Penny

Via Stellarum

The western sky had begun to lighten as the surviving conscripts made their way towards their objective. The ecological disaster around them grew starker with the extra sunlight, the landscape must once have been a forest but the changes that wide scale mining had wrought had killed all but the hardiest trees, leaving only dead fungus encrusted tree boles reaching towards the sky. Some trees, those hardiest and best adapted to the new conditions still sprouted leaves, but they were twisted and unwholesome looking, as though they had passed too close to a flame and begun to curl up in the face of the heat. The landscape itself had suffered as atrophied roots could no longer combat the vicious downpours that came each rainy season. Long gulleys were cut back to the bedrock where rain swept debris and detritus into pockets in the rock substrate, piling up impressive conglomerations of dead wood and small rocks.

Going was slow as the platoon slid down the sides of the erosion cut trenches and climbed up the other side. The loose soil was often to pliant to provide much in the way of hand holds and they frequently had to divert along the dry watercourses to find a place where the ascent was easier. Kyra was glad that they hadn’t landed during the rainy season as she was sure progress would have been completely impossible. Even with the suppressor chip in her neck she could feel the ambient mixture of fear and excitement. Each time a distant explosion shook dust from the trees she could feel a momentary spike of fear and then a trough of relief. The gunfire seemed more sporadic and less intense than it had during the landing, perhaps because the heavy guns that had been firing at the drop ships were now silent. What rifle fire they did hear was distant, and uncertain in its direction given the broken nature of the landscape.

They moved in a loose skirmish line that buched and expanded as the terrain demaded. Kyra stayed close to Edwin on the right end of the line while Reyes commanded they left. She didn’t know if the formation offered any advantage other than to keep them from bunching together where an artillery shell or machine gun burst could cut them all down, but truthfully she didn’t much care. After an hour or so her only focus became the defile ahead of her and she focused only on crossing each of the jagged cuts in the earth.

When Edwin’s hand fell on her shoulder she started and looked up for the first time in hours. They had reached a small ridgeline covered with shorty scrubby bushes with pale blue leaves. The landscape on the other side of the ridge was markedly different, though no less depressing. Instead of the knife cuts and tree stumps there was a flat rocky plain Kyra was momentarily surprised to see such a difference in terrain but then realised what had happened. Heavy earth movers had scraped the ground bare, bulldozing the top soil into the valleys. Now she knew what to look for she could see the lines of discolored, vaguely purplish earth, where the spoil had been sprayed with chemical plasticizer to turn it into a kind of poor man's concrete, presumably to prevent it from being swept away by the rains. Perhaps two hundred meters from the ridge lay a large compound. It was the size of a small town and surrounded by a thick burm of plasticized earth several meters high. Vast derricks reached into the sky from the center of the drilling station like the armatures of artificial mountains. The great rusted towers thrummed with power, the drills and pumps working ceaselessly to plumb the depths of the poisoned world. Periodically jets of flame or steam burst from outlet valves with a rush audible even from the distant ridge. A pipeline of rusted metal stretched off over the horizon, carrying whatever they were mining to its distant collection point.

Kyra tried to think back to the briefing but other than the word ‘drilling station’ didn’t remember very much. More for something to do than any real notion of what she was doing, she lifted her binoculars to her eyes and dialed up the magnification to X64. The burm was a real barrier, studded with watch towers ever thirty meters or so, spindly looking cheap constructions, with sand bagged platforms atop them. There were two large gates on the walls perpendicular to the ridge, each of which was protected by a block house. At the southern entrance an armored vehicle of some kind was parked, its turret pointed off to the south though clearly not aiming at anything in particular.

“We are supposed to capture this place?” Kyra whispered to Edwin, her quiet an instinct rendered completely unnecessary by the rumble of the heavy machinery at work at the base.

Star Crossed: The Duke's Rebellion

Rene opened his mouth to object, but an arched eyebrow from Solae was enough to quell the impulse. Obediently he touched a series of holographic key and brought up the piloting display. Like all Marines Rene had been around enough landing craft to know the basics, but his instructors had been careful to keep him away from any specialty training that might have offered him a chance to distinguish himself. The Marines might technically have been a new life, but that didn’t make them immune to the political pressures that wanted Rene to remain as inconsequential as possible. Fortunately, while the Bonaventure was an ill maintained ship, even the clunkiest tramp freighter had a sophisticated software suite, that included a training mode. The training suite allowed Rene to control the ship as an auxiliary, the computer accepting his inputs only when they didn’t clash with Solae’s.

“Ok, I have a space yard within about fifty kilometers of the main administrative complex that is cheap and nasty enough for a boat like this,” Rene said, transmitting the coordinates to Solae’s terminal. Almost at once the Bonaventure thrummed as Solae fed power to the thrusters and eased them down into the atmosphere. It was far smoother than their previous decent, Zatis not only lacked an active hurricane, it also possessed only the thinest of atmospheres. The early stages of terraforming had been begun only decades ago, and even under the best circumstances the process could take nearly a century to complete. They were descending towards the darkside of the planet and so Rene could see the soft phosphorescence of the shallow seas that teemed with genetically engineered microbial life that slowly broke down the carbon dioxide into water and oxygen and strung the spare carbon together into precursor organics and fixed harmful elements like sulfur into thin layers of rock. It was unusual that a world was settled before terraforming, as the process, particularly at the early stages, could be very energetic, but Zatis was an unusual world in many regards. Even now, its atmosphere was breathable, but so thin that no one could stand it for long without a respirator to concentrate oxygen. Rather than deal with the atmosphere, the denizens of that world had constructed vast domes of modular hexagonal crystal, that kept processed air under pressure. Without the central direction of the Empire to give it form, the process had been haphazard and the domes bulged and twisted like cancerous growths, wherever this entrepreneur or that had tried to add a little extra space. The panels were originally clear but grit blown in the air had tarnished the majority of the panels, particularly those in the poorer areas and they were frequently all but opaque for lack of maintenance.

Air traffic buzzed through all levels of the stratosphere as they descended towards the largest of the domed cities. Fortunately the landing fee Rene had agreed to pay at the space yard covered access to local navigational aids which mapped the progress of all the aircraft. Without roads, or other surface transport, all intercourse between the cities had to be conducted via aircraft, of which there were a dizzying array. Rene didn't doubt that the small air cars and jets had much more to worry about from the freighter and its blazing plasma thrusters then they did from the few tons of an aircraft colliding with them, but he would just as soon not put that belief to the test, particularly not when they were trying to be inconspicuous.

Solae guided them down towards the Lysin Yard, the name of the landing area they had rented a space from. In order to avoid opening the domes, the space yards clustered around the edge of the irregular domes, like the white of an egg with a particularly massive yoke, or perhaps the red inflammation ringing a boil that was about to burst. Solae, whose prior experience had been under much more adverse circumstances, bought them in with hardly a wobble. Rene mirrored her action on his own console, though his corrections were too quick and too large for the mass of the ship and the program frequently canceled his maneuvers. As they got closer to the ground he fought down his frustration and tried to think of it more like shooting, calming his breathing and deliberately waiting an extra few heartbeats before making corrections. This seemed to improve his performance, but the ship still took Solae’s commands the vast majority of the time. He was so engrossed in the exercise that when the landing skids settled onto the concrete it came as something of a surprise.

Lysin Yard was perhaps ten acres of open concrete, dotted with outbuildings and maintenance shops. The concrete itself was burned and scarred from thousands of starship landings,those areas that were not charred black, shone with an opalescence of spilled hydrocarbons. Unhealthy vapors rose from the shimmering spills in a way that wouldn’t have happened in a true atmosphere. Two other ships shared the landing space with them. Both were larger the the Bonaventure but were equally dilapidated. One of the behemoths had a large section of hull plating removed, exposing her innards, though no repairmen currently seemed to be attending the ship. The other was being unloaded by a team of men in respirators to allow them to breath. They had formed a daisy chain and were unloading sacks of what might have been rice or flour, passing them man to man before depositing them on a big aircusion truck for eventual transhipment. Both ships were attached to a large corrugated iron building that abutted the side of the dome by long umbilicals of rubberized white fabric on steel rings. The material might once have been white, but was so stained and so frequently patched that it resembled disruptive camouflage. The umbilicals tethered to the airlocks of the ships, allowing passengers and crew to go back and forth to dome without having to don respirators.

“Well, on the plus side, it seems vanishingly unlikely anyone is here to arrest us,” Rene joked as he surveyed the situation. While it was possible that men could be waiting inside, it seemed unlikely that even professional actors could continue to unload the freighter with the bored nonchalance the ground crew was managing if that kind of excitement were in the offing. A man in a protective suit emerged from the terminal building and shouted something at one of the men unloading sacks. The laborer looked up, nodded and then grabbed a second man who seemed to be taking a break. Together they began to extend a third umbilical, manhandling it towards the Bonaventure’s forward airlock.

“Well, time to meet the locals…”

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Junebug stepped into the hold and opened her mouth an instant before Indra all but leaped into her arms. Instinctively she caught the woman around the waist with one arm, keeping the other free for a weapon for the half second it took her mind to analyze the situation and report that there were no threats. Saxon stood coiled in his odd posture, looking sleek and powerful without his almost ever present Awkwardly she bought her other hand up and supported the other woman, one arm around her shoulders the other looped under her knees while Indra turned and buried her face in Sayeeda’s shoulder. She wasn’t particularly heavy and her body was soft against Sayeeda’s body, which, like Saxon was unusually bereft of armor, instead covered with a tank top with the winged knife of the Terran Marines, and a pair of khaki shorts.

Although she was clean, Junebug still looked an almost shocking contrast to Indra. Patches of skin at her shoulders and over her hips were rubbed raw from grit and the weight of her ceramic armor during the grueling march through the desert. Her hands were scratched from scrambling over rocks and her right hand bore a patch of synthetic spray seal where careless contact against a hot weapon had burned her. Numerous small scratches ran over her hands and up her arms where she had been cut on rocks, or injured in the firefight at the mesa. Where Indra was soft and sensual, Sayeeda was hard, wiry muscles coiled over her frame, allowing her to support the noblewoman without difficulty.

“No need to panic,” Sayeeda said awkwardly, “Nothing is going to hurt you while you are on this ship.” That might or might not be true. If Sven discovered she was here and stormed the ship, there might be little they could do to prevent it, but there seemed little point in sharing that with the panicked woman Indra clung to her looking unconvinced. Sayeeda gave her what she hoped was a reassuring smile and then gently disentangled herself, setting the woman back on the deck. Indra gave her a look, her lips curving up into a smile of appraisal that Junebug had seen before, though not in this exact situation.

“I had an idea,” she explained to Neil, moving back to the business that had originally bought her to the hold. Moving past the noblewoman she took her helmet from the rack she had stowed it in and set it on the floor, then opened a refrigerated crate that hissed cold white vapor into the air. She drew forth three bottles of Terran beer, leftovers from the supplies the commandos had bought aboard, and tossed one to Neil then passed a second to Indra who looked mildly perplexed. Taking a seat on an ammunition crate she struck the cap off by driving it down against the metal edge of the crate with a crisp pop, the motion had the casual ease of long practice.

“Aid, squad briefing, project a map of the star port,” she commanded before draining half of the beer in a single long swallow. It was ice cold, and pure ambrosia after the heat and thirst of the previous days. A hologram sprung into existence above the helmet, showing a picture of the dusty plate of sandstone on which they and several other ships currently rested. The footage was a composite, compiled by Lony from a variety of systems, mostly security camera feeds, that Taya had gained access to since their arrival. Computer finishing gave it the crisp accuracy of a high resolution satellite photo, right down to the various booths and stalls selling junk along the canyon walls.

“According to Taya these are the freighters Middle Finger and Lambruka,” she said. Two of the freighters, both larger than the highlander, brightened on the display and the names appeared beside them. The Middle Finger was nearly twice the size of their own vessel, though considerably older.

“Both of these ships pretty much make the run between Hahn and Cyloneika, bringing manufactured goods in exchange for loot that pirates sell here,” she explained. Indra brightened immediately at that news.

“So we can just take one of them home?” she asked eagerly. Neil frowned but Junebug was already shaking her head.

“Unfortunately both these ships are already being watched Sven’s men,” she explained. It was an obvious move and one Sven would not have failed to anticipate. He had probably checked in or surveilled most ships, in all likelihood it was only the fact that he knew first hand that the Highlander was in no condition to leave, that had kept Indra safe this long.

“I was thinking that maybe we could build some kind of device that would be able to attach itself to one of the ships, probably in orbit, that can either carry our message to Cylonekia, or maybe disable the ship long enough that we could fly the Highlander up and dock with it…”

Neil sucked in a shocked breath at the suggestion though Indra merely looked confused.

“You want to try to use of those ships to carry the Highlander through the RIP?” he asked, appearing genuinely horrified.

“Junebug you know… I mean… the RIP engines aren't calibrated to add another ships worth of mass to the jump profile. Sayeeda finished her beer and drew another from the ice chest, spreading her arms in an equivocal gesture.

“I’m just spitballing,” she told him honestly, “you’re the engineer afterall.”