Torch
Sorry about the delay; real life and trying to sell some of my work slowed me down.
If you've read the reviews, you'll see this one:
From: Hutch (Guest)
Hutch:Nice chapter with interesting character development, but to borrow from
Sgt. Schlock of the webcomic "Schlock Mercenary", 'Can we please shoot
something now?' grinning
Sure, Hutch, no problem.
The squadron came out of hyper right outside the limit, sails reconfiguring into impeller bands. Rebecca watched her crew at their stations. The damage done by Cathcart's cabal was still reverberating through her crew. Krueger would be in sickbay for two more days, and she wanted to assure that he at least was cleared.
"Put us in orbit, Lieutenant O'Malley. Guns?" She turned to Abigail, who was on watch.
"Drone shell one is going out now, skipper."
"Very good. Micah," She turned toward her communications officer. "contact the other witches. I want a shell around the ecliptic at the hyper limit. We should have enough between us."
"Yes, ma'am!" He grinned at the pleasure of having her call him by his Christian name.
At a sedate 208 gravities, they moved inward.
"Challenge. TRMS Tubman is calling us."
"Put them on, Micah." On the tactical display, the Frigate was charging them like a threatening Pekinese. Effectively, they were hyper-capable versions of the Royal Manticoran Navy's Shrike-class LAC but with about twice the missile capacity and a pair of spinal-mounted grasers, with the second energy weapon bearing aft. But the Turners were probably at least as dangerous as the vast majority of the galaxy's destroyers.
The view screen showed a man with a narrow glare, and brows that met in the center of his forehead. He looked like the guy you avoided in a spaceport bar if he'd had too much to drink. But his voice sounded like he should be an announcer on a talk show. "This is Samson X, commanding TRMS Harriet Tubman. You are HMAMC Witch Maiden?"
"Yes. Rebecca Duvalier, Baroness Duvalier of composite Squadron 3151 commanding." Rebecca replied.
"You have been expected, Captain Duvalier. Please maintain your approach, and welcome. Tubman clear."
Rebecca touched her annunciator. "All hands, this is the captain speaking." She grinned, and suddenly put on the air of the pilot of a passenger aircraft approaching something the passengers might like to see. "I want to thank you all for choosing Witch Maiden airlines. On our right, you can see Liberia, where the simple people of the Congo system are harvesting the asteroid belts for needed materials. Ahead of us just two hours away is the planet Torch where they busily gather the local vegetation for conversion into pharmeceuticals."
She dropped the tone as members of the bridge crew began to laugh. "All joking aside, I do have a few important annoucements. First, Mr. Dollaryde is not only out of the brig, but at my orders will begin a new batch of beer as soon as we can have the ingredients gathered. Since his problem was caused by other people, I am footing the bill for those ingredients, and have already bought that first batch, so when it is ready in two weeks, the drinks, you might say, are on me.
"Regarding Fengniao Dollaryde, she has been suitably chastized, and will be returning to duty on the day after tomorrow. Considering that she has forgiven Mr Krueger's actions, I expect the rest of you to give him that slack. In return he has volunteered in his copious spare time to assist Mr. Dollaryde's efforts in assuring that all of us remain pleasantly tanked.
"Once we're in orbit, I will be conferring with the local authorities concerning our mission. I expect some busy weeks here before we go on to our operational area. So get some rest now, because we're going to hit the ground running. Duvalier clear."
As they reached turnover, there was a cluck from Tactical. "Something interesting, Guns?"
"Yes, skipper. There are more warships in orbit than our download mentioned. There are sixteen Solarian War Harvests, bang on. But we have eight light cruisers instead of six, seven heavy cruisers instead of six, five battlecruisers, and sixteen SDs. Two of the light cruisers read as Frigate class Havenite units, four of the heavies are Mars B class, the battlecruisers are Warlords." She turned. "And a bunch of the ships below the wall are squawking GSN IDs."
Rebecca blinked, looking toward the com panel where Joshua Stanhope looked like a treecat with his own celery patch. "Do you have something to say, Middie?"
"It's the original Elysian Navy squadron, ma'am." At her blank look he grinned. "When Steadholder Harrington broke out of Cerebus, her crews manned ships taken from Statesec, and she dubbed them the Elysian Navy. But when she got home, there were... problems.
"A Steadholder is limited under Grayson law to only fifty armsmen, and that," he motioned toward the tactical panel, "is a lot more than that. To get around it, the Protector organized the Protector's own, with the Steadholder as commander. I know that up until about a year ago, all of those ships were in mothballs because we'd replaced them with modern Alliance designs and christened the replacements with the same names; sort of like your Manticoran Honor list.
"If you look closely at GSNS Farnese, you'll see that her pain scheme on the port side makes her appear to still be damaged. The SD(P) of the same name has the same paint scheme, in honor of when the Steadholder used her as her flagship at the Battle of Cerebus. When it came time to remove the originals from the fleet listings to replace them, Steadholder Harrington asked that they be transferred to the TRN as a gift so that they would not be scrapped."
"Thank you, Mr. Stanhope." She turned back to tactical. "As for the SDs, they were a a wedding present to Queen Berry from the Queen. Originally she had intended to give them some of the ships captured at Spindle, but after the Yawata Strike, and Admiral Filareta's suicidal attack on the home system, she substituted some of the least damaged prizes from them."
"But we are going to need every SD we can get if we have to fight the League!" Abigail replied, shocked.
"Of course we will. But those ships, except for software and a few minor bells and whistles, are a generation or more behind the Republic's ships we fought in the first war. Thanks to the Yawata Strike, it's going to take us a year to refurbish them for combat in the modern environment, and that's after we rebuild the infrasturcture necessary. We need modern ships now, not ships that have to be almost rebuilt from the keel out two or three years from now.
"So Erewhon gets a good look at the League's tech, has the slips available in their system to upgrade two or three of these at a time for Torch, along with the passage crews to move them from here to there and back again, and when the crews can finally man them, a firm happy ally here if it goes to hell with the League."
"You mean when." Commander Hughes commented. "The League will eventually remember that Erewhon is two transits away from the home system. I expect it to get pretty hot out here soon enough."
"That's what we're here to watch for, Number One." Rebecca stood. "I'll be getting ready to go down and meet our laison officers. The rest of you, break time's over. Back on your heads!"
The squadron came into orbit, and their wedges came down. In Cargo 2 Rebecca shook hands with the rest of the Republican crew that were going to be assigned below. She and Roclair had at least developed a mutual respect. Besides, Irene liked him, so he couldn't be all bad. The atmosphere was drawn out, and three shuttle departed, the Republicans to Liberty Station, and Rebecca's toward Beacon, the capital.
The planet was a verdant green pretty much from pole to pole, thanks to a minimal axial tilt. Everything that wasn't rain forest was swamp, marsh, ocean or bayou. Set about forty degees above the Equator, Beacon hadn't been built as much as slashed out of the forest around it. The local wildlife was classified as 'aggressive', which was like saying a Kodiak Max in winter was a bit peckish.
Like most locations for the first settlement on a virgin planet, the town had been started where a river estuary met a bay. The river, bay and town had been named by the Mesans. However the new owners had changed them. Now the River Jordan flowed into Moonlight Bay; whoever had named that had been in a truly puckish mood.
The previous owners of the planet had created barriers of sonic and physical fences around the actual production sites and residential areas across the planet, but that had not been for humanitarian reasons. It was just less expensive than replacing slaves in job lots every T-month. Any slaves who ran afoul of that wildlife were used as raw material for Mesan chemical vats because even the native microbes created byproducts that were valuable in the chemical industry.
The new companies renting those sites, like Havlicek Pharmaceutics of Erewhon and the Hauptmann Cartel's Medical Processing Division were literally minting money as they worked. Less than five percent of the planet had even been explored, and like the Amazon Rainforest used to be on Earth, new medicines and species were being found every day.
Rebecca looked down, then at the package Os had handed to her. It was from Queen Berry's adoptive mother, Catherine Montaigne; once Countess of the Tor, now the commons MP from the Borough of High Threadmore in Landing. How she had ended up as a delivery woman she had no idea. As they came in over the coast she saw a flash of movement. It was a small group of animals about human size, running on their hind legs to take down an herbivore the size of a shuttle. She had seen them before in the file on Torch. The Mesans had named them T-raptors, because they were the size of the ancient velociraptor, but with a head and jaws more like the T-Rex. They came in for their final approach, flaring out over the assigned pad, then settled to the ground.
The large town was bustling, cargo shuttles over in the comercial hub were coming in and lauching at the rate of one every two or three minutes. Workers moved cargo to warehouses or shuttles using antigrav pallets, forklifts, pallet jacks or even stevedores. There was over two thousand years of history playing before her eyes out there. A ground guide was making a notation on a pad as the ramp dropped, and Rebecca walked down it. Behind her came Jinhua and Fengua followed by the slightly menacing Shang-Ti Jaeger.
The ground guide nodded to them, pad still in hand. "You're the Manitcoran captain?"
"Yes."
"Queen Berry is awaiting you at the New Residence." He motioned toward a line of air cars along the edge of the landing field. "Her own car is going to take you there." He gave a sharp whistle, and a black limo pulled from the line to head toward them. The party climbed in as the cargo she had already ordered was delivered in an air van.
Like a lot of relatively new settlements, Beacon sprawled. The entire population of the town; less than half a million, could have easily fit inside three or four of the high residential towers of a more settled world, but that would be a century or more into the future. Right now, it reminded her of the small towns of Sidemore and the more rustic portions of her own Gryphon; including the 'city' of Duvalier in her own barony.
Of course, since snow was nonexistent in this region (and rare except at the poles themselves on the entire planet) the roofs didn't have the sharp peaks of Gryphon or Sphinx. But they were peaked because it rained. In fact it rained a lot, according to her briefing information. As they traveled over a residential area, it began, starting as a few drops, then pounding down like a waterfall for several minutes, then slowed and stopped.
The New Residence was the first sign of what might be called modern technology on the planet. A fifteen floor building with a hand holding an upraised torch showing in a holographic display above it. Rebecca had seen that representation before, but couldn't figure out where. "The hand of the Statue of Liberty that used to stand in New York Harbor." Jinhua commented. "The entire building is new, thanks to the Mesan nerve gas attack of two years ago."
The car settled in the parking area outside the building, and they climbed out. A pair, one with a treecat came toward them. "Captain Duvalier?" She nodded. "If you will all come with me?" She followed. Treecats were rare anywhere, and to see one on Torch surprised her. The woman with it riding her shoulder looked up, then back at the captain with a grin. "Sammie has that affect when people see him for the first time. But ever since Genghis and his partner died in the attempted assassination, we've been assigned here." She sighed. "I am not a security guard by profession, but as long as Manpower wants to kill the Queen, we're stuck here."
"What is your profession?" Rebecca asked.
"Try exozoologist." The woman replied. Sammie tapped her head, then signed to her. "I know, Sammie. We go where we're needed. Doesn't mean I have to like it." She waved toward the distant forest. "You know they're finding a new species of animal just about every day? I get to read the reports, but I want to be out there seeing them for the first time!"
"I know how you feel, actually." Rebecca said. "My father had hoped I'd become a JAG officer, but I followed in my mother's footsteps. All because I wanted to serve in space."
The entry terrace to the building was all that remained above ground of the older structure. A Haz-Mat team from the Maya Sector of the Solarian League had been sent in by the OFS governor, Oravil Barregos to clear away the chemcial weapon that had killed almost three hundred people when a controlled man had released it in the 'throne room'. Most of them had been the new bureaucrats of the emergent star nation of Torch. But some had been people the Queen had cared about or respected, including the one person who had been her original bodyguard.
The neurotoxin had been very hard to deal with; it had a persistence that made it as dangerous as plutonium dust. Just touching a wall that had been affected by it would have been lethal in minutes, and the LD; lethal dose, had been in micrograms; millionths of a gram. It had been easier to simply rip down the old building, and replace it. The wreckage had been lifted out in specialized haz-mat containers and dropped into the sun.
The building had been built by the Mayan Sector as well. In a usual case of OFS having them 'help' a Verge nation, it would have been the first move in occupying it. But the cost had been considered a loan, and would be paid off before the year was out. When it came to Office of Frontier Security officials, Barregos and the Maya Sector was the pennicillin mold on the rotting bread.
There was a wide entry hall beyond, and it actually looked palatial rather than business like. There were armed guards, but few of them. However there were so many different technological methods of security that when you had masses of guards, it was because an important person was being escorted. A young woman looked up, nodded, then gestured toward the double doors behind her. Beyond it was another more narrow hall, with a pair of doors at the end. The next room made Rebecca pause.
It was so... mundane. A chair sat on a dias, probably the throne, though it looked like a simple office chair rather than anything ostentious. A nice comfortable seat, nothing more. Beside it were two women. One was of average height, blonde, and slim. She was talking to another woman, a much larger woman. That woman was over two meters tall, and built almost as if they had made a larger than life marble statue of the smaller woman, down to pale skin and platinum blond hair, though her hair was a lot shorter and curly. They turned as one, and watched as the sole remaining guard (The one with the treecat) led them to the dias.
"Captain?" The smaller woman asked. At Rebecca's nod, she came forward. "Ruth Winton."
"I recognized you, Princess."
The girl sighed. "Stop that! I may be a princess back in Manticore. But here I'm simply Ruth Winton."
"Just as Iron Felix was just Felix to his friends... if he ever had any." The larger woman commented dryly. Ruth closed her eyes in a look of long suffering patience.
"I should have never introduced her to the history of Intelligence agencies." She muttered, then rounded on the larger woman. "If you're going to compare me to some ancient intelligence boss, couldn't you use Sir Francis Walsingham? William Bedell Smith? J Edgar Hoover? Bill Donovan?"
"Oh, you mean good officers who weren't too repressive?" the larger woman was obviously teasing."
"We'd have to leave out Sir Francis if we did. No I mean 'competent' ones."
"From what I read, Felix Dzerzhinsky was very efficient."
If you like torture and mass murder." Ruth shot back. Then she raised her hand before the larger woman could reply. "We have guests, Thandi. Be nice." She turned back to Rebecca. "Since we are getting a share of the 'take' from your operations here, Captain, we figured we'd meet you before Berry does. This," she waved toward the giantess, "Is Thandi Palane. We haven't actually come up with a proper moniker for her position as Commander of our armed forces, but everyone calls her Great Kaja." It was Thandi's turn to have a look of long suffering. "We're head of Torch Intelligence and Commander of the armed forces."
"We wanted to make sure you knew who to contact directly instead of her Majesty-"
"Ahem." A voice said from one of the doors nearer the back of the room. The young woman standing there looked like she was ready for a safari into the deepest jungle. Khaki jacket and pants, and- Rebecca felt an urge to giggle. She was wearing a pair of purple treecat slippers. The girl stormed across the room, glaring up at Thandi. "Your hand, Thandi."
The huge woman looked down, almost twice her height, and more than twice her mass, yet she extended her hand palm down toward the pint sized terror. The girl slapped the back of her hand sharply. Rebecca was reminded of a young child swatting the nose of a pet mastiff, and getting away with it for the same reason.
"I have to put up with that crap when we're in council or when we have merchants in here, but when it's just us, I am Berry." She looked at the surprised Captain and the amused little girl. Jinhua and her guard. "You lot are new, so you get one warning, call me Majesty or Queen, except when we're under formal conditions, and I'll do the same to you!" She raised her hand in warning.
"I will endeavor to behave, Berry." Rebecca replied.
The reaction of the girl was surprising. She clapped her hands gleefully at Rebecca's word, no her accent. "Except for Daddy no one has that accent here! I didn't realize how much I missed it until he left on that super secret assignment with Victor right before the war ended." She looked at the large box Rebecca held at her side. "Did Mother send that?"
"Yes she did, though I don't know how I ended up being the delivery service."
"You have a man named Oscelli aboard?"
"He's my steward, actually."
"He's also from High Threadmore. Mother asked someone at the Admiralty if anyone from her district was being assigned here."
"And they told her?"
Berry held out her hands, and took the box. "Hey, she's on the Naval Appropriations committee in the Commons! It wasn't like it's a secret." Berry hugged the box. "So when she found out your steward was coming here, she sent a letter asking him to carry a package to me. She cleared it through Admiralty House, of course.
"Hugh!" She shouted. Everyone flinched at the shout. Then Jaeger stiffened. The man who entered would have been considered a monster to most of humanity. He stood half a meter taller than Palane, and had rippling muscles that made him even more mishapen. He walked lightly though, reminding Rebecca of holos of the hexapuma of Sphinx. Berry charged the huge man, the box in her hands. "Happy Birthday, Hugh!"
"Berry, you know I don't have a birthday. I was decanted." At odds with his appearance, he had a mellow voice. Again Rebecca was reminded of a young girl and her... Kodiak Max.
"You do now." She told him. "I had mother pick this up, and decided that the day it arrived would be your birthday from now on." She thrust it out. "Go on, open it!"
The man looked at those present, blushing slightly. Then he carefully began to open the paper. Berry grabbed it back, shredding the paper like a kid at Christmas, then handed it back. Hugh looked at her for a moment, then took the lid off it. He reached in and pulled out... a huge pair of purple treecat slippers.
"You know how hard it was to find them in your size? Mother had to get them made in Ginormous!"
"Thank you." Hugh looked at the shoe in his hands, then put it back in the box.
"You're welcome." She held up her arms as if he were her father, and he picked her up to hug her. The observers merely watched until he put her down.
Berry clapped her hands. "So, to business. Ruth and Thandi have no doubt told you what we need-"
"No, Berry. Someone slapped my hand while I was still talking to the captain, before asking." Thandi commented.
Berry glared at her. Then looked at the captain. "Your squadron is bringing in our new LACs and their CLACs, but we need someone qualified to patrol now. Do you know about our wormhole?"
"Yes, Berry." The Torch Wormhole junction was only sixty-four light-minutes from the primary, closer and very faint in comparison to a normal womhole. While little or nothing was known about it, Mesan records captured by the rebelling slaves from when they owned the planet said they had never bothered to survey it, yet snippets among that date claimed it had three terminii. How they could know that without doing a survey suggested that they had lied. "Your LACs and Frigates can't do it?"
"Our LACs are short ranged." Thandi told her. "They're all obsolete even by Solarian Standards; Headed out from here they have an endurance of only about four days. And we have tried to picket it with Frigates, but they are so much larger than an LAC that we have spotted ships approaching it without signalling. If we try to contact them, they just hyper out. But The LACs aboard our new CLACs are longer legged, from what I hear, between the use of Manticoran tech and the Republic's sheer toughness, they should have a much longer endurance. And I was told that your AMCs carry LACs of their own..."
"My ship does. The others had been refitted earlier than the Maiden. She was the last to be sent in, and they didn't ripped out her LAC bays; so we have twelve of the most modern LACs in space aboard."
"Good." Ruth said. "The problem is, under Interstellar law, we can claim the wormhole because of it's position, but if we can't enforce it..." She shook her head. "Until we have our own longer legged LACs, and our own crew for them, we could really use your help for a while. Maybe two months or more."
Rebecca considered. "Unless I hold Witch Maiden here, that could be a problem. While ours have a much longer endurance, it isn't enough for more than about a month, I think. If you would not mind, I can check with my Squadron commander and the CLACs we brought. Maybe we can cobble together a tender for them. However I can have half of the squadron deploy for the moment, and extend the recon drone shell to cover the wormhole as well. Better yet, I can have what's left of my own drones deployed to cover the wormhole." She motioned. "If you have a com center nearby, I can order it while I get briefed in on our mission."
"Please."
A serious error
Leading five other LACs, HMSLAC Legate decelerated toward the wormhole. They were spread in an arch, as they were going to englobe the one light second space taken up by the wormhole. Matthew Quintain sat in his command chair, checking the readouts of the ship's gravitational sensors. The wormhole was detectable, but looked more like an anomaly than like the fury of the Manticoran Junction back home. He had assigned his units spaced with the more experienced crews between the newer units, so Legate was flanked by RSNLAC Shrew and RSNLAC Succubus, , with RSNLAC Otter next to starboard and farthest to port was GSN Michael and RSNLAC Fubuki next to fill it out. Behind the LACs came Witch Maiden, already deploying drones to encircle the-
There was the flare of a ship coming out of hyperspace ahead. He stiffened. Less than a million kilometers ahead of his ship!
"Helm, reverse course. Full speed! Right at him!"
"Sir, our orders-"
"I gave you an order! Do it!"
The helmsman shrugged. "Reversing helm aye. Full speed, aye."
"Sir, contact appears to be a dispatch boat. No transponder. Range 900,000 kilometers and closing at 8.5 KPS." Sensors reported.
"Communications, challenge her." He knew it would take several minutes for them to recycle the hyper generator so-
"Contact is turning, not dropping her sails."
"Guns, fire."
The weapons rating looked at the targeting system. "Sir, she's-"
"Damn you, fire!"
The man shrugged, hitting the button. If it had been anyone else, he might have tried again to warn him, but Quintain was an asshole.
The massive graser in the nose spoke once. Unfortunately they were aimed directly at the boat, and at this range without an impeller wedge, and moving sluggishly due to not dropping her sails, the ship didn't have a chance.
The beam hit just aft of center, shredding the small ship. It exploded.
Quintain stared, then roared, what the hell did you do?"
Even though he'd end up on report, the weapons rating merely turned. "Exactly what I was told to do, sir."