PrincessColumbia

  “Alright, what’ve we got?” asked Diane as she entered the bridge.

  The Athena’s bridge was significantly rger than that of the Dragon’s Daughter and had a corresponding increase in the number of personnel and stations. In addition to the expected captain’s chair, navigation, and helm, the bridge also had two more stations for comms and tactical. At the moment, all stations were occupied, leaving Diane to have to stand behind the captain’s chair.

  On the screen was a magnified view of the gas giant that Russe had highlighted in his briefing back at the station. A small rectangle that looked like a postage stamp in the middle of a football field was positioned a few degrees above the pne of the small and almost unnoticeable ring disk orbiting the pnet. A callout connected the tiny box to a much rger picture-in-picture dispy showing a cargo ship that had undergone extensive refits. Weapons systems that were clearly meant for rger capital ships were welded to the framework of the cargo section, and what looked like missile unchers had repced the exterior cargo bay doors. There were still access points to get cargo on...far too many, in fact. It appeared that telescoping tethers had been installed with the express purpose of connecting to nearly any type of standard ship configuration.

  Also on the screen was the bridge of the Arzoll’an’s Victory, Leki in the command station and Koar manning the helm. Both had grim expressions on their faces as they studied their own dispys.

  “Station commander on deck, everyone as you were,” announced the woman in the captain’s chair. Denna Powell had been one of the tenants on Diane’s station before she had arrived. The unfortunate victim of a failing drive coil and an opportunistic mutineer of a first officer, she’d been stranded on the station during Norma’s mother’s time and considered the mutiny a wakeup call. She’d been enjoying a bit of a retirement when Diane went digging through the personnel records to find an experienced fleet officer and had taken not a little persuasion to get her to take up a set of captain’s pips again. She turned the chair to face Diane without standing, “It appears Mr. Russe was correct,” she said in an accent that was almost, but not quite, British. “That...thing hanging in orbit of the gas giant matches the description of a ship that could take the Sappho’s Voyage to a tee.”

  Diane frowned, “So where is Caitlynn’s ship?”

  The officer at tactical, a lieutenant that Diane was struggling to remember the name of, turned to the captain. Captain Powell nodded and the lieutenant tapped a few buttons, rotating the image of the pirate ship. Apparently, the Sappho’s Voyage was behind Coxand’s ship from their perspective. As big as Caitlynn’s ship was, it was dwarfed by the kitbashed monstrosity that was the pirate ship. “The ship has bits of several names on the hull,” said the lieutenant, “Which likely means that it’s been assembled from parts of multiple ships, likely all scavenged from The Bonyard.

  Diane sneered, “This guy’s a pig! He takes no pride in ownership and builds...that!” she gestured at the screen; mountains of disgust piled into the st word. “Do we have anything like a tactical schematic of that, or is it too much of a salvage job to have any hope of that?”

  Koar spoke up via the comm link, “We’ve got a better sensor suite than you do, we’re linking you in now. That thing is a nightmare maze of corridors and holds.” As she spoke, another window appeared above the magnification of the ship, this one a wireframe with corridors ced throughout the hull and around the engines and what appeared to be an absolutely obscene number of weapons bays and missile magazines. “This thing is one ugly sonovabitch, to use Norma’s term. I’d be almost afraid of stepping foot on this thing. There’s almost zero safety tolerances between the weapons systems. Hell, he can probably get ships to surrender just by parking next to them and threatening to sneeze at the wrong time.”

  “Well,” Diane rumbled, “If it’s safe enough for him to live aboard it in squalor, it’s safe enough for him to die aboard it.” Any other time she might have been disturbed by the words coming out of her mouth, but what the other Morvucks were calling the Hunter’s Haze had kicked down the door to her higher brain functions as soon as she cpped eyes on the ship that had taken Diane’s mate! She had a target, and the idiot male who had dared to cim what was hers was going to meet his end at her cws! “The pn was to identify the best approach, take a shuttle while the Athena attacks from a distance, then board the pirate’s ship and rip and tear. Is there anything we’ve learned since entering the system that changes that pn?”

  “Negative,” reported Leki, “We’re putting our ship in stationary holding pattern and we’ll be joining our docking colr to the Athena shortly to join you. Suit up, Commander, we’re going to get your girl.”

  Diane nodded grimly, turned slightly to give a simir nod to Captain Powell, and left the bridge.

  Diane was sitting on the crew bench of the shuttle, strapped in securely with a five-point harness that had to be adjusted to its maximum size. She wasn’t in one of the pilot seats for a simple reason; she had no idea how to fly the shuttle. She was more than capable of piloting a starship in space, because of the distances involved it was, for the most part, a matter of basic geometry. Okay, technically it was kinematics and calculus, but the principle was the same; you had objects and a course to plot and you plugged the numbers into the formu to get the result. So long as you kept your ship pointed where the course told you to go and kept an eye on the drift so corrections could be made, you were golden.

  Actually piloting a craft in three-dimensional space? Especially around objects that were flying on their own paths and could sm into you hard enough to make you into so much space dust if you weren’t careful? Docking with a rger ship during combat? Even if her experience in defensive and combat driving from her agent training could transte to flying a shuttle (which, of course, they couldn’t), she was not about to try her luck learning all that on the fly.

  She found it an interesting coincidence that her choice in battle armor design was simir to the battle armor and weapons choices that Leki and Koar wore. Her armor was all white. Almost storm trooper white, she brooded as she looked down at her knees. Leki and Koar’s armor, in contrast, was bck with colored panels that apparently denoted their roles on their squad prior to their discharge from the Aiexi military. The red and gold reminded her a lot of Star Trek, especially given the red of Leki’s armor denoted her as the commander and the yellow-gold of Koar’s was tactical and support. The only thing missing are the comm badges, she thought as she scanned their armor across the cabin with her eyes. ‘course, if the gold had been command, then they’d just need the insignia painted on the left breast of the armor, but that’s not there either.

  The simirities to Diane’s loadout and/or Star Trek ended with the color of the armor. Coming from a race of women, Morvish armor had clearly been designed from the start to accommodate the female form, where with Diane’s armor was of Earth design, given that it was based on the conceit that the person wearing it would be male, but then adapted to fit a woman at some point after the initial design process. It was only really noticeable when they stood side-by-side; Diane’s torso pting was intended to emphasize the abdomen and had a fairly fixed breastpte. Once sized for the Diane, it was intended for Diane. Which made some sense, but she noticed that the chest pieces of Koar and Leki’s armor consisted of four interlocking sections and where the sections joined they flexed and moved, allowing their chests to actually have a little freedom to...well, jiggle a bit while still being held in pce and supporting ‘the girls.’ Diane had been noticing during ‘that time of the month’ that her breasts were tender with a slight but measurable swelling and imagined that a more flexible breast pte would help with the occasional problem along those lines.

  There were lots of small differences like that. The leg armor allowing for a more generous freedom of movement around the hips, the carry points lower to avoid the slight statistical skewing of lower upper body strength, a few aesthetic choices that emphasized the natural curves and shape of a woman’s body. Diane couldn’t really help but compare her armor to theirs and feel hers was inferior. There was no single way she could pinpoint exactly why she was thinking this. While based on different technologies, their armor was pretty evenly matched. They functioned equally well at the intended purpose, that is; stopping or slowing things that make the blood that’s supposed to remain inside the body come out of it.

  She kept finding herself gazing at their armor almost longingly. It wasn’t envy or jealousy, she didn’t want Leki’s armor or Koar’s armor, she wanted her own armor to be more like theirs; to have the curves and shape and details that made them undisputably feminine while still being hardened barriers against the world to protect the warriors inside.

  In less emotionally problematic comparisons were the weapons loadouts. The two veteran soldiers carried fewer firearms all around, and what they did carry was entirely energy based. While Diane would be juggling ammunition from her pouches and magazines, the “hunting companions” with her would only be limited by the overcharge of their firearms. Absently, she flicked her pyer HUD up and switched to the research trees and scanned through them. There was a tree for Construction, Starship Combat, Alliances, Resources, Exploration, Starships, Ethics, Navigation, Economics, and others for a total of sixteen research trees, none of them had any research for combat that wasn’t ship-to-ship. So looks like I’m going to have to go a little rogue here... She pulled her mini-tab out of the pocket in one of her hip pouches and tapped out a message to Katrina. Of course, the assistant wouldn’t get it until it wormed its way through the gactic rey network via the slow-speed connection...or she returned to the station with the mini-tab and it updated to the station’s local network and sent the checksum message to the network to delete the cached copy.

  @Katrina – Please look into research options for small arms and melee combat. We’re using 22nd century tech in the 27th century. I feel like I’m using stone knives and bearskins in World War 2.

  She realized with a start Leki and Koar were discussing pns for the attack. “One of us needs to get aboard the Sappho’s Voyage,” Koar was saying quietly, “And it can’t be Princess Doomsyer back there.”

  Diane frowned, “‘Princess Doomsyer’?”

  Startled, the other two women turned away from the front viewport to look over their shoulders. Leki smiled somewhat apologetically, “We...didn’t expect you to be mentally present.”

  Diane gnced through the front viewport to see the inside of the Athena’s shuttle bay, “We haven’t even unched yet.”

  Koar shrugged, turning back to her control panel to continue her pre-flight checks, “You kinda go in and out. We’ve had to repeat things a few times in the st half hour.”

  “At least some of that time you’ve been using your Commander’s...whatever it is that you look at when you’re not quite...present,” expined Leki, “And you’ve done the same motions several times. It’s fairly common for women to slide into a Haze and repeat the same actions because they’re so focused on the hunt they forget what they were doing and do it all over again.”

  Diane frowned and gnced at the message on her mini-tab and realized Leki was exactly right.

  22 minutes ago@Katrina – Look into new carry weapons, please. I feel like I’m behind the times here.

  15 minutes ago@Katrina – We need to update our weaponry for personnel carry, the Morvucks are embarrassing us without trying.

  8 minutes ago@Katrina – Do you have any updated hand-held weapons schematics in the update from Earth when we brought the station online? The Morvuck’s sidearms are WAY more advanced than what I’m carrying.

  2 minutes ago@Katrina – Please look into research options for small arms and melee combat. We’re using 22nd century tech in the 26th century. I feel like I’m using stone knives and bearskins in World War 2.

  Diane groaned and thumped her head against the wall of the shuttle, “God, I’m worthless! What the hell is going on with me?!” She saw Leki open her mouth to speak but waved it off, “I know, I know, Hunter’s Haze, I get it! But why? I wasn’t this keyed up when the svers attacked and we rescued the women from their starbase!”

  Leki turned her seat so she could face Diane, “It’s because...” she gnced over to Koar, who realized she was being given a cue and smirked at Leki before turning back to her preparations. Leki rolled her eyes, “It’s because you’re in love.”

  Diane blinked owlishly, “In love?! But Caitlynn and I just met! I mean, yeah, we’ve slept together a lot, but I...I don’t even know if we’re actually girlfriends!”

  Koar barked out a ugh but offered no commentary as Leki chuckled, “I’d say that qualifies...but then I don’t know how they did it on Earth where you grew up, so maybe they do girlfriends differently there.”

  Diane’s face reddened as she realized she had little enough idea that she couldn’t say for sure one way or the other. “It’s...most of the time it’s boyfriend and girlfriend and the boys ask the girls...at least that’s how it was where I grew up.”

  Koar paused in her checklist, “What’s a ‘boyfriend’?”

  Leki answered, to Diane’s surprise, “‘Boy’ is juvenile for ‘man’ on Earth, like how ‘girl’ is for ‘woman.’ Just like ‘girlfriend’ is applicable in a romantic context to adult women as well as juveniles, ‘boyfriend’ counts for men in a retionship.”

  Koar mouthed a silent, ‘Ah!’ and went back to her checklist, finishing it up with a few more button presses and flips of a switch. She tapped the comm panel, “Shuttle Minerva to Athena bridge, we are ready for departure and awaiting clearance.”

  The comms officer’s voice came through the speaker in the overhead, “Athena to Minerva, we’re still on approach to the enemy ship. We will open the bay doors as we decelerate for combat, the captain has given clearance for you to unch as soon as the bay doors are open.”

  “Confirmed Athena, safe flying and see you for drinks when this is all over.”

  As the comms officer gave her sign-off, Leki turned back to Diane, “It sounds like you and Caitlynn need to have a talk when this is all said and done, but whether you’ve formalized your arrangement socially or not, up here,” she reached across the space between them and tapped Diane’s forehead, “You’re mated. Your hormones and your instincts are being driven to find and protect the possible future mother of your daughters.”

  At the mention of ‘daughters’ Diane felt her entire body tense up, her grip on her shotgun tightening enough that she felt the hardened rubber grip flex. If her hands hadn’t been covered with the armor’s gauntlets, she was sure she’d be white knuckled.

  Leki’s smile quirked up just a little, “See? My job will be to keep you focused enough to do as much damage as possible as you seek out your mate...or that which has threatened her. It’s only natural you’re a bit of a wander-child.”

  Diane blinked, “A what?”

  “A...” Leki had clearly been thrown off slightly from the communication misstep, “Wander-child. A child who wanders, like your mind doesn’t focus on the here and now.”

  “Oh,” Diane huffed a ugh, “A space cadet.”

  Leki’s face twisted in amused confusion and Koar turned to give Diane an incredulous stare.

  “Like, your head’s in the clouds?” offered Diane, “Lights are on but nobody’s home? Staring off into space?” It bothered her somewhat that she could list them off so readily given how frequently Tiffany had accused her of being all of them and more.

  Koar chuckled and settled back in her seat as Leki nodded, “I...suppose that will do. But the important thing for you to remember is that you’re entire purpose is to tear through them as fast as you can. The sooner you eliminate the threat or find your mate, the better. Until then, don’t expect too much from yourself, it wouldn’t be fair to you.”

  Diane thunked her head back against the wall again and heaved a sigh, tucking her mini-tab back into her hip pouch, “Well at least tell me this is the first time we’ve had this conversation.”

  “Didn’t you already ask that?” interjected Koar with a grin.

  Leki turned and gibbs-spped her business partner, who just chuckled in response.

  It was thanks to the command-and-control channels of the shuttle that they were kept abreast of the action on the Athena’s bridge enough to be prepared for the unch opportunity.

  The C-and-C circuit was an adaptation of space combat that was a necessity where it hadn’t been for oceanic or air combat in the pre-space exploration days. Owing to the sometimes lightminutes that could exist between combatants, even inside star systems, all ships on an allied side of a conflict needed up-to-the-nanosecond coordination in order to be able to do things like unch near-light-speed attacks with energy weapons or track the paths of all shots made with kinetic weapons. It wouldn’t do, after all, to have a macro-rail round travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light arc around the star in a parabolic orbit only to sm into one of the allies of the ship that fired it.

  While normally the voice channels that tied bridges, fighters, and shuttles together was the perview of a comms officer on a rger ship like the Athena, for something the size of the Minerva (or even the Dragon’s Daughter), the voice channel was often a lifeline in the heat of battle for smaller ships that might go unnoticed without the living person on the other end of the comms.

  Or at least, that’s what the in-game Wikipedia page said about it when Diane looked it up while they were waiting for unch.

  They listened intently to the action on the bridge. As one might expect of a space battle, the pirates had seen them enter the system as soon as they’d dropped from the FTL tunnel.

  “Weapons systems on enemy vessel going hot.”

  “No response to direct hail, just a repeat of the broadcast demanding ‘tribute.’”

  “Athena’s weapons systems are fully operational and ready to fire. Ammo magazine four reports the jam has been cleared and the system repaired.”

  “Forward deflector fields are on standby, and shields are up and fully operational.”

  “Preparing deceleration for shuttle unch outside combat envelope.”

  “Preparing to fire macron cloud.”

  As the occupants of the shuttle settled themselves in for unch, Leki and Koar double-checking their flight harnesses, the bay doors began opening, revealing the dark vista of space outside the envelope of metal and polymer that was the Athena.

  Koar flipped the switches that cycled up the shuttle’s impulse engines and gripped the flight controls, one hand on a flight stick with a plethora of switches and buttons and the other on a throttle that had a resting position midway through its travel and a directional thumb-controlled hat. Once the shuttle bay doors had opened enough for the ship to clear, Diane watched Koar’s thumb nudge the directional hat vertically and the shuttle followed suit, the craft rocking slightly as it fought the gravity pting of the ship. Diane watched as the veteran warrior carefully guided the shuttle through the doors, then without even moving the flight stick pressed her thumb on the directional hat on the throttle to spin the shuttle in pce. I’m not gonna gush about how cool it is that she’s controlling the shuttle so effortlessly! She chastised herself.

  They watched in the safety of the contrail between the twin impulse exhausts of the Athena as the shuttle bay doors closed, intentionally keeping the shuttle where the pirate’s ship’s sensors were unlikely pick up its presence.

  The voice of the Athena’s weapon’s officer came over the C-and-C circuit, “Athena to Minerva, firing macron canon in 90 seconds, prepare for maneuvers.”

  Leki keyed the channel, “Minerva acknowledges. Just don’t shoot us in the butt, Athena.”

  “Buy me dinner before we talk about that.”

  Leki snorted and replied and Koar chuckled, “You’re not my type, Athena, though your captain might have decent chances.”

  “Athena captain takes that under advisement. Firing macron canon.”

  At the word ‘firing,’ Koar ducked the shuttle under the Athena and up under the rger ship’s ‘chin,’ and they watched as a stream of particles fountained from two nozzles mounted at the extreme outside edges of the ‘nose’ of both of the pontoon-inspired halves of the ship. After about two football-fields length of space, the stream started dispersing into a vaguely directional spray of cloud. Once it had dispersed enough, Koar nudged the shuttle forward, and just as they cleared the leading edge of the Athena, the stream of particles stopped. While they could visually see through the cloud about as well as one might through a fog on a pnet’s surface, to a ship’s sensors the cloud would appear as a hot, highly kinetic, and fast-moving blur, effectively blinding anyone relying on sensors. It had the additional benefit of hammering an opposing ship’s shields, deflector arrays, and armor with hundreds of trillions of particles, each no rger than a grain of sand, overwhelming any energy barrier defense and shattering many standard armors.

  As space battlefield weapons went, it was almost nightmarishly effective in many situations, especially against rge, slow moving targets. Dedicated combat craft, even explorer-css ships, would be able to simply alter vector and dodge the cloud. This meant, of course, that they were going to be forced to move to a less favorable firing position, but those ships would still have options.

  A massive, modified cargo-hauler like Coxand’s ship? It would be a sitting duck.

  The Minerva was to fly in the wake of this particle cloud, using the macron canon’s discharge as a camoufge.

  Of course, this method of approach had a downside, if the enemy ship started blindly firing into the macron cloud they were just as likely to be hit as anything else in the ship’s weapons radius.

  Arms started bring in the cabin. “Incoming fire from enemy ship,” announced Leki, “Evasive action, hard to starboard!” The ship rocked to the side, Diane feeling the five point harness holding her in her seat as the inertial dampers couldn’t quite compensate for the sudden change in trajectory.

  “Evasive action, hard to port,” came the voice of the Athena’s navigator, “Drawing fire from Minerva.” Diane gnced to the ship’s HUD, having some difficulty seeing the dispy from her angle in the back cabin.

  I’m going to learn to fly one of these as soon as I get back to the station, this being tucked in the back sucks! Diane compined mentally as she watched the trajectory indicators for the cruiser and their shuttle diverge.

  Diane was honestly not sure which she preferred; being completely exposed and only protected by her small size and heat signature but having the freedom to see anything that might be coming her way as had happened when she assaulted the sver’s starbase, or the much greater protection of being aboard an actual spacecraft but being unable to see anything happening as was happening now.

  The Minerva ate up the distance between the ships as the pirate vessel concentrated fire on the Athena, keeping behind the cloud of macrons. Koar turned the ship to aim straight for the target ship, Leki maniputing the shields of the tiny craft to focus all forward. Whoever was on weapons on the pirate ship was absolutely fooled by their maneuvers, they weren’t being targeted, all the weapon’s fire being aimed at the Athena.

  In just minutes that felt like eternity in the middle of a battle, the macrons particles had smmed into the pirate vessel, overloading the shields at least temporarily and sgging the point defense weapons on the side nearest their approach. The shuttle made it inside the operational envelope of the massive weapons on the modified freighter and Koar maneuvered to the nearest airlock port to their approach. She matched the rotational velocity of the pirate ship manually, which was a feat in itself. This did mean that Leki was required to man the grapples, firing them at the skin of the ship around the damaged colr. A couple dozen seconds ter, the grapples had reeled them close enough to allow the magnetic cmps to lock them to the hull.

  “Only an 84% seal, we’re going to be breathing vacuum before we can get the doors open. Helmets on,” Leki said. She tapped a control surface on her gauntlet and her helmet sprung into being, sliding into pce like an old Hollywood movie effect, about half of the helmet forming a framework for the remainder to materialize from some sort of transporter-like buffer in the suit.

  Koar and Diane followed, their own helmets snapping into pce as Leki disengaged her harness. Diane released her own and took quick stock to make sure none of her gear had disengaged during the transit and joined her friend at the door.

  Once Leki confirmed everyone’s suits were vacuum-secure, she hit the controls for the hatch. The doors rolled back into the framework of the shuttle, revealing a pitted and scarred airlock door. Leki didn’t even bother with any sort of hack to the door’s electronics as Diane had in her st engagement, she merely scanned the damage-scarred surfaces and spotted the corner of a bit of paneling near the pce where the access dispy should have been and ripped it off, revealing a series of tubes leading to a hydraulic mechanism. She yanked them all, not bothering with anything resembling finesse, followed by digging her cws into one of the door panels.

  Taking her cue from Leki, Diane extended her own cws and dug them into the other door panel and they both heaved. Even one of them would have been able to open the hatch with the hydraulics destroyed, so both of them working together caused the doors to practically fly open. A slight breeze pushed against them as the pressure equalized, and she could see the ambient moisture in the air fogging as it approached the bad seal where the combat colr didn’t quite mate with the damaged ship’s hull.

  Koar’s voice crackled over her helmet comms, “Alright, get your butts in there and shut the damn door, you’re letting the heat out.”

  Diane and Leki darted into the pirate ship, Diane stumbling slightly at the difference in gravity pting. It was only a small change, but she wasn’t accustomed to the sudden increase during boarding action. Leki oriented herself quickly, clearly having had experience with this type of operation during her military service as she scanned the wall next to the airlock they just entered and spotted the internal control panel. Ignoring most of the controls, she cracked the seal on the emergency pull and hauled down on the drop-lever. This pulled the pin out of pce that was holding the emergency airlock seal in pce, allowing a high-pressure canister hidden in the ceiling to expel its payload and sm what amounted to a three-inch thick wall down to block off where the airlock had been.

  Leki tapped the side of her helmet to activate her comms, “Alright, we’re aboard and sealed in, disengage and secure the Sappho’s Voyage.”

  “Good hunting, sisters, and see you when all our enemies are dead at our feet,” came Koar’s reply.

  “Good hunting,” answered Leki as she tapped the side of her helmet again. She then turned to Diane, “Are you ready to answer the call of the hunt, sister?”

  This focused Diane on Leki. She hadn’t realized her mind had started to wander as her attention was drawn in the direction she knew the bridge would be from their studies of the scans of the ship. Leki rarely, if ever, called anyone else ‘sister;’ it was an appeltion Koar used almost exclusively.

  As the lights in the hall strobed red, Diane felt a surge of something akin to happiness and contentment that seemed unconnected to anything, somehow buoyed by the awareness that she was being referred to as a woman in a familial way by the Morvuck warrior. She grinned, not bothering to dampen her response as she knew Leki wouldn’t care that she looked inhuman, “Rip and tear until it is done...sister.”

  PrincessColumbia