PrincessColumbia

  Three ships had been built by the station so far, and when the first two were finished, Diane had been busy enough with other matters that she hadn’t been able to attend their unch. Today, however, Diane and members of her crew were gathered in the observation lounge as a bottle of wine, pitched at it by a space suited volunteer from one of the shipyard’s airlocks, crashed against the prow of the vessel and its running lights activated. Cheers rose from the crowd, mirrored by the crew still in ops, as the new cruiser’s engines kicked on and the ship pushed away from the safety of the shipyard unassisted for the first time.

  More bottles of wine were broken out, these having been only recently received via the new, fully established trade route between Mortan and the Matron’s Aerie. Recordings of the event were going to be sent back, mostly via the social media streams that proliferated across the gaxy, but also via the two actual media outlets that established offices on the station.

  Nobody was in anything resembling formalwear, but Norma wore something a bit nicer than her usual jeans and t-shirt combo under her father’s beaten-down old flight jacket, and Russe had actually consented to wear a button-up shirt. Diane, ever the sentimentalist, wore a blue tunic under her white jacket with a pair of red dress pants. The rest of the Ops crew that could be spared the time from their posts to attend the celebration in the observation lounge were there, as well as a handful of guests. The rest of the Morvucks were present, either having put in some time on the new ship or being personally invited by a crew member. Even Mr. Bendenson showed up, but his much-discussed wife that Diane had never seen remained back in their quarters for reasons the old salt wasn’t divulging.

  Mess Attendants given the honor duty of serving snacks and beverages were circuting throughout both main Ops and the Observation Lounge. Diane’s plucking of a winegss from Sani’s hands with a stern, “Nope, too young!” drew a round of ughter from the nearby revelers as Cynthy and Kymberlynn took their offered water gsses and snickered at their friend. All in all, it was a very good, happy atmosphere where a party was likely to break out and nobody was about to mind.

  “So,” said Norma in an obviously louder than necessary voice, clearly intended to gather the attention of the room, “Have you decided what you’re going to name the ship, oh glorious commander?” The ughter that greeted this question from the assembled crew and staff made it clear she had succeeded; Diane was now the focus of everyone there.

  “Way to put me on the spot, Norma,” Diane snarked back at her mayor, “And I happened to have given it at least a little thought, thank you very much.”

  “I’m shocked!” Norma prodded.

  “Shocked that I thought about this?”

  “No, shocked that you thought, I figured you were all about just charging in and eating people, no thoughts, head empty.”

  There wasn’t a single person on the crew or staff rosters that didn’t know what Diane had done for the former sves (and continued to do, a few of the former sves had even returned to the station, citing less than favorable receptions on their home worlds), so the good-natured ribbing drew companionable ughs while Diane rolled her eyes and did her best to bite back a smile.

  “Well surprise, your commander has a brain,” she stuck her tongue out at Norma, letting it extend a good six inches before pulling it back into her mouth.

  “Don’t threaten a girl with that if you’re not pnning to use it!” Norma purred.

  Diane blushed, “Russe, are you gonna let your girl flirt with me like that in front of you?”

  Russe just chuckled, “Are you going to stop her? Since when has she let anyone tell her what to do?”

  She rolled her eyes, “Okay, yeah, fair point.” She let the ughter die down a bit before she announced, “I decided to go simple, the ISS Athena.”

  “‘ISS’? What’s that mean?” asked Russe.

  “Well, we aren’t exactly part of a nation, so U.S.S. didn’t seem appropriate, but we are Independents, so the Independent Star Ship Athena.”

  There were nods all around at her expnation when Koar raised her gss and said, “Give us a toast, sister!”

  The cry was joined by everyone else in the observation lounge and the voices chanting over the speakers thanks to the feed from Ops as everyone there raised their gsses of non-alcoholic drinks to the camera. Diane rolled her eyes again and raised her hand to issue a silencing gesture, “Okay, okay, shush, I gotta be heard if I’m going to offer a toast.” The crowd went quiet as she lidded her eyes in thought for a moment.

  “We’re alone in the dark out here,” she finally began, “When the Branwell Consortium came along we were just another seed station that had unlocked her doors to the universe. They saw us as...freshly hatched, if you will, easy pickings for a predator that thought it was the biggest, meanest creature in the territory.”

  She’d always loved watching the rousing speeches on Star Trek, especially when there was seemingly little to say but the person giving the speech revealed that there was, indeed, something that needed saying to remind the crew who they were. She always wondered if she’d be able to deliver such a speech, and even though this wasn’t a high-tension moment, she felt like this was a rare opportunity to step into the shoes of someone worthy of the command role and provide inspiration to her people.

  “What the Branwell Consortium learned was that this wasn’t some helpless little bird that hatched, but a fire-breathing DRAGON!” a brief cheer met her words before dying down into an anticipatory silence, “We had one scout-css ship, a crew scraped from the bottom of the barrel, and a commander who’d never led troops into combat in her life, and we rose up and slew the monsters and rescued the damsels! And now with our newest cruiser, we’re decring to the darkness, this is our territory, challenge us if you dare!” she raised her gss to the observation window, eyes on the ship slowly passing by.

  Norma clinked her gss against Diane’s, “To the ISS Athena!”

  Cheers and the clinking of gss filled the small space and was echoed by the crew in Ops.

  Several hours ter, Diane was in her quarters. She had arranged a chair more appropriate to pying an instrument than the very comfortable and plush furniture that occupied her living room. As comfortable as they were, they were miserable for holding a proper pying posture or enabling proper arm movement where necessary. She had a tablet mounted on a music stand with a type of sheet music specific to guitars called ‘tabs.’ While she had decided at one point to find out why it was called that, she was satisfied that it was sufficient for the purpose of learning guitar pieces. So far, she’d been focusing on technically simple pieces that didn’t require much in the way of range or technique. She mostly just needed the basics of the chords and how those reted to the time signatures and the notes she was familiar with on sheet music for piano.

  At the moment, she was working on one of her favorite piano pieces, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. Technically, it was an organ piece, but as the sheet music worked for both organ and piano and there were far more pianos and synthesizer keyboards in America than organs that the average person could py. She’d had a chance to sit in the audience for a concert at the People’s Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah when she was a teenager and found herself falling in love with the piece and obsessed over learning it until the end of her high school career. She’d never managed anything like the performance she’d experienced at the Tabernacle, but she had become passably good at it, enough to impress acquaintances when she pyed it at the rare social gathering she'd attended.

  She’d been quite pleased to find a tabs version for guitar on the Internet. Perusing the piece left her feeling slightly winded and her hand aching even before she pyed a single note, so she separated the Toccata from the Fugue and set the tter aside for working on ter. The Toccata was actually quite enjoyable to py on guitar, the simple notation still requiring that she flex her beginner’s skill to py it on key and at speed.

  She had just completed the fourth measure during her second practice pass through the music when a chime sounded, the urgent one that told her it was more than just a simple hail. She paused and announced with a frown, “Computer, put the call through.”

  “Commander,” came Cynthy’s voice, pinched with stress, “You better get up here, it’s about the Sappho’s Voyage.”

  Diane was up and moving so quickly she had actually forgotten she was holding the guitar until the cord to the amp drew taut and she had to return to the chair, setting it on the seat instead of putting it carefully in the guitar stand.

  Five minutes ter she was rushing into Ops, “Report!”

  The faces surrounding her were grim, and rather than say anything, Cynthy tapped a few commands on her workstation and the main dispy lit up with a message.

  “Greetings merchant marines!” decred a man who seemed to encapsute everything Diane found revolting about the male gender, “This is going out on the public network so that everyone who relies on your pathetic service will know who’s really in charge in this sector.” A map of the gaxy suddenly occupied a corner of the screen and zoomed in a square of space that encompassed several dozen star systems, “Everything in this area is now subject to paying tribute to me, Hardy Coxand!”

  Diane found herself taking in every inch of his, frankly, disgustingly ugly features. He was overweight. Oh, she could see muscle under the yers of fat, but it was like he’d intentionally piled carbs on top of the developed muscle. His face was bristling with hair, an exaggerated beard and mustache covering the bottom half of his cheeks and everything below his nose. That his teeth weren’t stained and misaligned was a minor grace, as his smile was less ‘evil mastermind’ and more ‘smarmy and punchable.’ He was wearing some form of visor, obscuring his eyes, but that just made his absolutely eye-piercingly offensive excuse for a pompadour stand out. He was wearing what looked like a leather vest, exposing a spectacurly hairy chest that had folds of fat that made her stomach clench. Small mercy that he seemed to at least keep his body clean, she had a feeling he probably had some sort of masculine musk that she knew she’d want to kill him for offending her nasal passages with it.

  What had her ready to kill him over what would be minor irritations at any other time was the sight of Caitlynn securely tied to a chair aboard her own bridge over the shoulder of the self-procimed ‘Hardy Coxand.’ She had some form of duct tape over her mouth and she was gring daggers at the back of the man’s head.

  “As a demonstration of what happens when you don’t comply,” he stepped back, pulled a pistol out of a conveniently strapped holster, and shot Caitlynn in the temple.

  “I know she’s a Commander, I’ve found her spawn points on this ship and have enough of my security teams surrounding each point to grab her before she can make a move after respawning.” As he spoke, the avatar Caitlynn had been occupying faded from existence, the bindings holding her to the chair cttering as they hit the metal surfaces of the seat and the floor, the piece of tape that had been over her mouth fluttering to the floor. “Her cargo is already mine, and I can’t cim her ship, but I can blow it up with her on it. She’ll respawn halfway across the gaxy with nothing. If she’d just given me the tribute I demanded when I ambushed her, she wouldn’t have been killed repeatedly.” So saying, he pulled a universal marking pen from his vest pocket and clicked the end to extend the tip, adding another mark to thirty-four others on the wall next to the chair.

  Diane’s mouth was as dry as her eyes, strained from trying to capture every detail on the screen.

  Hardy continued, “Let it not be said I’m unreasonable. This here Commander might just have people that care about her, so I’m putting a ransom on her release with her ship. Bring me the list of materials and resources attached to this message and I’ll release her and her ship. As long as she’s able to respawn the ship is useless to me. Get the payment to me in the next seven standard days and I won’t blow the ship’s core with her on it.”

  “If I’m willing to do that to a Commander, imagine how easy I find it to take the life of anyone else that gets in the way of me becoming the undisputed lord of this sector. The countdown starts as soon as I hit ‘send’ on this message. Lord Hardy Coxand, out.” The video blipped off, leaving the normal ‘window’ projection that normally dispyed of the station outside the Ops building.

  A bass rumble that could have been mistaken for a ship flying too close and mixing its psma trail with the station’s atmosphere. Diane didn’t care that the sound came from her, nor did she care that nearly the entire Ops crew were looking at her like she was going to tear their throats out. She didn’t care about that because there was only one throat that she wanted to tear out. She clenched a fist and drove it into a nearby console, shattering the psticine surface and the circuitry and casing beneath it.

  She felt two sets of arms linking around hers as she was pushed back against the wall, “Easy, easy...” came the calm voice of Leki, “You’re no good to anyone if you let loose here.”

  She bucked, absently, her eyes still locked on the screen as her growling doubled in volume, “Whaoh there, sister!” barked Kaor, “Don’t make me put you on the floor, just ‘cause you’re taller than me doesn’t mean I can’t drop you!”

  Russe’s face suddenly blotted out her line of sight to the screen. “Hey, buddy, it’s okay. She’ll be okay, you know she will. Come back to us, we can’t help if you’re...yeah.” She felt his warm hands against the skin of her cheeks and jaw and breathed deeply, the smells of Ops mixing with the scents of Russe, Leki, and Koar. She found herself fighting against their calming influence and had to consciously let the fury that had gripped her go.

  It took several minutes, but she finally calmed enough to actually use words, “I’m...I’m fine. I need...I need to...” a small, abortive growl rattled out of her as the other two Morvucks helped her to stand on her own two feet after releasing their holds.

  Leki rather uncharacteristically stepped into Diane’s personal bubble, a gentle purring rumbling through her as Leki pressed herself against her, wrapping her arms around Diane in a hug. Diane was shocked to realize that she was actually somewhat further calmed by this action, a purr from her own chest rattling sympathetically with Leki’s. “You probably don’t know what you’re feeling right now since you were raised by humans, it’s okay. It’s a normal response when someone you love is threatened or hurt. And to see them killed...”

  “S-she’s a Commander...she’ll be fine...I know she’ll be fine...I...” her throat was tight as she started shivering, not like she was cold but like she was forcing herself not to break and run at the threat, even though that threat was probably light years away.

  Russe took Diane’s hand in his own, gently squeezing like he did when he knew she needed calming, “Yeah...but that was...I don’t think we’ll be running tests after all, okay? That was awful to watch.”

  Diane let herself be comforted by her friends as she wrapped her free arm around Leki, “What...what are you two doing here? I get Russe, he’s always up in Ops, but you guys should be at your shop.”

  Cynthy raised her hand timidly, “I...after I saw the message I kinda panicked and called Kymmy and Sani, and they were at Leki’s workshop.”

  Koar put a hand on Diane’s shoulder and squeezed gently, “We saw more’n a few rookies get lost in Hunter’s Haze in the service. We figured we’d better get up here as soon as we heard.”

  Diane nodded and just breathed as the sounds of Operations returning to normal resumed around her. She closed her eyes and just inhaled and exhaled steadily, letting the familiar scents wash through her.

  “So what do we know about this ‘Hard Cock-in-hand’ person?” asked Kaor.

  A round of sniggering rippled through the conference room, even Diane managing a smile as she took a sip of her Jiantin Tonic. It was, perhaps, the only drink that could actually calm her without impairing her faculties.

  “Not much,” said Russe, “I’ve checked with my contacts on the forums, he’s not a Commander as far as we’ve been able to tell. No reports of him respawning or having any exceptional abilities.”

  Leki nodded, leaning against the table with her elbows on Diane’s left, “That’s a relief. Having someone that cutthroat being able to simply respawn would be a nightmare.”

  Russe nodded and tapped at his mini-tab, activating the conference room’s main dispy. It had a map of the gaxy with the major space nations highlighted in their usual blue, green, red, and yellow coloration, “We were able to trace the call through the rey network back to this section of space,” a spherical highlight appeared on the gactic map, which zoomed in on a trio of systems in Independent space, “And based on the st data from the deep space scans in our logs, we’ve been able to spot an old outpost with enough fortification that it would make a good pirate’s ir in this system here,” he tapped on his tab and a circle appeared on the dispy with a callout that had a zoomed-in image of a fortified space station. “However, I don’t think he’s there.”

  Diane’s eyebrows went up, “...why not?”

  “Because of the capabilities of the Sapho’s Voyage. She may look like a standard merchant-css surveyor, but she’s sacrificing about half her cargo space to be outfitted with weapons and shield ptforms, and even a couple of cub fighters that can be deployed at a moment’s notice.” Russe tapped on a few more controls and a second dispy rezzed in holographically, showing the specs and yout of Caitlynn’s ship.

  Diane immediately began memorizing the yout and pnning attack vectors, “Russe, if I liked guys that way I’d kiss you on the mouth. With tongue.”

  Russe blushed as he continued, “Basically, the station is, oddly enough, too small to house a fighting force big enough to take on Caitlynn’s ship. We’ve got a cruiser, they’d need a full-sized battleship just to be able to get close enough to take out the point defenses to get a boarding party on the ship.”

  Leki spoke up, “And the station couldn’t home the theoretical battleship?”

  Russe shrugged, “It could, but it’d be powerful and big enough to not need to.” Russe stood and walked over to the dispy with the gaxy map on it, “I think they’re here,” he tapped on another system, and when he did so it expanded to fill the screen, “And specifically, I think they’re in the rings of this gas giant here,” he said with another tap. “Obviously, our sensors won’t have current enough data to see if they’re there now, but the gas giant is composed of about 43% oxygen; O-one, O-two, and O-three. That makes it a fantastic pce for a ship to park long-term and drop occasional gas mining lines into the atmosphere to harvest the oxygen for long term parking for dozens of shipboard uses, especially if the ship is rge enough to support an onboard molecur synthesizer.”

  Diane’s eyebrows scrunched together as she looked at the pseudo-live representation of the sor system on her meeting room’s wall, “Why doesn’t one of the Big Four cim that system?”

  “They can’t, it’s too deep in Independent Space. The few times one of them has made a move, one of the others comes in to stop them. The st time they tried it was one of the key events that started the Gaxy War.”

  Diane flinched at that, “And one would presume that any independent stations would have been steamrolled in that...”

  Russe nodded, “That’s also a good second reason to consider this system as the most likely pce. There’s tons of wreckage there; independent ship hulls, shattered space stations, drones, unexploded ordinance, you name it, if it’s spaceborne in the st hundred years or so there’s likely some derelict version of it floating around that system. It’s called ‘the boneyard’ in online circles because it’s practically a tech graveyard. Scavengers like to make a go of picking through the wreckage, but unless you’ve got a really strong ship that’s not strong enough to ping as a possible representative of the Big Four, another scavenger or pirate’s going to pick you off, and anything too strong draws the attention of the Terrans, the Lantru, or the Crotuk.”

  Norma, who’d joined the party as they’d moved to the conference room, grumbled, “You keep saying, ‘Big Four,’ who’s the fourth?”

  As Russe tapped a few more times to bring up a third holographic dispy, this time showing the political map of the gaxy, Diane said, “The Swarm.”

  Russe nodded, “We don’t know much about them, just what their ships look like and that they’ve cimed that area of space,” he gestured to the yellow blotch that was ‘above’ the Terran Federation and the Lantru Concve with only a thin strip of ‘no man’s nd’ between the green and blue parts of the map connecting the yellow with the rger independent space between the other three big space empires, “They don’t have much to do with the other races, and no ships sent in by either the Feds or the Bugs have ever been heard from again.”

  Well, I know a bit more about the Swarm than that, but no way I’d be able to say it with just what my character’s knowledge should be, Diane thought. Out loud, she said, “Getting back on topic...”

  “Right!” said Russe, “My final reason for why I think that’s where they are is this,” he tapped a few more times on his mini-tab and the gactic map gained a new line, this one tracing from Darksky to a point near Terran space. Russe put a finger from each hand on either side of the line and spread them, zooming in on a familiar sector of space fairly close to Darksky. The line went right by the star with the oxygen-rich gas giant. “This is the flight path Caitlynn’s navigator plotted just before they left the station.”

  Diane set down her mug and nodded, “Alright, I’ll take the ISS Athena out to that star and hunt down the bastard. If he’s not there I’ll check the other two systems. Katrina, how long will it take the Athena’s drives to get there?”

  Katrina rezzed in next to Diane’s chair, “Approximately 49 hours.”

  “Good,” she stood, “That’s easily enough time to investigate that system and at least one other before the deadline. Kat, change the priority order, I want that Eclipse css survey ship getting built just in case. I’d rather we be able to just give Caitlynn a new ship so she can save her insurance payout to compensate her crew’s families if the worst happens.” The hologram gave her usual jaunty wave and rezzed out, “Russe, I want you to keep chasing leads on this pirate. See what else you can dig up. And who knows, you might get word that he really is a Commander and we’ll need that info before going into battle with him.” Russe nodded and sat down, tapping away on his mini-tab, presumably to start building a dossier.

  Before Diane could say anything else, Leki and Kaor stood, “We’re coming with you on this.”

  Diane blinked in surprise, “I...but you’re not part of my crew. I couldn’t...”

  Kaor snorted, “We’re your friends, dipshit. Practically the sisters you never had, remember?”

  Leki chuckled, “Plus we’re experienced combatants and you’ve trained with both of us in the gym and in gaming sims, we’ll be the best breach and exfil team you could ask for.”

  Diane found herself feeling a bit misty, “...thanks. I...” she swallowed the sudden knot in her throat, “Thanks.” She cleared her throat and addressed the room, “Norma, you’re in charge of the station until we get back, tell the shakedown crew for the Athena that we go hot in thirty minutes.”

  Norma gave a sloppy salute, “Got it, boss dy.”

  “And Russe?”

  “Huh?” he grunted as he looked up from his work.

  “If you give me a copy of everything, and I mean everything on the Sappho’s Journey that you’ve got, I won’t tell Caitlynn that you hacked her ship.”

  Russe blushed bright red having been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, “Uh...right!”

  PrincessColumbia