpse was held together for some time by Blain Spike, but by then the reputation of a once mighty unlawful faction in the Vagrant Raiders was tarnished and then some. A few years later, Kane returned to the spotlight, his close friend and accomplice known to the underworld only as Escher in tow, to reclaim the Raiders and move out of what was killing them and into more legitimate enterprises and a stable future for the civilians who slowly became part of the greater Vagrant family. They looked to the future, envisioning a place in Sirius where they could continue their legacy as a nation of their own.
And then they lost it all and were forced into hiding. Kane took the weight of the exodus to bear himself.
Now, a year and a half later, they had the beginnings of what they had five years ago. A newly-constructed starbase in orbit of a potentially habitable planet, few allies, and relative security in being far from what appeared to be any active warzones. And a broken, hodgepodge fleet of a few warships, a wing of fighters and bombers, and a handful of transports, civilian and military alike.
“Lay it on me, Tobes,” he said, looking up at a tall, chestnut-skinned man wearing squared glasses and a relatively casual outfit of a grey T-shirt and jeans.
The man coughed. “Same as before, Harold. One Starbridge, half a Huginn, one Cormorant, about two dozen snubs, a couple Voyagers, a working Ibis and the salvageable hull of another… and that’s about it as far as military vehicles go. OIC’s got a couple Spatials and a Taurus, though to be honest I’m not keen on asking Victor where he got that particular ship from.”
“Apparently they’re just selling them on Curacao now.”
“Hmm. Could be worth using as a light ferry between stations and systems. I’ll put it on the list of things to look at. Our military is still in shambles, though. We’ve started getting a few more butts to put in seats but our force projection is limited only to anywhere we can get a wing of fighters operating safely. The one Ibis we have hasn’t got any working carrier components, so our long-distance snub transport capabilities are limited to say the least.
“As for warships, the Crayterians have a few blueprints we could probably work from. Light battleships, cruisers, corvettes. There’s a few civilian deep space frigates on the market now based off the old Corvo platform, and a rather unwieldly-looking cricket bat of a carrier platform. Putting the Black Cloud II back together will require some help from the Hessians – we’ve lost the blueprints, the VWA is gone, and we don’t have the resources or facilities to rebuild it in open space. So the Huginn-class is on hold for at least a few months. And unless you’ve got a bunch of friends on Valetta that we don’t know about, we can’t rebuild the old Storta-based destroyers from the First Fleet.”
Kane folded his hands in front of the lower half of his face and looked at the display on his desk. The treasury fund and upkeep for the Fourth Octavarium Fleet was not exactly a positive outlook, but it was a realistic problem at least. One that they could certainly find ways to solve.
“Asking Crayter for a battleship or even a cruiser of some sort this soon into our relationship would be… ill-advised. Something to investigate later, perhaps. Start setting aside some funds for construction of a cruiser, Tobiah. How much do you think it’d cost versus a light battleship?”
The Minister of Finance tapped the right side of his glasses twice and smiled. “Hull and core would be about half the cost for a heavy cruiser versus a light battleship. Armour is variable, but similar pricing – it all depends on how much armour you want and how high tech you want to go. I’m sure we could start small and scale up though. Weapons would be about a third at the most. Even the heaviest of cruiser turrets these days through legitimate channels are cheaper than battleship main guns. Only downside is we wouldn’t be able to kit it as a carrier.”
“That’s fine. If we can build two cruisers instead of one battleship we’ve got two smaller targets potentially attacking or defending from two angles. Gives us more tactical options and forces anyone we’re fighting to split their attention.”
He chuckled. “I’ll leave the fighting to you, boss. Once we get the things built, though, try not to get them blown up. Insurance on warships isn’t cheap and the turnaround is hell. I’ll need to prioritize maintenance, but we’ll get the fleet back up and running in top shape within six months or my name isn’t Tobiah Nitzan.”
He turned to walk out the door but was interrupted by one last thought from Kane.
“Hey, Tobes? Sorry about the office situation. We’ll get the three of you your own spaces soon enough,” Kane said reassuringly, tossing a fist-sized ball at his friend and colleague.
Nitzan caught it with his right hand, threw it gently in the air, and let it land in his left. “Don’t worry about it. Florence and I are having fun annoying the hell out of each other. Ellen will probably be the first one to request a separate office, to be honest.”
Kane let out a genuine laugh – something he hadn’t done in what felt like years. “Try not to piss Flor off too much, eh? Neither of us really want to get on the chief engineer’s bad side.”
Walking out of the office, Nitzan held up the ball. “You know I’m going to throw this at her, right?” he asked rhetorically, wandering down the hall and out of earshot of any response Kane would come up with.
“It’s a good thing we’ve started patrols,” Kane said, coffee in each hand, looking at the already-messy station Florence Clemens was using as her personal work area in Melbourne Station’s brand-new engineering bay. “I’d hate for you to go a week without something new to tinker with.”
She looked up from the scanner she was programming and sighed. “Twelve hours I’ve been working on this stuff, since you and Escher brought it in. I hate to admit it, but I’m more lost now than I was before I started.” She put down the scanner and stood up to look at her work. A large weapons turret about three metres across at the base was situated on a lift in one corner of the engineering bay.
He strode over and handed her one of the piping hot mugs. Black, one sugar. “What do we know about it?”
The engineer took a long, relaxed sip of her beverage. The engineering bay was noticeably colder than the rest of the station due to its open floorplan. Any source of heat was appreciated, and one with caffeine was a godsend.
“It’s basically an impenetrable black box,” she started. “I don’t know how to get into it to observe its internals. There’s no access or maintenance ports, no seams, and no markings of any kind. I could try to get in through the hardpoint connectors, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to securely put them back together. It’s not from Bretonia or Liberty, and it doesn’t look like something Rheinland’s engineering companies would build. Definitely not Kusari or Maltese.”
“Gallic?”
She laughed. “Come on, Harold. Do you really think they wouldn’t be proudly slapping their emblem all over the thing if it was theirs?”
“Fair enough,” said Kane, smiling. He walked under the massive armament and ran his fingers across the baseplate. “These are definitely for a destroyer or cruiser of some sort. Too bad we don’t have any laying around to try mounting it on, and frankly, I’m not sure if I want to tell Crayter about this.”
Florence looked on from her workspace, drinking her coffee slowly.
“Looks kind of like the power junctions used on a siege weapon’s mounting plate, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “It’s close enough to a Cerberus that we can probably build an adapter plate for it with relative ease. Where I’m lost, though, is what the hell it actually is on the inside. There’s no access at all to its internals or visible joints for the turret articulation and barrel assembly. The offset barrel suggests that there’s a large series of capacitors and possibly plasma accelerators in the bulk of the turret. No connectors for projectile feeding all but screams that it’s entirely energy based.”
“But we can’t get into the thing to check it out, and we have nothing to mount it on to test it.”
“Not a single way into this thing. We can’t even get any deep scans of it. It’s about as impenetrable as the station it was salvaged near.” She paused for a moment. “Which we need to talk about, by the way.”
Kane turned around sharply. “Why, is there something wrong?”
Florence swirled the coffee in her mug. “Not if you consider an unknown abandoned orbital colony popping into a fairly well-surveyed solar system’s asteroid field out of the blue to be normal.”
“It really doesn’t make any sense, does it?” Kane asked rhetorically, slowly walking back from the massive directed energy weapon. He wasn’t sure what to be more concerned about – a station popping into existence in Tau-44 or a ship guarding that station containing biologically-disruptive nanomachines and a pair of unknown capital ship weapons. He stood next to Florence and looked at the weapon from what he wasn’t particularly convinced was a safe enough distance.
“This always happens to us,” the engineer said.
Harold turned his head to look her way.
“The Lane Hackers and the Legion, and then that mess at Freeport 1 pushed us away once. We were dead in the water. And then Spike’s leadership tore us apart. Then we started getting settled as a proper colony and we were forced into exile. And now we’ve found another place for us to set up an orbital habitat and keep our civilians safe and in the exact same solar system, this happens. And now the Gallic fleet knows we’re here and that we have a Crayter-aligned civilian installation that’s just ripe for the taking. Everything in Sirius is trying to kill us, Harold. I don’t know how much longer we can keep it at bay anymore.”
He put his arm around her shoulders. The battle above the unknown station was still fresh in his mind. It had only been twelve hours, and he had only managed to sleep for two. He wasn’t prepared for this. “It’s going to be fine, Florrie. We’ve been through worse. The Gallic expedition left us alone after the threat was eliminated, though I may have bribed them somewhat. This is probably just those Omicron-based Nomad cults waving around ancient technology they pried off an artifact and shoved into a mortar turret. And maybe that station’s always been there, cloaked, until its reactor ran dry.”
She put her hand on his. “Maybe. I’d like to take Prophecy back out there. Or the Repentance. We need more scans of that thing, whatever it is. If it’s an orbital colony from hundreds of years ago, it’s in frankly incredible condition and we could learn a thing or two from it. Especially if it has a station-sized cloaking device. Imagine being able to just… hide the civilian assets in case of an attack.” She yawned and put down her half-empty coffee mug.
Harold smiled. “How long have you been awake for?” he asked.
“Too long,” she responded with a light snicker. “Walk me home, fearless negotiator of Gauls?”
Chief Engineer Florence Clemens, walking with unusual confidence, walked into the hangar bay where Harold Kane was rolled underneath an Aquila Defense Systems R-9W Raven assault fighter. Effectively an open market Raven’s Talon strike fighter platform purchased in bulk by Aquila, upgraded with multi-mode fusion reactors capable of sustaining cruise speed reference frames for longer than the average generic strike fighter and sensors packages derived from old-school Vagrant Raiders tech dating back to the Fleet’s time with the Lane Hackers and the Hellfire Legion, and painted with the Octavarium Fleet roundel on the underside and Octavarium Orange on the trim.
Aquila always did a fantastic job with their upgrades, Kane believed. They were never half-baked, shoddily built, or prototypes thrown into production without any quality assurance or testing, and Aquila always had repair bays with priority availability for the Fleet in case of battle damage or routine maintenance. Kane did, however, prefer to do his own repairs on all his personal craft. Not out of lack of trust in any other engineer or technician’s abilities, or out of fear of sabotage, but to get away from the madness of being the commander-in-chief of the Fourth Octavarium Fleet and the Minister of Relations. Laying on a mechanic’s cart, he was just Raider Harold Kane, fixing up a Bayonet aboard the VCS Metropolis, somewhere in or around Vespucci, or Magellan, or the outskirts of Cortez. Under a fighter, wrenches in one hand and parts in the other, it was 817 A.S., and he was just a pilot earning his pay and keeping his machine well-oiled.
In recent weeks, he came back to this simple retreat more and more frequently. The government was only a few dozen people, but he still found plenty of time to get strapped into his Raven and take flight. He wondered how long Melbourne would be able to live in orbit of Borneo, and how long his people would be able to stay there before coming into contact with some other existential threat. Would the Gallic Royal Navy be battering down his front door with Valors and Obstinates tomorrow morning? Would he be forced to choose between his people’s history of blood and kinship to Malta and their benefactors in Crayter and subject them to exile again?
He rolled the cart out from under the fighter and smiled. “Here to lend a hand?”
Florence laughed. “I think you’ve got this more or less under control,” she remarked. “Commission’s got the Pillar installation locked down while they figure out whether or not there’s a pile of nanobots inside, Aquila’s down south handling some business with the Hessians, and we haven’t gotten into any scraps since discovering the Pillar, so I’m bored out of my skull.”
Harold put his multi-tool back in his toolbox and sat upright. He wiped his hands clean on a shop rag. “Well, the Raven’s all tuned up so I’m afraid there’s not much for you to do,” he said, reaching out towards his friend. “Unless you’re here to tell me that you’ve found some other arcane doodad to poke and prod.”
The engineer locked her hand around his wrist and helped pull him upright. “Nothing yet. Unless you want me to take a look at your back,” she added.
He laughed. “I must have pulled something in my sleep. That or I’m getting old.”
“Well, if your dad is any indicator, you’ll be a strapping young man well into your late fifties.”
The toolbox closed with a slight kick from Harold’s heel. “The man’s sixty-two and is still running around bars across Sirius doing god-knows-what. I’m not even sure I’m going to make it that long.”
Florence wrapped her arm around his. “Don’t go dying on us,” she said with a mixture of concern and command. “There are people here who need you.”
The taskmaster let loose a sigh of equal parts relief and defeat. “I’m not going to go seek out death, Florrie. I’m just worried it’s going to seek us all out, right here, in this system.”
“What’s bringing all this up, Harold?” she asked.
He looked down for a second and then back up at her. “One of our patrols ran into a Council cruiser the other day. It was covered in damn battle scars. Who knows how many crews that thing had seen and lost in this part of space?”
“If we move again, that will be how death seeks us. Our people can’t take that kind of exile again.”
“I know, darlin’. Melbourne’s more fragile than any half-cocked Freeport after the Confederation broke apart, and who knows how long it’ll be until we can get the Pillar operational and start fortifying our citizens there. What will we have to show for all this work and all this blood if someone comes and breaks the only thing we have with any sort of permanency apart?” His voice broke slightly as he slipped into a vaguely Texan accent; a relic of his mother’s side of the family that he learned to suppress over the thirty years of his life.
She repositioned her arm and squeezed his hand. “We’ll all have each other. The same as we’ve had for years, and what got us through the past five years of trials. That’s what turned us from a loosely united flag of smugglers, pirates, and vigilantes into a nation of our own.” She paused for a moment, and with a hint of levity, added, “Also, I’m not sure if Vic’s fear of the Pillar being overrun by a nanomachic biotoxin is particularly grounded. But what do I know? I just keep our fleet from falling apart. Darlin’.”
Harold looked at her suddenly, staring for a few seconds before cracking a slight grin. “Sorry,” he mumbled with salmon cheeks. “Some of the dialect from my mother’s half pokes through occasionally.”
Florence smiled. “You don’t have to apologize. When was the last time you ate?” she questioned.
He pulled out the pocket watch secured deep in his left pantleg and examined its face. “Six hours? Maybe more.” He felt the curves and indents on the silvered timepiece for a moment before replacing it.
“There’s a new restaurant on E deck of this module. Kusari-Bretonian fusion. You can buy me dinner,” she said, walking towards the hangar’s entrance, confused taskmaster in tow. He didn’t argue.
The comfortably dim lighting and murmuring ambience of the Glass Moon Pub was a stark contrast to many of the previous off-duty venues of Fleet non-coms and officers. The Razor’s Edge on Seasons Base was a dive, thrown together by the Vagrant Raiders at a time when they were still unapologetically unlawful. It was, of course, their dive, but a dive nonetheless. Barrier Gate had its share of pubs and bars, some pretending to be the height of Sirian class and others fully acknowledging their roles as hiding places for the most wanted that coincidentally also served the foulest rotgut in or out of the four houses. And the Rogue and Hacker bases from eons past either had proper bars, nightclubs with everyone dressed in black and staring at their phones, or just a frequently-replaced keg of beer with a tip jar and maybe, if you were lucky, a stack of disposable cups.
The Glass Moon, meanwhile, was a neighbourhood pub. No music, no dance floor, no monitors. Rowdy patrons were sent home to sober up. All off-duty Fleet members were equal there; the Taskmasters were treated with no more importance than a newly-minted Pilot recruit. Mingling with coworkers you didn’t usually get the chance to interact with was not only possible but encouraged, rank be damned. And most importantly to Harold, the garlic fries were complementary.
It had been seven weeks since the Natio came out of the void, and in those seven weeks, they had struck multiple treaties and deals, recovered a few of their assets including several well-hidden and well-credited neural net accounts, and begun constructing a semi-permanent military and government headquarters. Most recently they had discovered and staked an uncontested claim on a long-forgotten installation that the Octavarium Intelligence Commission codenamed “Pillar”. It was a massive station of unknown age, origin, or intended purpose, but initial surveys suggested it had an already-constructed framework for tens of thousands of modest quarters and enough usable unformatted space for enough factories and agricultural setups to sustain a population well over that of the Natio.
To most nation-states, living in a spaceborne arcology was orders of magnitude downwards. But to Natio Octavarium, it was several better than another two years aboard a hastily-converted fleet of starships. A Hegemon turned into a semi-mobile residence could hold three thousand people in relatively cramped but livable conditions, and Talon Resource Extraction had already converted their six. The Silent Man held fifteen hundred, the gutted Black Cloud II held a thousand, and the Headlong Flight held the same. Various independent long-haul transports, freighters, and the occasional gunship made up another thousand. The rest were aboard Melbourne Station, Minato Harbor, or neighbouring Freeports.
The last headcount before the Natio packed up in Kansas was around thirty thousand souls; the first headcount in the void was five thousand short, a figure Kane did not particularly care to think about. He preferred even less to think about the five hundred more that were lost by the time they arrived.
Pillar was a new start and a point of stability and security for the Natio. They could breathe freely, live comfortably, and exist in a more relaxed environment like they were promised those many years ago. Octavarium itself was supposed to be a fresh beginning for those in unkind situations, so when the siege and exodus occurred, Harold felt it as a personal failure. He was unable to protect his people like he had promised.
But they had felt worse. They endured. Those who fell behind were declared missing, but not lost. Whereabouts unknown, but not presumed dead.
Kane stared out the panoramic window to his left. The view of the Tau-44 system stretched from the furthest edge of the Sumatra Cloud to the nearest of the Makassar Asteroid Field. At the furthest right, far off in the field and invisible to the human eye, was the Pillar installation. The false-colour images seen through the digitally enhanced windows used on all modern installations and starships gave the system an agreeable blue-grey backdrop in front of which lived billowing blue clouds and white ice fields.
He took a sip from a pale beer that sat in front of him and returned to flipping through a library of ancient cultural locations. He started from the last one he used – Melbourne – and clicked related links over and over to find a name that stuck with him or had some sort of historical significance.
“I know we’re supposed to be chatting up people we don’t talk to much, but I presume this seat isn’t taken,” came a voice that moved from behind Kane, to his side, then in front of him, and finally directly opposite from him at the table.
He looked up and smiled. “It is now, my friend,” he joked.
A server came over with a pint of something far too stout-like for Harold’s taste. “Black and tan, as usual, Tobiah,” he said, setting the drink down. “Anything else for you, Harold?”
Harold looked up. “Not right now, Terry. Thanks, though.”
The server flipped a quick thumbs-up and a cheery acknowledgement. Tobiah drew a mouthful and closed his eyes, letting the flavour fill his head before swallowing. “You still trying to find a name for the Pillar, hoss?” he asked, pointing at the datapad in front of his friend.
Harold sighed. “Three hours and I can’t find a damn thing worth using.” He reached to put the device to sleep but was interrupted by the Minister of Finance smoothly spinning it over to his side of the.
Tobiah spent a minute in silence, slowly working away at his beverage while deftly navigating the encyclopedia before him. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers and slid the datapad back across the wooden countertop. He stood up and began walking past Harold, beer in hand, pausing briefly to clasp him on the shoulder. “Canberra,” he announced. “Try not to spend another four hours deciding on a suffix for it.”
As Tobiah’s hand lifted, Harold turned around in utter disbelief, then back at the datapad, which proudly showed historical records of a city called Canberra, and a preserved photo of it bathed in starlight.
A knock on the frame of the always-open door to Kane’s office startled the Taskmaster slightly. He was deeply engrossed in the paperwork in front of him: authorization of transfer of credits for cargo lost due to extenuating circumstances, authorization for new goods and services to be brokered at the dockmaster’s offices, ship purchases and movement agreements, and armoury storage movement.
“Sorry to interrupt, Harold.”
He looked up. “No worries, Ellen,” he said with half a smile. “What can I do for you?”
The Minister of Services walked into Kane’s office and tossed him a datapad. “Couple things, actually. Number one, the Commission and Aquila have finished decontaminating the Pil— Canberra. Furnishings are starting to go in and the first agro-bay is being seeded with HydroGro as we speak. We should be able to start moving people in within a few weeks, if all goes according to plan.”
Kane’s eyes lit up. The funk of paperwork around him was instantly lifted. “I thought we were still a few weeks out from that,” he beamed.
“V and some Crayterians found a new way to filter any potential threats out using a series of seals and a whole pile of xenobiotic filters. Three passes took care of everything. Coupled with the—ugh, corpse disposal—it’s like a brand new ludicrously oversized orbital habitat that someone peeled all the protective film from.”
Harold looked at the datapad, which had an advertisement for suites and jobs opening on Canberra. Room for thirty thousand people would be furnished through the help of drones within a few weeks, thanks to the goods shipments provided by the Temporary Autonomous Zoners, and goods manufacturing was even closer to completion. Canberra Star City would be a living, breathing station less than two months after they had found it.
“Six floors completed. Eighteen more unused. Fully operational life support including ninety-eight percent water reclamation. This station is big enough that whoever designed it was trying to fit a hundred thousand people on here, no problem.”
Ellen nodded. “There’s more. Unrelated to Canberra, actually.”
“Oh?”
“I did some digging through some of the Raiders archives and stumbled upon part a land deed on Malta belonging to the late Overlord Petrucci and his family. Seems to be a cardamine farm and a ranch. Check the next page.”
Harold swiped left on the datapad and began reading the deed. “Twelve hundred hectares of usable farmland. That’s enough to keep a small city filled to the brim with the spice.”
“And nobody’s heard from the Petrucci family in years. The Overlord was probably the last.”
“So, we own a drug farm.”
“Potentially. We’ll have to clear that the deed is still valid and our holding of it is considered legal on Malta, but if so… to put it bluntly, yes, Harold, we own a drug farm.”
He laughed and handed Ellen back her datapad. “I’ll make the requisite calls. In the meantime, get an announcement out to populace. Tell them that move-in starts in a few weeks.
Six lightly-armoured people were in a modified Taurus-class shuttle; two in the front, four in the rear. In addition to the protective properties of their full-face helmets, for three of the party members, they were also filters tuned for the local atmosphere. Between that requirement and the presumption that first contact would require some light bulletproof plating, Kane thought it would be wise to leave no room for error. He himself was seated in the back of the descending shuttle, handgun in a holster strapped to his chest, pulse rifle standing upright on the floorplate in front of him.
He drew a deep breath and tasted the oddly-clean air brought into his body through the filter. Three of the people going down to the surface were already cardamine users, so they didn’t need masks to remove the drug from inhaled air. Kane, however, had never used the stuff despite his familial and career history with Malta. The masks were just a part of business when the home of the Orange Dream was involved.
“Two minutes to landfall.”
Kane turned to the cockpit, and then back to the whole team. “Right, here’s the op. We’re going down to the Petrucci farm to recon and reclaim if possible. We get in, we figure out what the plantation situation is like, and if it’s salvageable, we call down the other shuttle and set up operations. Callahan said there were probably a handful of street rats around, probably gnawing on the grass, but they shouldn’t be a threat. Do not shoot unless shot at. You’re all able to tank a few rounds no problem with these suits. They’re just local kids, and we’re not really armed for ‘stun’. Questions?”
Silence.
“Good. Front-end, any signatures on the farm?”
Lieutenant Clemens piped up. “Four in the fields, three in the house. Wait, no, looks like they’re all heading towards the front of the house now. Probably saw the shuttle incoming.”
As the shuttle began its final approach to land in front of the farm’s estate, Kane felt increasingly nervous. He had hoped the potential opposition would be fewer in number, as even with the party’s arms and armour accounted for, it would be easy to make two or three bodies go away. Seven would be a problem on both logistical and political levels. A couple punks go missing, no one notices. A couple families of punks go missing, people start looking into it.
“Touchdown in ten seconds.”
The party looked out the starboard window to see five young men, barely old enough to be making a living on their own, holding a variety of mistreated and archaic firearms. It would be a miracle of science if they even fired properly.
When the shuttle touched down and the red light over the rear and side doors turned green, the entrance team’s harnesses unshackled and in unison they stood up, rifles unslung, and exited through the side closest to the house with half the organization that Kane imagined they would. Four members of the party spread out in a line, with Kane walking through and ahead of them, and the shuttle pilot bringing up the rear behind him.
Kane looked around for a second as the local greeting party clutched their ramshackle armory tightly before attempting to cut the tension. “Thank you for keeping our farm alive. Your services are no longer necessary.”
“Not your farm, cabron. We own it now,” said the street rat in the center.
Kane laughed. “Right, street rules. Listen, kid, I don’t want to reduce you all into your component parts and keep the fields growing nice and rich with them, and I’m pretty sure if you fire any of those ye olde hande gonnes, the only people you’re going to kill with them are yourselves. Plus, we own the deed to the late signore Petrucci’s familial land here as his successors under Maltese law.”
“That’s mierda, offworlder. You ain’t got claim on anything on Malta.” He raised his weapon and pointed it at Kane’s head.
Kane walked forward, grin concealed by the polarized faceplate on his helmet. “You don’t get it, do you, ese? I ain’t afraid of being shot at by you or any of your local gutter buddies. Those peashooters will go ‘spang’ right off my noggin and into the atmosphere. My only concern is explaining to my dear Amalfi friends where a dozen local kids went and why the grounds smell meaty and the grass is growing deceptively quickly. Go ahead. Pull the trigger. See how quickly an Octavarium soldier can unsafe, shoulder, aim, and fire a rifle.
“Or you could do the smart thing and put your guns down and we’ll make you a nice deal that ends with both of us getting what we want. I know you’re all here for the free orange. No one’s maintaining the farm, so it’s just grown haphazardly for three or four years and you can cut down bushels and sell it for pure profit. I get it. Easy money. But you can’t keep these plants alive forever and there aren’t enough muscles or brains between the seven of you to run a farm for real. So before I have to desecrate the final resting place of my dear old friend John with the blood and ground remains of you and the other punks, consider laying down your arms and inviting us in for a cup of tea like good, honest Maltese businessmen, hm?”
The boy waited for a moment and lowered his gun. “What you got in mind? We ain’t leaving the farm, so you can write that off outright.”
Kane laughed and removed his helmet, letting his medium-length orange-brown hair loose. The filter over his mouth proved that he was truly an outlander, but he felt no need to continue that concealment. “What’s your name, son?”
“Diego Paredes.”
“Well, señor Paredes, my name is Harold Kane. And I am about to make you the man in charge of keeping the local street gangs from starting a drug war over our farm.”
“And my boys?”
“We need strong workers for the fields, for processing, and for local distribution and preparation for offworld shipments,” he explained, arm around the lad, leading him into the lobby of the estate house. “You’ll all be compensated more than fairly, of course; this isn’t a farm built around slavery. It’s never been one. The Raiders used to operate it when Petrucci was still among the living, and as the successor to that same organization and its leadership, the Natio is here to oversee operations. Get my drift?”
“Si, I think so.”
“Perfect. We’ll call down the rest of our people from orbit. They’ll help figure out how to get this place back up to peak operating capacity again.” Kane snapped his fingers in the air twice and beckoned forwards one of the party members, who removed his helmet and stepped forward into the entrance wing. “This is Claudio. He’ll be my eyes, ears, and hands on the ground. If shit goes sideways at any point, you bring it to him. He’ll also be authorizing your paycheques and bonuses. Questions?”
“Did we just get patched over?”
Claudio laughed. “Something like that, mano. Call your boys, we’ll get everything sorted out,” he said. Kane clasped him on the shoulder as he walked back out of the house and towards a granite structure off near the property line.
He stopped in front of the two-metre-tall rock carving of a sword and shield with the Maltese cross inscribed on it, knelt, and pulled from his right breast pocket a small model of the original Spyglass-class dreadnought VCS Metropolis.
“I never got to say goodbye, John. You were gone before I make it back out to Mactan and by then, the Lane Hackers weren’t too thrilled to see anyone flying our flag. The folks in Vespucci said there wasn’t a trace of you or the Metropolis. And when we found her… well, we didn’t find you.”
He placed the model in front of the grave marker and stood up.
“I’m sorry we didn’t really commit to your original path for us. Things were just hell after Gallia broke through. I know that’s not an excuse, but… we’re here to fix things. For your legacy. So none of this ever has to happen again. We miss you, JP.”
JOHNATHAN PETER PETRUCCI
779 – 818 A.S.
LOVING HUSBAND, RIGHTEOUS LEADER
HE GAVE HIS LIFE SO THAT OTHERS NEEDED NOT
The array of ships in orbit of Canberra was growing. While the station hadn’t been officially opened to the public yet, furnishing was continuing, and civilian operations on board were starting to come to life. Hydroponic farms were sprouting in the agricultural sections, and greenery was being added to the common areas and hallways for both aesthetic purposes and enhanced oxygen recycling. The amount of permanent life in the floating city was small, and most of it flora, but it was life.
Two levels down from the docking bays was the commons, a three-stories-tall open area encompassing an entire three hundred sixty degree slice of the station intended for gatherings, meetings, conventions, and general public use. Pools and artificial creeks ran throughout, with greenery along the walls of the walkways and riverbeds, giving the public forum a sense of natural existence and harmony. It was a stark contrast to the way the area looked mere months ago; the wall-to-wall windows were in place then, but the riverbeds were dry, plant life was nowhere to be seen, the lights were completely burnt out… and there were corpses, though those weren’t particularly a fixture of the commons.
All throughout the commons, areas were designated for different types of use. One of the most well-used and a frequent favourite, though, was the ubiquitous food stand. One could—and many would—frequently walk to the commons for lunch, grab some form of “authentic” to-go meal ostensibly representing the culinary themes of some system or planet somewhere in Sirius, and sit by a creek and watch the world go by.
“Almost makes you forget that we’re on a station, doesn’t it?”
Harold Kane looked up from his Texas-style all-day-breakfast probably-not-all-that-healthy fried-everything wrap. “Oh, hey, Tobes,” he said, taking a bite of the burrito-style amalgamation of traditional breakfast foodstuffs. “Have a seat?”
Tobiah planted himself down next to Harold. The pair were sat on a waist-high wall, backs to a pond, looking over the forum.
“Emily’s got me on this health food kick,” Tobiah started, holding up a take-away box of genuine imitiation Kusari vegetable and tofu stir fry. “She’s been bringing all this meat-free stuff into our office for lunch every day, enough for all three of us, and I think I’m starting to enjoy it.”
“What, the lunch itself or that she’s making it for you?” Kane barely got his sentence out before being jabbed in the shoulder with a chopstick.
“Ass. She’s a nice lady who’s helping me lose my beer gut. And it’s working, I might add.”
Kane laughed. “Is that the food or the… exercise?”
Tobiah opened the box and grabbed some noodles and a strip of tofu. “What about you and Florence?” he asked, deftly changing the subject.
Harold tapped a few grains from a packet of spices into the open end of his wrap. “We have dinner a couple times a week. I don’t think either of us are really sure what we’re looking for out of whatever it is we have, so that’s really about it.” He took a bite and thought for a moment. “It’s hard to want to get attached when both of you wake up each morning and wonder if that’s going to be the day where something finally goes wrong and that ejection capsule just doesn’t work right, or a freak accident gives you twenty sieverts of the hard stuff, or... whatever. You know?”
“Yeah, but what do you want?”
“I miss the Metropolis.”
“We could rebuild her. Again. For the fourth time.”
Harold sighed. “It’s not the ship itself, Tobes. It’s what it represented. It’s the era it lived throughout that’s gone now. We were the Vagrant fucking Raiders, man. A former part of the Lane Hacker Triumvirate. Feared pirates and smugglers across Sirius. Now we’re cut-rate politicians, a self defense force, and an unrecognized microstate in a system so backwater the only people who want it are us and the Crayterians.”
“And they’re not exactly known for their judgement skills.” Tobiah paused briefly before continuing. “We’ve lost our military might, but we have two things we’ve never had before: A space station so grand it makes Fort Leniex look like an asteroid full of cracked-out Liberty Rogues, and the respect of a nation of almost thirty thousand people. And, on top of that, we’re not being hunted to extinction. We’re at relative peace right now. We’re growing, and we’re gaining legitimacy. Don’t lose sight of that, man.”
Harold nodded and clasped his friend on the shoulder. The two spent the rest of their meal in relative silence, watching the crowds go by, not as ministers, or pirate lords, or military commanders, but as two citizens having lunch together in the Canberra Star City commons.
Florence’s sudden question put a puzzled look on Harold’s face. He hadn’t thought about the personal flagship of the presumably-late former Warlady of the Vagrant Raiders, Jada Zachary, in some time. He definitely was not expecting anyone other than possibly the Legionnaires to bring the name VCS Systematic Chaos up. And most certainly not over garlic fries.
He put down his fork and took a sip of his drink. “Officially? Jada rode her off into the sunset, never to be seen again. She probably burned up or blew up somewhere in the Omegas after the Battle of Freeport One. A sad, tragic end, but the way she wanted it, I’m sure.”
His longtime partner-in-totally-not-crime cocked her head. “Officially.”
“In reality… it’s a more complex situation. When the Outcast defectors aboard the Cassus Belli went to the Neo-Terran Front for protection, the Front let the crew keep the battleship for themselves as NTBS Cassus Belli. At some point, the ship was severely damaged and sold off to the Hellfire Legion as part of the exchange that ended up with the Front taking ownership of their very own Spyglass-class dreadnought, the Belisarius. The Legion kept the hull of the Cassus around for some time before the Raiders called in a favour and bought it at a pretty solid discount.
“We had to rebuild the innards of the ship ourselves, and source our own weapons and some engine bits, but for the most part, it was our very own Sarissa. Petrucci named it Systematic Chaos and gave command to Jada, who had the nose of the ship reinforced several times and nearly split the ship in half once ramming through a veritable column of Overlords. And then the Battle of Freeport One happened.”
Kane paused to let out a sigh. “After the battle, Jada disappeared, and so did the Chaos. While we had heard word from her once or twice since, the Chaos was nowhere to be found and whenever we prodded her about it, she didn’t have an answer. There were rumours among some of the Raiders who we picked back up during the transition between the Second and Third Vagrant Fleets about that traitorous piece of fuck Spike stealing the thing out of a ship graveyard in Omega-3 and trying to take it to the Rogues, but we scoured that system before he left. The biggest thing we found was half a Storta, and we salvaged it for the Metropolis rebuild, remember?
“Anyways, we don’t know what happened to it. All we know for sure is that it’s gone, and if there’s any of it left, it’s probably somewhere in the Omegas and it’s not going to be a case of ‘EVA to ship, pressurize hull, fire up reactor, fly it home’, that’s for sure. Why do you ask?”
Florence poked a fork into the pile of fries and extracted a mass of potato, garlic powder, and melted cheese. “Canberra’s almost got twenty thousand civilians on it, Harold,” she reminded him. “Gallia’s still next door, and the situation between Crayter and Malta isn’t the best one for us have all those people sitting between them, completely defenseless. We can trust the Amalfi Union to not stage attacks on Tau-44, or at least not near any of our assets, sure, but what about the independent families? You know how they can be. And Kusari? What will they do if Gallia puts a boot to their throat and says ‘go get us some more territory’? We’re right next door to them as well.”
“We can’t support a battleship. Not yet. We don’t have the crew, or the materials, or the maintenance infrastructure.”
“We’ve done it before, with the Metro,” she protested.
Kane sighed. “Florrie, you’re a brilliant engineer and a shipwright, but the Metropolis needed more than open space repairs to keep her going. Destroyers and cruisers, sure, you can maintain those without a scaffold for decades. A battleship is a whole new scale of complexity. You and I both know that.”
“Well, we can’t park a Sarissa at Sabah.”
“And our re-establishment of relations with Malta is still young. I cannot ask them for parts to rebuild a battleship, and certainly not in their drydock. They have much bigger concerns, and neither us nor them are represented by the same people and ideals as a decade ago.” He chewed on a string of fries for a minute in silence. “Talk to the Commission. I think they’re interested in bringing the Huginn project back to life. I overheard Vic talking about the Hessians the other day, so with any luck he’ll be giving them a call about getting the guts shoved back into the Black Cloud II. We can always strap a few extra guns to it and call it a defensive platform.”
With a laugh, Florence wondered aloud, “He probably wouldn’t like it if I were to immediately start disassembling the thing after we got it back so we could hack together a Silver Lining II, would he?”
Kane smiled. “I can’t lock the man out of the airlock controls, so let’s put a pin in that one. I’ll give him a shout tomorrow morning, see what we can make happen.”
The lower fabrication bays of Canberra Star City were still off-limits to most civilians in the area. Not out of gatekeeping, or because the lower levels were unpressurized or otherwise hazardous to human health, but because they were completely unmapped and contained equipment and machinery completely unfamiliar to even the most well-travelled members of Octavarium R&D and the Science and Technology Advancement Bureau. Naturally, it was entirely likely that if one could not find the head of engineering for the Fourth Octavarium Fleet, Lieutenant Florence Clemens, one could take a stroll down to the lower fabrication bays and find her poking around an arcane piece of fabrication equipment.
“What’s the find of the day, Florrie?”
The engineer popped out of her mechanically-focused trance and turned around with a smile. “I think I know what the previous owners were working on, Harold,” she started, waiting for him to ask.
He gestured towards the pile of parts laying on the well-lit table that Florence had been working away at. “Go on?”
“Weapons,” she announced cheerfully. “Fighter type ones, mostly. But it’s no surprise, considering the drone remains we… borrowed had those ‘bots and turrets in them. What’s weird is that I swear I’ve seen some of this stuff before. It seems to be a gauss-type energy projector, not entirely unlike a plasma cannon, but instead of just regular bottled plasma it’s more like a magnetically-bottled low-temperature ‘bullet’ of particulate hydrogen stabilizing some cryogenically frozen antihydrogen. Not much, but enough that you get a solid hit on impact, more so than most fighter weapons, but the amount of active cooling needed to maintain the projection slows the fire rate down to an average of sixty rounds per minute.”
Harold blinked. “That’s really neat, and I get what you’re saying, but how do I explain this to some of our less technologically-inclined pilots?”
She sighed. “Big gun fires slow hits like a truck.”
With a laugh, Harold asked another pertinent question. “So how many do we have?”
“A couple dozen, right now. I don’t know if we can produce any more, not without getting these labs back up and running, and I haven’t actually tested the ones that we do have assembled, but the mounting points are similar enough to the heavy output hardpoint receptacles on most assault fighters. I’d wager you can line up the bolts and connect the power and coolant conduits just fine.”
He nodded. “I’ll get someone on that. Can you spare four for planting on a Raven?”
“Sure.” She paused for a moment. “Oh, something else, unrelated. I’ve been looking at Canberra’s outer frame, and I don’t think this station was meant to repel attack. It’s basically just a few layers of pressure hull and some micrometeoroid-resistant plating.”
Harold groaned. “So, you’re saying Canberra is made of paper.”
“I think paper is a bit of an overstatement, but it’s not far off. Those drones we shot down? I think the defensive capabilities of this station were entirely based around shooting down whatever wants to hit it. We can scramble fighters to keep away hostile light craft but the second someone shows up with even a single cruiser and starts knocking on our door with mortars, the door and everything behind it will be gone on the first knock.”
Florence produced a datapad and pulled up schematics of both Canberra and Melbourne. “Melbourne is fragile, but it’s fairly well armoured and has a shield generator as part of its modular design. Now, we can’t easily port that generator system to Canberra since the station is a completely foreign design, but the nadir of Canberra has what appears to be partially laid out zones for shield refractors. Again, completely foreign design, but we could probably design and build an entirely new shielding system for Canberra if we had the money and the technical resources.”
Kane pulled out his own datapad and received a copy of the schematics from Florence’s. He studied it for a moment. “Money isn’t the hard part. We can solve that problem in no time through the Mercantile Guild. Technical resources, though… I don’t know who we can call on for station shield development. We can’t rely on existing refractors since the station isn’t a standard Sirian design, and the diodes we’d need to connect a field generator to the refractors would be from Rheinland, and we’re not exactly persona grata there.”
“I bet the popes can grab us the diodes, but I don’t know about the refractor designs,” Florence shrugged. “This really isn’t my forte, Harold. I put ships together and put them back together when someone decides they want to forcibly disassemble them. We’re going to need outside help on this one.”
He put his datapad back in his jacket pocket. “We’ll figure it out. I’ll make some calls. Dinner tonight?”
She smiled. “Sure. There’s a new steakhouse in the upper ring of the commons, northeast side. I’ll call you when I’m done cleaning up.”
Florence had spent time in and around countless ships as an engineer and a shipwright, and could usually make heads and tails of most designs. The design of the Thanatos-class assault cruiser, the mid-size champion of the Crayter Fleet, was one that had numerous "features" built into it that confused her to no end. She was in the forward spear, attempting to make sense of a two-and-a-half-deck-tall barracks and armoury attached to a giant airlock when Harold walked in on her.
"How's the refit blueprints coming?" he asked cheerfully. He had a travel mug of coffee in each hand and an uncharacteristic glow about his face.
Florence strolled over to him, grabbed the coffee from his outstretched hand, and put a datapad in its place. "More or less we've figured everything out around here, but some of the portions in the front and rear spears are just... confusing," she explained, pointing at the refit blueprints she had been constructing. The ship was about two hundred metres long and roughly shaped like a rifle bullet with a well-armoured cone at the rear containing the drive array.
"Do you remember how Jada always used to fly the Chaos into battle screaming 'ramming speed' over public comms?" she asked, referring to Warlady Jada Zachary, former Vagrant Raider and CO of the long since destroyed Sarissa-class VCS Systematic Chaos.
Kane nodded. "Usually that was around the time the tides of battle changed, but it was always an expensive manoeuvre if the shields weren't at full strength."
"Okay, well, the Chaos was a battleship. It wasn't designed to do that kind of thing, as much as we reinforced the hell out of the forward blade. I think the Thanatos might have been," she explained. "This complex we're in is an armoury and a barracks all in one, and it's got a frankly oversized airlock at the fore end. And right above it, there's an auxiliary, short-duration shield generator with an integrated supercapacitor bank. This ship might be able to ram its front into a disabled ship with minimal to no damage incurred even if the shields are disabled, and deploy a platoon or two of marines practically right out of their beds and into their own brand new charlie foxtrot."
The taskmaster took a sip of his coffee. "Well, we're not calling it OCS Zachary," he joked. "But that's fascinating. How about the rest of this ship, front to back? Any issues found so far?"
She sighed. "Well, the frame and hull are in good shape. We're ready to start bolting armour and support plates into it, and as soon as we have a source for weapons--"
"Which I need to find, thanks for the reminder."
The engineer laughed. "No problem, thought you might need a reminder. We can hook those into the hardpoints and do power flow testing as soon as we have them. We ran the munitions loaders with dummy rounds for kinetics and torps, and they fed fine. This beastie has two reactors running in parallel juicing up a two-and-a-quarter capacitor, so twice as many parts to check, but if one goes down the ship can withdraw from a deployment and make it home intact at cruise speeds."
"It's well-engineered, then."
Florence smiled. "I wager this thing could go toe-to-toe with a few lighter battlecruisers, especially with a Lovelace unit in the executor's chair, so to speak. It's a heavyweight even for its size bracket. Perfect for front-line combat and, with its power output, artillery roles as well. We'll need it, what with this Legion mess."
Kane took another sip. "What's your take on that, Florrie?"
She sat down on one of the dressing benches in the armoury and patted the spot next to her. Harold sat down as she started talking. "Frankly? I'm both surprised it didn't happen sooner and disappointed we didn't get more warning. This has been a long time coming, even before we started burying the hatchet with Mactan. But it's sudden. I expected a few skirmishes and arguments, not just a sudden declaration of war. Though I have to admit, your 'the-reason-you-suck' comm was very well-written, to say the least. We have the support for it, though. With the military and technological backing of the Hackers and the Crayterians, we have good odds of coming out well ahead on this one. We'll lose some ships, but we have no ground to lose. But it's been a long time since we've been on the offensive in a war, Harold. I don't know if we remember how to do it."
Harold put his arm around her. "We're not alone this time, y'hear? It'll be fine. The Unioners will want in on this for sure, so they'll have that big ol' bastard of half a Spyglass drawing fire and putting spyglass-sized holes in anything it comes across, and you know Fleet Admiral Xander will want to be the tip of the Crayterian spear himself. If we forget which end goes towards the enemy, we can just look over at our any of our allies to double-check."
"We'll just need to try to not get our shiny new Thanatos pulled apart in the opening salvo."
"Ha. I'm sure Rod will do his best. I'll check the grey market, see if I can get some artillery pieces and EMP bolters delivered to Freeport 10. If we don't need to replace anything on the inside of the ship, we can set Canberra's fabbers up to build some defense turrets, eh?"
She smiled and stood up. "The torpedo bays are still good on this thing, if you don't want too go too heavy on the directed-energy weapons. We just need ammunition for them, so see if you can get some Marauder-types if you want something for making frigate crews reconsider their life choices."
Harold laughed and threw up a parting wave as he walked out the into the main corridor of the ship. "Yes, ma'am."