“RCS Victory I really must protest, this is outrageous, its unfair!” the captain of the freighter Bullock’s Bones whined over the comm. Sabatine resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

“As we have stated, you will be compensated for your services to the Republic in due course, which is all well and good, but if you do not comply with my orders now, we will have a problem NOW. A very brief problem Bones. Victory Out.” Sabatine concluded cutting the channel. It might have been a mistake not to just seize the ship and ground its crew somewhere but they were short handed in the extreme already and she couldn’t afford to spare the men. It was even possible that she was telling the truth. The War Ministry might eventually pay the standard charter rate for the thousand tone freighter which had been commandeered by a junior lieutenant in a distant theatre of a chaotic war. Some people did win the lottery afterall. It was axiomatic in the RCN that hard work lead to more hard work and that had been true in spates after their unlikely victory. Kaiden had taken a prize crew aboard the K-21 while Sabatine had executed the short intra system jump to commandeer on of the mining ships. Even though the alliance ships had most of their crews on the ground there were still more notional ‘prisoners’ on the K-21 than there were in the Vickie’s crew. There was no space aboard a starship to keep 80 people prisoner. They needed to be offloaded and fast, and since Kaiden’s attack on the Hickendorf had smashed the few temporary structures the Alliance had constructed on the moon, that meant finding another ship. Fortunately mining ships were both large and locally available and if they didn’t prove to be comfortable places to be incarcerated, well, worse things happened in war time.

 

“Is there a problem five?” Kaiden’s voice crackled over the comm circuit, clipped and tired. Sabatine wondered if she sounded that tired. Probably not, as she hadn’t been securing a battle damaged prize ship for the last three hours.

“No sir, Bullock’s Bones is beginning approach…” she tapped a few keys and remoted a view of her proposed landing site, a shallow crater a hundred meters from the scarred ruin which had housed the Alliance cruiser, “are you ready to set down?” She needn’t have asked, K-21 was already beginning to maneuver. A moment later a gridded silhouette of the ship appeared on her own image. Either Kaiden was getting better with signals or…

“I’ve highlighted our landing site Lieutenant Hickoring,” Tilda broke in. Sabatine ground her teeth. She had been surprised when the one time reporter had volunteered to go with the boarding party and was annoyed to have her break into the conversation now, even if she was being helpful.

“Acknowledged,” she responded as neutrally as she could. Why Tilda even wanted to be there was beyond her, perhaps she just preferred to stay with her meal ticket, maybe her reporters instinct told her to stay with the story. Heroic Cinnabar Officer Kaiden Caladwarden takes charge of his prize. It did have the ring of a headline about it. A handsome high born officer winning a stunning victory with courage and guile. It might be enough to distract from the fact that he had mutinied against his captain, victory was a great cloak afterall, but was there room in that cloak for two? What of Sabatine Hickoring? Would she be left holding the bag for the mutiny? Not officially perhaps, but in the minds of the RCN officers who would determine her future assignments or lack thereof? Would she be Kaiden’s lackey or his patsy? Sabatine checked the PPI making sure that the Bones was on course, she needn’t have bothered, low g landings on moons and asteroids were the stock and trade of miners after all and the big freighter slid graceful to rest on the dust coated surface, thrusters angled artfully to blow the dust away at a slight angle to the hull. K-21 was beginning its decent now, one of its plasma engines had been destroyed by the plasma cannon fire she had endured in the battle and Kaiden was compensating by lowering the output of the eight portside units rather than risk her nose dipping too much if he took the corresponding engine out of action. It wasn’t a landing that would make the Academy Ship Handling instructors smile, but it was serviceable enough. It took perhaps fifteen minutes for the ground to cool sufficiently for the spacers to unroll an umbilicus, a twenty meter long tube of plastic with metal stiffeners to connect the two ships, allowing the prisoners to be moved to the hold of the freighter, chivied along with wrenches and lengths of high pressure tubing. How the civilians would handle them if they got hostile Sabatine had no idea and honestly it didn’t much matter. The bones was armed only with a bundle of chemical rockets, the standard defense against pirates. While the rockets could strip away antennae and rigging, they were no threat to a warship, even at relatively close range.

“Five this is Six,” Kaiden’s voice came over the comm, sounding grim. “You better get down here.”

 

 

“We didn’t pick it up till we got to the ground,” Bushman said, handing a headset to Sabatine. Bushman was a power room tech who had been transferred with Kaiden, Sabatine didn’t know him well, but he seemed to know his business. They were in the secondary hold of the Bullock’s Bones. It was a dingy ship, ill maintained with exposed cabling and a dozen major safety problems Sabatine could spot without so much as turning on a scanner. Her crew were equally dirty, and probably considered themselves equally dangerous, though next to the RCN crew they just appeared scruffy and somewhat underfed. The console they were using was easily older than Sabatine, but it seemed to be the only working one that wasn’t on the bridge where the irate captain was still stamping around complaining about piracy. Sabatine put the headset to her ear.

“….anyone receiving….survivors….dorf….say again…. trapped…” the signal sounded tinny, a telltale sign that Bushman was boosting it for all he was worth. Survivors in the Hickendorf, buried beneath tons of dust and debris. There had been no hope for the crew out on the hull when the missiles hit. Even those that survived the blasts would have died of asphyxiation by now, the air bottles in their suits exhausted, but she had never considered anyone in the cruiser itself might still be alive. Her face grew tight, skin stretching into a grimace that she did her best to suppress. Killing the enemy was part of the job, something all RCN personnel had to accept but the reality was that the difference between RCN and Alliance spacers was minimal. The two communities had much more in common with each other than with the civilians of the various powers they fought for. Half the time planet of origin was mismatched in any case. The Vickie had crew who had been born on Pleasance, the Alliance Capital, and they were just as skilled and loyal as those who had been born in Xenos. Often it was just a case of which planet they had been drunk on when the recruiting officers, or press gangs, had run across them. She looked up at Kaiden expression neutral. Leaving the spacers to die made the most sense. They should be taking their prize and heading for Herculaneum immediately, to raise the alarm about the Alliance attack. Every minute they delayed here could prove costly, it was even possible, though not likely, that Alliance reinforcements would arrive and threaten the Vickie herself.

 

“What are your orders sir,” she asked formally.