Penny

Dogs of War: Old World Mercenaries

The sky lightened as the sun rose on another damp and dreary day. Camilla opened her eyes to the patter of rain on her canvas tent. For a moment she was prepared to dismiss the strange events of last night as a dream but as she peeled back the flap she saw the grail knight standing guard over her tent. Though he stood in the rain his armor was somehow bone dry, as though the rain drops refused to fall upon him. Camilla jerked her head back into her tent and swore in Tilean, a very un-enchantress like action. Perhaps the man really was insane, the Gods knew that times were hard enough to drive even the bravest to madness, but the reaction of Beaumont and his knights proved that most people wouldn’t see it that way. Pushing the possible problem from her mind, she dressed in one of her tailored blue riding dresses and her tooled leather armor before adding a waxed canvas cloak with hood to the ensemble.

The camp was quiet, cook fires smouldered under improvised covers and peasants huddled together in an effort to stay warm and dry. As Camilla stepped from her tent the Grail knight turned and went down on one knee with a whisper of ensorcelled steel.

“I am at your command, m’lady,” he declared fervently.

“Stand up and come with me,” Camilla said, more out of lack of a better option than real desire. Peasants fell to their knees as she passed and she cast irritated glances their way. As she passed through the camp she listened to the muted buzz of conversation. The members of her little band had long called herself Mademoiselle Aqua, or Lady Blue but the emphasis had shifted to make the Aqua into its root word for water, now the name the mutered was something closer to The Maiden of the Waters. The obvious allusion to the Lady of the Lake wasn’t lost on anyone. Under normal circumstances Camilla would have been on the first ship out of Bourdeaux, but the grey fatalism that had clung to her since Cydric’s death made the idea impossible.

Over the past few months the senior members of the little band, Camilla, Beaumont, Matis and Leofric, when he was sober enough, had developed a routine. Each morning they met by the central fire and discussed the plan for the day. All three men were already there when Camilla arrived. A sheet of canvas had been strong from spears butted into the wagon to create a lean-to to keep the rain off. All three men looked bedraggled and wet and Beaumont looked grim as death itself. Matis lounged on an empty wine crate, puffing at a pipe, while Leofric’s face shone with the same devotion as the other peasants. He must have been a handsome man once, even if time and a repeatedly broken nose had left him looking prematurely aged.

“Contessa,” Beaumont began with uncharacteristic directness.

“Sir Guillorme rode of during the night. I fear he has gone to spread word of this ...unorthodoxy,” The knight concluded with a glance at the grail knight.

“It is no lie Sir Knight, I Renard de Lucinion, swear it before the Lady,” the grail knight declared in a voice that throbbed with power. Renard, well she hadn’t gotten his name last night. Guillorme had been a taciturn man, more than usually vocal about her liberation of the serfs, it wasn’t hard to figure that the perceived heresy had put him over the edge. It was a shame Matis hadn’t shot him for desertion.

“Well there is nothing to be done about it now,” Camilla said wearily, accepting a cup of venison stew from Leofric. She sipped at it in the Brettonian fashion not bothering with knives and forks.

“Other knights will come when they hear what has been said about you Contessa, many have been willing to ignore you provided you only have a small band of vagrant serfs, but if they here you are impersonating Morgana L’Fey…”

“She is the Enchantress,” Renard declared in a voice that somehow wasn’t loud and yet had the clarity and carry of a trumpet blast.

“I have seen it, others have seen it,” he said with a scowl at Beaumont.

“Many will not believe Sir Knight,” Beaumont responded stiffly, “They will…” Camilla made a guesture with her free hand cutting off further discussion.

“If a host of knights rides out to crush me then I will have to hope they crush a few of the undead while they are about it,” Camilla responded harshly. It would be typical that they lords of Aquitane had ignored her warnings and the obvious signs of the undead only to ride out when their precious Knightly honor was tweaked.

“Contessa I..”

“Enough Beaumont,” Camilla said wearily. It was the first time she had used his name without a Sir before it and it obviously shocked him. His cheeks colored in she knew not what and he fell silent. Reaching into a leather satchel she withdrew a map of rolled parchment and spread it out on one of the empty crates. Each battle they had fought with the undead was marked with a charcoal X. At first they appeared to be randomly scattered over northern Aquitaine, but as she thought about it over night Camilla had changed her mind about that.

“I think we are finally getting somewhere,” she told the men, who looked puzzled at the confidence in her voice.

“We have, or at least I have, long believed that the undead are searching for something,” she began.

“Afterall, why spread out like this in small groups, why not use a large force and crush those who oppose them?” she continued.

“Because they are not strong enough,” Beaumont interjected stubbornly and predictabley. Camilla fixed him with an exasperated look.

“If you tally up the dead we have destroyed over the past three months, its easily over a thousand,” Camilla pointed out with a touch of acid to her voice.

“More than enough to overrun most small towns and hamlets, even some of the smaller castles.” Beaumont seemed about to raise another object but Matis forestalled him.

“And you said we are finally getting somewhere? Have you puzzled out what they are after?” he asked, puffing at his pipe. Camilla nodded and drew out a stick of charcoal.

“Not what they are looking for no but if you look at when we encountered these forces…” she started at the most recent encounter and drew a line back through earlier ones, then repeated the process with each of the recent engagements. The lines converged close to the edge of the forest of Chalons, on the border of Aquitaine.

“Thats where the bastard is,” Leforic grunted.

“I think it must be at least close to wherever sorcerer or fiend is lairing,” Camilla agreed, it was a testament to her acting skill that her voice didn’t quaver with raise. Whatever monster had been responsible for Cydric’s death. She rolled up the map and tucked it back into its leather case.

“I want everyone fed and on the road in an hour, we will have to back track post Quori Tre, then take the Rue de Magiste north until we lose it at Carasae,” she ordered. It was a long ride, but after three months she felt like she was finally riding towards something, rather than away from it.

~GRAY CELLS~ (Spy/Operative RP) (18+)(M or F)

God I love Burn Notice so much...

Via Stellarum

The hatch tore from the dropship with a screech of tortured metal, that might have come from some ancient depiction of hell. The sudden sucking rip of the outside air tore one of the sergeants out through the breach, his wildly flailing arms vanishing into the darkness. Everyone 121st Volunteers was screaming. Many were also puking. Kyra managed to keep herself out of the second category only by virtue of herculean will power and having not eaten anything in longer than she cared to remember.

The dropship hurtled downwards in a freefall that pushed Kyra back into her uncomfortable seat. That was actually a good sign because it meant that the cheaply built space to surface craft was still underpowered, which gave it at least some chance of not being a coffin for its reluctant cargo. Despite the name the 121st were anything but volunteers. Almost to a person they were revolutionaries, criminals, or in Kyra’s case, other undesirables who had been given a choice of enlisting or serving a prison term that started at life and ended at a considerable shorter, if not preferable sentence.

The emergency lights flickered on and off like strobes giving her brief glimpses of the terrified faces of her fellow recruits. She wondered what her own face looked like, blonde haircut to a military buzz, blue eyes wide with terror, fine features draw back into a rictus of horror that made her face hurt. She had accepted that death was a likely outcome of this mission, but in fairness she had expected to die plowing into the surface of Kyzon. The sudden flicker of a plasmabolt bathed the cabin in painful blue light, the near miss reminding her that she might die even sooner than that.

“We have to get out of here!” the conscript beside her shrieked as he ripped at his restraint harness. A massive crash shook the ship and something flashed through the man, transforming him from screaming recruit to a pile of ruined meat that sprayed arterial blood over Kyra as she squeezed her eyes shut. A better constructed vehicle would have been torn apart by a hit like that but the lander, little more than a thin steel box with for drive motors, was flimsy enough that the rounds punched right through it.

The kick of the landing thrusters slammed the deck into Kyra without warning, only three of the four engines managed to fire and the resulting misalignment pitched the lander end over end. The world kaleidoscoped in a cacophony of screams, rending metal and clattering equipment before a colossal boom snapped Kyra back in her seat. The emergency lights flickered once and died, plunging the interior of the ship into silence and blackness broken only by the drumming of distant gunfire and the sobs of wounded and dying conscripts. It took Kyra a long moment to realise that she was still alive, vertigo assailed her as she realized she was hanging upside down. The dropship had turned turtle in its frenetic tumble and come to rest on its back. Gingerly she reached down to her belt, relieved to find all of her limbs were still attached, and drew the short cutting bar from her belt. Lifting it to her shoulder she sawed at the harness that held her, feeling the woven plastic fibers begin to part. She didn't dare power up the cutting bar, as her hands were shaking so badly she was likely to cut herself. After a few stroke the harness gave way and she dropped to the ground with a painful crash. Enough light was spilling in through the gaping wound in the side of the ship that she could find her way out. Crawling on her hands and knees she collapsed to the ground outside the wrecked ship. Taking her first breaths on a new world.

Dogs of War: Old World Mercenaries

“Is he touched?” Camilla asked bluntly. Beaumont looked shocked but Matis rewarded the laconic response with a snort of amusement. Several of the nearby peasants gasped and some went so far as to fall to their knees muttering prayers.

“Contessa, he has...he has tasted of the Grail, yet to say such a thing…” Beamont trailed off. Both he and his companions looked deeply troubled, torn between what they saw as a living embodiment of Knighthood and what was at best madness and at worst a lie.

“Sir Knight I am no enchantress, fey or otherwise,” Camilla protested quickly. Talk of sorcery made her nervous, it would make anyone who had spent time in the Empire nervous. She was glad that Matis knew her well enough to know that she had as little to do with the arcane as she did with the Imperial Family.

“Talking like that is a good way to get someone burned at the stake,” Camilla added a touch tartily.

“I believe our less educated cousins in Brettonia prefer drowning,” Matis chimed in unnecessarily. Camilla could feel the smirk behind the words without turning her head. She bent down to push the knights sword down but instead he waited till she touched the hilt of the weapon, then reversed it and kissed the jeweled hit.

“Then I am yours to command m’lady,” he exalted. Camilla cringed back as though she had just touched hot iron. The grail knight stood, he was an impressive man, tall even by imperial standards and his armor more intricate than anything she had seen humans wear. It seemed to combine the sophistication of the elves with the sturdiness of dwarven work. There was an astonished gasp from the peasants behind her and she spun to find several of them falling to their knees.

“I’m not an enchantress! Im a….!” she trailed off, she had been about to say she was a whore from Tilea but that wouldn’t do. Suddenly something hot touched her hand and she yanked it away, looking down to see the hilt of her elven sword radiating some kind of heat. She pulled her hand away puzzled and not a little alarmed.

“In our dreams we saw that you would conceal it, even from yourself,” the Knight told her serenely.

“In time you will reveal yourself,” he went on rhapsodically. Camilla shook her head in weary defeat, she turned to face Beaumont and his knights they had guarded looks on their face, though the beginnings of awe glimmered behind a few eyes.

“I am not an enchantress,” she shouted though from the looks of thing she might as well have been shouting into a hurricane. Wearily she deflated, suddenly feeling the futility of it all.

“Make camp, get a proper watch set, I doubt any Knights will trouble us here, the Baron of Angolem is old and poor and fighting another nobleman besides, but this close to the forest I worry about the undead.”

Exasperated she stalked away to where her tent was being erected and slipped inside. She sat down on her bed roll and put her head in her hands. These people and this country were insane. If she had any sense at all she would ride off tonight and take ship for… anywhere she supposed. But what was the point of going anywhere without Cydric. The dark forces that had killed him were here, so here she would stay, until she died, or they were utterly destoyed.

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

Rene sucked in his breath, at the suggestion. Zatis was something of a special case in the sector, though there were other places in the Stellar Empire where making concessions was easier than crushing a planet. Sometimes the only thing that would stop the locals from shooting at each other was bringing in Imperial troops for them to shoot at. Bowie had been born on Zatis, or so he claimed, and if half the stories were true it was no place he wanted to take Solae. Rene opened his mouth to object but then closed it. Solae wasn’t a fool, even if she sometimes tended to underestimate risks, she wouldn’t suggest Zatis lightly. It had a PEA that was at least theoretically operational. They had no way to know what if anything the Duke had done, but it was a fair bet that he had people there, an Imperial Intelligence presence would be too much to ignore, but if nothing else the locals wouldn’t be in the Dukes pocket.

“Mia are there any records of who the PEA operator on Zatis is,” Rene asked.

“Unknown…,” Mia purred, as though it were some sexual secret she was looking forward to exploring. Rene sighed in slight irritation.

“Mia can you access the data dump from either of those two Freighters, do they have any information on the conditions on Zatis?” he asked.

“Neither vessel has touched at Zatis in the past year Sir Rene,” Mia informed him. Of course they hadn’t because no sane merchant would go to such a place, and if they did, they would certainly scrub the data from their automated systems. No sane person would go there. The thought lingered in his mind, perhaps this course was so unpredictable that it actually became an advantage.

Rene tried to juggle the different factors in his mind but he knew that it was an almost impossible task. There were too many factors, too much was unknown to allow him to do anything other than guess. At least this had the virtue of being a plan, a definite goal they could work towards. During his training Rene had learned the lesson that no decision was worse than failing to make a decision and that when in doubt attack. His heart twisted at the thought of putting Solae in danger, but then she was in danger wherever she went until they were back in Imperial space, or the Rebels were crushed. Feeling the weight of the decision he opened his mouth and said:

“I aggre with Solae Zatis it, is, set course Mia,” he declared. Solae made a small adjustment to their vector to align them with the jump point.

“Wait,” Rene said, “We shouldn’t jump while those other ships are in sensor range,” he said, indicating the glowing dots on the PPI.

“Mia set course back to New Concordia,” he instructed, “We can jump a light hour away then alter course, if they are interrogated it will look like we are doubling back.” Solae confirmed the course after Rene explained his logic and the ship leaped into jumpspace and away from Panopontus, leaving a shivering oily feeling in Rene bones. Almost as soon as it began the jump ended and they were dumped back into real space. They were now almost a light day from Panopontus, whose star was just a slightly brighter dot in the void. No ship sensor was accurate enough to track a ship out this far. Solae bought them onto the new heading and Rene flashed her what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

“Well M’lady,” he said with a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth, “how many great ladies will be able to claim to have been to a place like this.” The jump drive engaged, hurling them towards Zatis and all the uncertainty. Rene reached and and squeezed Solae’s hand. Whatever happened, at least they would be together.

__________________________________

“I am beginning to dread these little chats General,” Duke Alexis Tan said with a scowl as the last of the courtiers cleared out of his self styled throne room. Since declaring himself Emperor the Duke had replaced the columns that supported the roof of the audience chamber with large columns of blue black spherite each treated with laser impingement to create tiny particles of phosphorescence within, mimicking the star scapes of important worlds in the Eastern Cross. The technique was designed to mirror the Celestial Palace on Cappela through the nods to individual worlds was a touch more egalitarian than the rendering of the Cappelian starscape that adorned the Empress’ Throne Room.

General Antigony Bhast, the Duke’s head of Intelligence and covert operations, was a practical woman who viewed such frippery as a frivolous waste of resources, though intellectually she could understand the value of a shared feeling of nationhood, her cold analytical mind tended to convert things to simple equations of force. It was hard to quantify a feeling, and so she found it hard to give them equal weight to numbers of men, ships and munitions.

“I regret that,” Bhast responded, her tone so neutral that not even a veteran political operative like Tan dould interpret it, though it's very blandness suggested something.

“I assume from the lack of an urgent message that you haven’t yet managed to capture our wayward Marquessa?” Tan asked, his tone light but the slight tightening around his eyes betraying his anger and frustration. The lack of instant communication had been a hindrance at the start of the Rebellion but it was rapidly becoming a thorn. When Imperial forces finally responded to events here, the lack of such communication would be devastating.

“We have not,” Bhast responded austerely. She lifted her forearm and entered a series of commands into a communicator around her wrist. The air around the Duke’s throne shimmered as an active cancellation field dropped into place from the outside the throne appeared a blur of color and no sound penetrated the field save for a soft buzzing of junk low frequency sound waves. Inside the pocket of silence a holographic projection sprung to life. Some were the familiar picts of Solae Falia, taken from surveillance footage and official Imperial archives. The remainder were of a tall rather striking man in grainy security cams.

“We have made some progress my Lord,” Bhast said, touching a key. A series of of new images flashed up. One was a post recruitment ID photo taken from a Marine Corp medical file. Another was a younger version showing the same man at a glittering gala with a woman on his arm.

“Our mystery gunman revealed,” the Duke said, leaning forward with interest that banished his former pique.

“One Rene Quentain, a private in the Imperial Marines,” Bhast agreed, then quirked a finger to enlarge the more glamorous image.

“As you know it is common for those enlisting in the marines to adopt false names, normally this to cover some petty crime, or escape some trouble on their homeworlds. In this case it's a little more impressive..”

“This isnt the Du Quentain who murdered a handmaiden is it?” Tan asked, enough of an Imperial aristocrat to be shocked by the scandal of it.

“The very same,” Bhast responded dryly.

“What are the odds of him ending up with her? It can’t be just chance can it? Some kind of deep cover imperial intelligence?” Tan asked, scowling at his intelligence chief.

“Something dosen’t add up,” Bhast agreed.

“If he is some kind of deep cover Imperial agent, why use something so close to his real name, there were some rumors about spies on New Concordia but as best I can tell he was assigned to a battery in the middle of nowhere. Hardly prime intelligence gathering duty.”

Tan glowered at the photos for a long moment trying to puzzle out what could have bought a disgraced former aristocrat and the most important noblewoman in the sector together.

“Reach out to our contacts on Zatis, see what you can find out….”

Penny's Interests

Bump

Dogs of War: Old World Mercenaries

“If you give up the peasants they will let us depart,” Beaumont began but Camilla held up her hand to forestall him.

“We aren’t giving up people who have sworn fealty to me to be executed or enslaved,” she said with a steely undertone to her voice. Below them the score of knights were forming up in a loose semicircle, though if they expected to charge the hilltop, they would find that riding uphill into fortifications was an expensive proposition. Sir Guy was shaking his fist and yelling as he took an inferior horse from one of the squires who straggled at the back of the knights line. Knowing what she did of Brettonian horses, she had just cost the knight a princely sum by killing his horse.

“Zey cannot hope to take us,” Matis said contemptuously, hefting his own pair of pistols, good for two Knights from what Camilla knew of his shooting. In the Empire it was the infantry who were superior, their were Knightly orders as good or nearly so as the Brettonians but no knight could hope to stand against a formation of halbiders and handgunners. Matis had the faith of an Imperial, which might be misplaced in this half trained band of peasants.

“He wont need to,” Beaumont replied stiffly, gesturing to a pair of squires racing away down the road.

“He is sending for more men, and the local lords will support him to put down your little peasant band,” Beaumont explained patiently.

“By noon he will have enough men to invest us and starve us out.” Camilla saw fear flicker over the faces of the listening peasant but she gave them a confident smile. Spending years in the company of mercenaries and armies had taught her that a confident commander went along way.

“Well I don’t think we need to keep him waiting that long…”
Camilla and her party burst from the ruins in a sudden gallop, the difference between Beaumont’s warhorse and her Arabian as compared to the pack horses and nags the peasants were riding was instantly apparent as the group began to straggle. Most of the peasants could only cling to their horses, doing well to merely hold on. They thundered down the reverse side of the slope and onto the road opposite the semicircle of hostile knights. Guy let out a warcry and the knights thundered after the fugitives, warhorses kicking up great gouts of the muddy roadway as they eagerly sprang forward. The twenty knights lowered their lances as they spurred onwards. Camilla felt her heart leap into ther throat, there was no way her disheveled party would last beyond the first impact of the lances, and there was no way the peasant nags could outdistance trained steeds. The screaming peasants obviously came to the same realisation.

Guy and his men raced past the hill, their visors down but their faces doubtlessly split in grins of triumph. Afterall, no peasant rabble could hope to stand against the fabled Brettonian cavalry. A horn rang out with a sudden shattering blast. Camilla wheeled her horse and pulled both her pistols from the silken sash around her waist. The knights charging wavered slightly at the unexpexted sound but in their armor couldn’t pivot enough to see what was happening. A knot of knights, Beaumonts companions who had not ridden to the early parley, raced down the slope and into the rear of Guy’s men, the downslope and the hesitation at the horn blast allowing them to close the distance. The battered veterans struck with their unadorned lances of new cut wood. Several of the enemy were pitched forward over their saddle bows in the opening seconds of the fight. Horses screamed and lances shattered to pulpy ruin.

“Charge!” Camilla shouted spurring her horse back into the mass of clashing steel and shouting men. Beaumont raced past her towards Guy. The enemy knight had only a moment to react but with the skill long training his shield came up in time. While a normal lance might have shattered the green wood of Beaumont’s weapon bent like a bowstave and then straightened, pitching Guy from saddle in a flash of flying mail. Camilla shot one of the Knight’s horses out from under him and spilled a second from the saddle with her remaining pistol.

“Back!” a big knight carrying a banner draped lance yelled. The knights loyal to sir Guy wheeled and raced back down the road. A straggler was punched off his horse by a pistol shot, a bright flash of arterial blood marking where Matis’ shot had shattered his neck. Once, Camilla might have regretted the needless loss of life, but since Cydric’s death, it was hard to care about much of anything. She slowed her horse with a gentle pressure of the heels, he was trained to be used by a mounted archer, but it was easy enough to adapt him to a pitsoler’s tactics. The horse obeyed instantly and subsided to a trot. Most of the peasants behind her hadn’t pushed their horses back into the skirmish, which was a good thing because they would have been butchered by men in mail. As it was the casualty count was low, one of Beaumont’s knights was nursing a sprained wrist, another had been thrown from his horse and had broken an arm. Among Guy’s men the tool was hire, three men lay dead on the ground, two killed by the knights flanking attack and the one Matis had shot. Another trio of men seemed to be alive but stunned, knocked from their horses in one way or another. To Camilla’s considerble suprise, the man she had shot in the chest was among this number, a great concavity in his breasplate where the ball had struck, but none the less still alive. Of the squires who had accompanied them there was no sign

Guy was pulling himself to his feet and grasping for the sword he had dropped. Camilla bought her horse to a stop and leveled her pistol at the striken man.

“Do you yield Sir knight?” she asked politely. Guy looked up at her and then pulled his visor back, his blue eyes gazing hatefully up at her.

“To a woman?” he sneered.

“You can yield to Sir Beaumont if you like, or I can shoot you,” she offered, though the pistol hadn’t yet been reloaded. Guy hesitated and gave up the attempt to find his sword.

“Will the bodies of my companions be respected?” he asked bitterly. Camilla nodded solemly.

“Yes,” Camilla responded, “though I suggest you have them burned or beheaded if you cannot get them back to your castle before dark.” Guy sighed and removed his helmet.

“Then I yield,” he said sullenly, making certain to look at Beaumont when he said it.

“Will you ransom me?” he asked the other knight. Beaumont opened his mouth but Camilla cut him off with a curt gesture.

“You are free to go, provided you swear not to harass me or my followers,” she told him, “otherwise I will accept your word of honor to return with a thousand gold florins.”

Guy looked at them incredulously.

“We are not your enemy Sir, we are merely trying to destroy the undead that plague this land,” Camilla told him. Guy spat into the ground.

“So long as you harbor run away serfs you are the enemy of every Knight of the Realm. You cannot be allowed to roam about fermenting rebellion,” Guy snapped. Beaumont looked decidedly uncomfortable at his words but opted to say nothing.

“Shall I take it you will be returning with a thousand gold florins then?” Camilla asked. Guy ground his teeth, a sum like that was a significant portion of the rent of even a great estate. It would all but beggar even a rich knight.

“Very well, you have my vow that I will not raise arms against you,” he growled. Camilla lowered her pistol.

“Then I suppose you are free to go Sir Knight,” she said. One of the peasants cleared his throat, a sandy haired man clearly uncomfortable speaking those he percived as his betters.

“Ummm M’lady, should we take the weapons and armor? We could use the steel,” he asked differentially. Guy’s face turned purple with rage and Beaumont stiffened, affronted by the very suggestion.

“No Jaq,” Camilla said, “these men aren’t truly our foes, their weapons and armor will go to their families.” How she would have felt if some of her own people had been killed she couldn't say, but it was bad enough that a group of knights had been humiliated by her little band. Luckily most of the glory for the exploit would land on Beaumont, if peasants along had beaten the knights she could probably look forward to every noble from here to Courrne hunting for her. Guy still bristled but at least it didn’t appear that he was about to suffer a bout of apoplexy. She turned her back on him.

“M’lady, what about the horses,” Jaq asked. Camilla was about to ask what he meant when it dawned on her. Beaumount groaned in disgust. Camilla who had eaten horse at the siege of Prag and at numerous shady taverns throughout the Empire bridged the gap between the peasants desire for meat and the nobles disgust for it.

“Leave it Jaq,” she said wearily, as she nudged her horse into a walk, “we don’t have time to butcher them and I strongly suspect that Sir Guy’s friends will be back here with whatever forces they can gather before noon.”

“Form up!” Leofric bellowed and the unmounted peasants lopped down from the hilltop carrying bagage to drape over the pack horses which had been pressed into service as improvised cavalry mounts. There were no spare mounts for Guy and wouldn’t have been given one if Camilla had one to hand. Within a surprisingly short amount of time the small force was on the road, picking its way north towards the Forest of Chalons.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Junebug glanced around the strange room, regardless of its original intent it certainly served their purposes well. The walls provided perfect cover and the profusion of them meant that grenade blasts and other explosives would be of limited use. Whatever this vessel was, it was certainly no Terran treasury ship, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. Alien technology, particularly alien technology this divergent from the galactic norm, was valuable, but there were only a few buyers for it and you had to be careful how you doled it out, lest a Terran warship arrive and seize the whole thing.

It did mean the Canek was going to be very disappointed if and when he managed to fight his way back here. He certainly wasn’t going to get the quick cash turn around he had wanted to start his mercenary company which meant getting the Highlander fixed was still going to be a problem. A problem if they lived anyway.

“Well I can imagine better circumstances to visit an alien sex dungeon,” Sayeed observed wryly. Neil and Saxon both snorted laughter and even Taya smiled.

“We aren’t going to call it that are we?” she asked incredulously. Junebug checked the load on her stolen weapon. It held nearly a hundred rounds, probably originally intended as a squad support weapon. Raising it to her shoulder she peered through its iron sights tracking the length of the barrel with her eyes. By now the sound of firing from outside had died away, meaning that either Canek had been destroyed or his men had pulled back out of effective range. Neither of those boded very well for the four trapped mercenaries. Momentarily Junebug was back on the freighter where she had earned her nom-de-guerre, running through the hallways with an empty rifle and a bloody bayonet, hacking into the neck of a federal conscript with a powered cutting bar.

“Junebug?” Taya asked in a tone which suggested it wasn’t the first time. She blinked her eyes, skin prickling as she shook her head to clear it.

“Right,” she interjected, giving herself a moment to gather her thoughts, “Here is what we will do.”

It took the enemy nearly an hour to find them. Neil and Saxon had time to do a little scavenging, but beyond tools that had been used to partially disassemble sections of the ship there was little enough to find. They were just dragging in a box of welding rods when yells and gunfire announced that they had finally been spotted. Saxon let out a roar and ripped off a burst with his integrated cannon before the man and the Hex dived through the door and slammed it shut. Without power there was no way to lock it. Sayeeda lay prone on a ledge halfway to the back of the room. There was enough of a lip to allow her to rest her stolen weapon without use of a bipod.

Neil and Saxon just managed to take cover behind the nearest wall when the door jerked open and a pair of grenades sailed in. They detonated with a shocking actinic that was instantly stunning to anyone in the area, sending sparks and electrical discharge crawling over all the nearby surfaces. Whether Neil or Saxon were effected Sayeeda couldn’t say, but her combat helmet blanked the discharge easily, throwing up a wire frame approximation of what was going on, synthesized from the thermal and millimetric radar displays. Three figures rushed through the door, guns chattering as they sought to overwhelm the defenders. Sayeeda dropped all three with careful bursts. To her annoyance the weapons feed was too fast to allow for single shots but by careful trigger control she kept each burst to two or three rounds. The wireframe’s slumped to the ground as more figures fired from the cover of the door, spraying the interior of the room with bullets. Sayeeda fired twice more and then ducked back as the gunmen at the door tracked towards her muzzle flash. Neil and Saxon popped up and cut down another pair of gunmen who had been wrong footed by the move. Then Saxon leaped the wall, seized the door and slammed it shut in the faces of the shocked survivors. Taya jumped forward with a heavy industrial rivet gun and stapled the door to the wall, freezing it in place, at least until the attackers could organize a real breaching team.

There was a great deal of pounding on the door and some gunfire, but they weren’t able to penetrated it. Junebug slipped down and examined the weapons and gear that the attackers had carried, gratefully accepting a second rifle and a bandolier of ammunition to supplement her own depleted gun. Taya looked vaugely sick as Junebug and Neil quickly and effectively stripped the dead. Hearing a crackle Junebug pulled an earpiece from the ear of one of the corpses.

“... get in there and kill the bastards!” someone was shouting over the radio. Junebug’s helmet AI matched the frequency for her automatically.

“This is Captin Cyckali commanding the intrusion team in this vessel,” she declared formerly.

“We’d like to talk terms with whomever is in charge of this shit show.”

Priest & Hawthorne Investigations - A Modern Fantasy Adventure!

POKE!

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

Tychon blushed furiously at Mia’s tone and shook his head mutely. Rene supposed it was possible that one eventually got used to Mia, but he certainly hadn’t as yet. The Hydralics groaned as the ramp was extended and Rene stood and clasped the fisherman forearm to forearm.

“I hope we meet again,” he said honestly. Solae rose from the controls for a moment and murmured her farewell to Tychon and then Rene walked him to the landing ramp, the air outside was biting with ozone roiled from the thrusters but if it bothered Tychon he gave no sign of it. Rene paused for a moment, and raised his hand in farewell, and then touched the control that began raise the ramp. Tychon turned and shouted something, but it was lost over the sound of the Bonaventure.

A sudden beeping came from the cabin and Rene swiviled his head to see what was going on, before he could however Mia’s voice interrupted him.

“There are several aircraft lifting from the local air field,” the computer explained with the sensual relish of a debutant announcing that her parents wouldn’t be home for several hours. The sensors on the Bonaventure were not Fleet quality, but even the most rundwon tramp needed to be able to chart interstellar space and so they were more than enough to pick up a couple of jumpers lifting in response to an unexpected starship launch. Rene swore and turned to glance through the narrowing aperture but Tychon was already trotting away toward the treeline, plenty far enough that they could light the thrusters.

Ducking back through the companionway Rene clambered into his seat beside Solae and strapped himself in. The sensor board registered the contacts almost two miles away, almost precisely in the center of San Roayo. It was very unlikely that they were armed, and even less likely they would fire on the vessel without knowing to whom it belonged but there was no percentage in waiting around for what, at best, would be an awkward discussion. Solae waited till his buckle clicked and he nodded to her, letting her know Tychon was clear, before she lit all six thrusters and they rocketed skyward, drawing enough Gs to squeeze them both against their seats. The ship rocked and buffeted as it sped up through the atmosphere, leaving the slow moving aircraft far behind. There would be logs of the encounter of course, but at the very worse they would be identified as an interloping freighter, dozens or hundreds of which plied this area of space.

The atmosphere peeled back like a veil and suddenly they were faced with the dark backdrop of space. Behind the Bonaventure streams of vapor trailed like a comet’s tail as the last of the water vapour and atmospheric material burned away. The sensor switched seamlessly from their atmospheric mode to their stellar configuration and Rene’s display a three dimensional view of space centered on Panopontus sprang to life. A trio of small bright dots trailed notations. One was BVT, the computer designation for the Bonaventure, the others were labeled COS and CAP. Rene touched each dot and expanded the names. The transponders identified the as the City of Saint Lawrence and the Cappadocia, both unremarkable freighters of unremarkable registry. There were no warships or suspicious vessels on the screen. Rene leaned back allowing himself to feel safe for the first moment since they had dropped out of jump space days before.

“Looks like we are clear,” he breathed swiveling his chair to smile at Solae, his face transfigured with relief.

“So what is our next move?” he asked before throwing his arms around Solae and kissing her in relieved delight.