"Its a mess part of ventral A carried away, ripped through some of the mizzen on B before the lines snubbed it. Might be best to take the A ring of the sail plan and re-rig with B. I think we can get 90 percent efficiency within about an hour that way, vs eight hours to put ventral A to rights," Sabatine replied. Kaiden said something to her but her mind had wandered back to the engagement they had just survived.

"Sorry, sorry sir what was that?" she asked.

"I said go ahead and re-rig, hours count here, but obviously your mind was somewhere else?" he asked. Sabatine tried to look at Kaiden, the motion momentarily breaking the contact of their helmets, but all she could see was the mirrored reflection of the matrix in his visor. She was wrung out, as much by adrenaline as by the short action they had just fought.

"I keep thinking about that cruiser, I mean she is stuck on the ground, it will take three days at least for her crew to lift her," she explained, replaying the images of Graving's gunnery display in her mind, seeing the fittings and the outriggers struts burn under the hammering of plasma.

"We crippled her but she isn't finished, a couple weeks and she will be back in action. And while we are at it... I mean I shouldn't be saying this but what was with the Captain, he just froze up, never known him to suffer that badly from extractions, and that was only a few hours in the matrix." She thought back to the strange conversation she had shared with Commodore Welkins the night before they had lifted. The memory of how she had acted that night embarrassed her but she swallowed it down.

"I don't know, just don't know what to think," she admitted.

He wouldn't lie and say he hadn't had similar thoughts, both on the Captain and the rig stuck there on the moon. "From the look of him, I didn't know if he'd ever been in an extraction." Kaiden relayed, shaking his head inside his helmet. "You know, I've always noticed Micha being nervous at weird times, but I chalked that up to different reasons than cowardice. I think that might be the case though, as much as I'd hate to admit it."

That didn't spell well for the ship, if this attack was the beginning of a full scale war. And there was no reason to suspect these were rogue agents acting outside any alliance chain of command.

"You're right, though, about the cruiser. It's..." He sighed. "It's our duty as Cinnabar Officers to see it doesn't rise again, regardless of the Captain's misgivings."

"What are you saying?" She asked.

"I have an idea."

---

Hours later.

"That was the most flagrant disregard of my command, my crew, and the bloody republic!" Micha screamed, his face so red Kaiden thought he was about to break out in hives. The crew that happened to be on the bridge watched silently, the tension in the air so thick it was hard to breathe. The two Lieutenants didn't shirk from Captain Micha's wrath, Kaiden fully acknowledging that it was likely earned, no matter if they did the right things. Many courts in the system could consider what they did an act of mutiny or even treason, at least out of context of the situation. "I should have you both stricken from the military, or at the very least demoted! In fact that does not sound like a poor idea in my ears. Starting a war, not only by attacking a peaceful scouting party, but engaging a foe that cannot fight on the ground!"

Micha was skipping over the space battle and tight maneuvering they had to pull off in order to destroy the cruiser, using a gambit of missiles and a faux retreat to catch the Alliance ship off guard. Through Kaiden's plan and Sabatine's brilliant ordering of the crew, they had won the day without any further damage, though it did lead to what Kaiden knew was a defining moment in one or two of their three careers, meaning he, Sabatine, and Micha.

"With all due respect sir, I don't think you quite understand the seriousness of the situation." Kaiden said coldly, piercing eyes boring into the Captain.

Micha guffawed, unable to contain his sheer amazement at the statement. "What the hell do you think I've been yelling about!?"

"The Alliance situation, sir. Not ours." The prince iterated dangerously. "Every man and woman on this vessel understood and faced the situation with bravery, Captain. None shirked their duties, save you." He could have mentioned Ensign Enrique, but he did not fall under the category of cowardice or shirking duties. Kaiden had to admit his orders had been so outrageous to the normal ear that anyone would have given pause, and the time simply did not warrant delay. Enrique was many things, but he was neither coward nor insubordinate. "Why do you think the crew went along with my and Lieutenant Hickoring's idea despite your misgivings?"

Micha ground his teeth, puffing up like a fat dog raising its hackles. He looked flummoxed, but too enraged to think clearly. Not that he'd likely have a good explanation after being given a moment to cool off. "That is it! I cannot believe I saw potential in you. Someone send a transmission to command and Commodore Welkins! I want these two detained and off my ship!" He cried. No one immediately made a move, so Micha continued. "You can count on your father hearing of this, Lieutenant."

Kaiden winced, despite his resolve that they did the right thing. Sabatine knew better than anyone that bringing up Kaiden's father was a sore subject. The Prince disliked the man at the best of times.

Sabatine felt her stomach lurch as she stood up from her station. Things were rapidly getting out of control but she didn't see a way to deescalate them that wouldn't be seen as cowardice in her own eyes if no one else, and whatever else Sabatine Hickoring was, she was no coward.

"Can I take it then sir, that you are refusing Lieutenant Caladwarden's plan to return to station and re-engage the Alliance," she spoke firmly and distinctly, despite a quivering in her bowels at the thought of what was coming. Micha's eyes, almost impossibly bulged further and his face flushed with anger. The bridge sensors would record what she was saying for posterity.

"Are you out of your mind Hickoring?!" he exploded, "It is a miracle we survived the first time, and this yahoo wants to take us back into the lions den?!" Micha was right in that it was a miracle, by an enormous stroke of good luck they had extracted at precisely the right position, any closer to the destroyers and they would have been destroyed before they could either escape into the matrix or inflict significant damage. Watching Micha's throbbing temple Sabatine hoped he might have a stroke, that would make all of this easier.

"Of course I am refusing, our duty is to get back to Herculaenum as soon as possible and report this disaster!" Micha screamed, spittle literally forming on his lips. The bridge crew and probably numerous men and women in the hallway stood silent.

"So you are refusing to engage the enemy sir," Sabatine pressed, drawing close to the knife edge that would put her and Kaiden's life on the line.

"I just said so didn't I, Boson Higgs, get your men out and set the rig for transit to Herculaenum! And I want these two taken into custody!" Still no one moved. Helenna Graving looked like she might be about to throw up and everyone else looked panicked.

"Lieutenant Micha," She began formally, "In the face of your repeated refusal to engage the enemies of the Republic in wartime I am left with but with no choice but to relieve you of command of RCS Viceroy until such time as a court martial can be convened in accordance with the Code of Military Justice." Her guts tried to crawl up her throat as she spoke.

"This is mutiny! You will swing for this Hickoring, both of you will!" Micha shouted, his eyes so wide they were completely ringed with white, "Arrest these mutineers!" An able spacer caught in the wrong place at the wrong time took a step towards Sabatine but, surprisingly, Tilda stepped in front of him, denying him the ability to pass without making a confrontation out of it. Evidently the ground was too shaky for him to risk that and perhaps he recognized the way the reporter set her body, obviously she knew a thing or two about hand to hand fighting.

"Lieutenant Caladwarden will assume command until a courtmartial can be convened," she continued, amazed at how steady her voice was under the stress.

"Bosun Higgs, Bosun's mate Klave, you will confine the captain in his quarters until that can be arranged," she directed.

"Touch me and you are mutineers too," Micha warned, backing up as the two big riggers stepped towards him.

"Don't worry lads, its me that is for the High Jump if I'm wrong," Sabatine called, but neither of the spacers showed any hesitation in seizing the screaming captain and dragging him bodily but effortlessly from the room. A silence decended over the bridge that was as absolute as one could be on the deck of a working starship.

"Excuse me," Sabatine managed before grabbing a rigging helmet from a hook and vomiting into it noisily, her entire body trembling with shock.

The Vickie jumped out of system without delay. Kaiden almost thought the crew wouldn't follow his instructions. He'd gone off the map of his reality, sitting in 'Micha's chair.' But Higgs and the rest, even Sabatine leaped to stations at his call. The ship had roared internally before bursting out of their current location.

"Hickoring, give Graving 5 degrees left of the current location of the moon from our position." Kaiden snapped.

"Done!" A female voice called. Kaiden swiveled his head to his right and saw Tilda amongst the men, shapely legs crossed on a chair and professional, albeit sly look in her eyes. Kaiden didn't have the time to pay too much attention to it and barked again.

"Graving, I want you to fire half out silos at that location, now!"

"Yes sir!" The Gunner called after just a moments hesitation. Even in such a large ship, the firing of the missiles reverberated through the steel like someone was whacking a wooden bat against an armored car. Sabatine barked orders at the spacers but the Prince didn't hear over the din of his own commands. Kaiden could feel the confusion in the air, but his eyes remained steely.

"Locate twenty degrees from the moon and jump! Now!" He cried, not missing a beat. "Graving I need those missiles reloaded. All hands on the task. Tilda, keep us monitored on the enemy locations. I don't want AFS K-21 our of sight." Tilda moved like a machine, already transfiguring onto the Destroyer's location.

The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. Kaiden had never seen such discipline in the crew, though he'd always known they were capable of it. If every ship was like the Vickie, the Alliance wouldn't stand a chance. The Halifax was spinning desperately trying to realign itself to face the Vickie's sudden reappearance. The ship flew far too close to the moon for any older officer's liking. Once the ship was out of the jump, the Vickie once again fired at the location it fired last, only this time far closer. On the screen, the Destroyer AFS K-21 filled their vision as it continued its escape.

"I want us twenty thousand kilometers from that ship! Follow those missiles and blow that ship out of the sky!"
@Penny

Sabatine blinked the flashes of varicolored light from behind her eyes. The multiple quick transits they had undertaken where brutally jarring but they had succeeded in deploying a cone of missiles in a sixty degree arc with their focus on the Hikendorf's crater. The calculations had been run a half dozen times, correcting for gravity from the primary and the moon. Even though the math was complex, the astrogation computer had been built to solve multidimensional calculus that was orders of magnitude more complicated. The missiles accelerated to 0.6 of lightspeed over their three minute acceleration burns and then broke into three segments to spread the footprint. Each segment weighed a quarter of a ton, carrying enough potential energy to gut a battleship. The missiles were deployed sufficiently far enough from the alliance ships that they had remained out of sensor range. Lumps of iron without electronic signatures were far harder to detect than a star ship and so, by the time the alliance realized they had incoming, the missiles were only a few minutes from impact. Both the K-21 and the Halifax reacted as Kaiden had planned, they began to accelerate away from the moon, firing their plasma cannon at maximum rate. The plasma cannons were designed to nudge the missiles off their flight paths but at maximum velocity and at the sharp angles they were coming in, relative to the orginal positions of the two destroyers. Because they were inside the arcs of the missiles, even a direct hit provided minimal deflection. Sabatine had no doubt that both Alliance skippers were frantic to save their crippled cruiser. Kaiden's plan was, well to call it daring was to understate the point.

"Extracting," someone called as knives of ice drove into Sabatine's temples. The Vickie snapped into sidereal space 18,000 off the K-21 stern, a little more lateral than the plan had called for. Kaiden's course calculations had been refined with up to the minute observations in the matrix. His astrogation was good, better than Sabatine's, though both of them would have preferred Micha had handled it. The former captain had refused to even entertain the idea, threatening both of them with execution once they got back to Cinnabar. That might happen, but it was much, much more likely that they would be vaporized in the next few seconds. Sabatine's console lit up with a gunnery display, a redundancy incase the rapid in and out jumps knocked Gravling out of commission. As it happened she needn't have bothered. Helena was already swinging the targeting reticule onto the stern of the K-21. The destroyer had certainly detected them and its ventral guns were already swinging to bear on them, but because Kaiden knew the trajectory of the incoming missles, he knew what bearing K-21 had lain her guns upon. Their extraction wasn't perfect, but it still meant the destroyer had to swing its heavy guns nearly 140 degrees. A starships cannons floated on frictionless electromagnetic bearings, but the inertia of several tons of steel still meant they needed time to traverse. Graveling fired, the kick of the cannons slamming through the ship like a trip hammer as both barrels fire in close syncopation. The first bolt struck the hull of K-21 just aft of her turret, whipping the destroyer like a kicked dog. The second shot hit the turret housing itself, dishing in hull plating.

"Stand by for maneuver," Kaiden called, though the ship was already shifting, gravity altering with the thrusters. The plasma cannon slammed again and this time the K-21's plasma cannon errupted in a jet of blue white that slammed the destroyer sideways. Jets of pressurised air jetted from a dozen places, forming gyesers of ice crystals as seams started from the whipping of the impact.

"Hikendorf is firing," Ottis called. Sabatine tapped a key and remoted the midshipman's terminal onto her own. He had pulled up a plot position indicator which showed the tracks of the incoming missiles as cyan tracks well as the position of the two destroyers. Three of the missiles had been deflected by the combined gunfire but that still left 27 incoming projectiles. The cruiser itself was now firing with its ventral guns. The 20 centimeter guns were far heavier than those the destroyers mounted, but the rounds were coming in with nearly zero deflection. Even a direct hit wasn't sufficient to stop the missle segments as they slashed in.

"Dear god," Sabatine breathed as she scrolled the video back a few seconds. Dozens of men in rigging suits had been crawling over the hull of the cruiser, doubtlessly trying to fix the damage the Vickie had done in her initial assault. As a group they leaped from the ship and started to bound away across the moons surface. That probably didn't save them from the side scatter when the heavy guns cracked. Sabatine winced. The alliance spacers were her enemies, but she didn't take any pleasure in watching them broiled alive in their suits. The Vickie slammed as two more missiles launched. Both rounds were aimed at the distant Halifax which was desperately breaking to try to aid her crippled consort.

"Impact," Sabatine reported as the first missile struck. It was a hundred yards from the Hikendorf's stern, but the detonation was spectacular lifting a cloud of lunar dust that billowed out in all directions. A moment later the second round hit, this one less than twenty yards from the Hikendorf. The blast lifted the bow six feet into the air, the ship dropped into the ensuing crater, the lower gravity lessened the impact but that didn't discount the impact of several thousand tons of steel. Sabatine watched the back of the cruiser break before the billowing dust obscured her view. More missiles struck into the cloud, lighting it with flashes and roiling the dust. The Vickie's crew was cheering, those without duties having been watching on flat panel displays.

"Halifax is inserting!" Ottis yelled, raising Sabatine's opinion of the midshipman even further.

"What?" Kaiden demanded, looking up from the missile attack he was furiously plotting. Even as he spoke the dot on the PPI representing the Halifax wavered and vanished as the ship slipped into the matrix ahead of Kaiden's salvo.

"She is running," Sabatine said flatly, not quite daring to believe it. Either of the destroyers ought to have been able to handle the Vickie, even after she had crippled the K-21.

"RCN Viceroy, This is AFS K-21," a panic voice yelled over the 30 meter emergency band, "Cease fire, cease fire, we surrender!"

"They had crew dismounted, probably half at least," Sabatine surmised. She scrolled the image back and tapped a few commands into her console. A forest of carrots sprang up marking crewmen who had been engaged in the repair effort.

"Probably half the crew from both destroyers, maximum effort to free her," Sabatine concluded.

"RCn VIceroy, I repeated, we surrender, ceasefire!"

“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.

Kaiden had never tasted something so bittersweet. A grand gesture given by god on a day where he felt anything but victory. The whole of the republic would know his name as soon as they got back. Even if he said naught at all, word would get out. But the mutiny with Macha weighed heavily on everyone, and damn Kaiden was more tired in both body and soul now than ever. He did well to stand as a commander, hands behind his back and eyes primed on the men and women under him, half the eyes of the crew on him.

They needed to get back as soon as possible, but the knowledge there were sailors down there, even military men of the alliance, made him take pause. A civilian would tell him to go and aid them, but he knew he would be sternly advised to resist the temptation by any man above him in rank. And yet...

"Sir?" Sabatine asked, snapping him out of his thoughts.

Kaiden turned to her, eyes passing over Tilda who watched him like a hawk. It seemed like an hour, but he took only five seconds to truly decide.

"We're doing the quickest CSAR in the history of the republic," Kaiden announced, causing a few of the men to blink in surprise and half the crew to feel a modicum of guilt lift from them. 99% of commanders in his position would make the correct move and leave immediately. Kaiden intended to be the 1% that didn't and still succeeded. Probably one part hubris, one part merciful, but he knew in his bones that they would make it back. He didn't know how, but he did. "Enrique, Riggs, make sure we're good to approach. Harwen, prepare the cells. I want all guns on deck in five minutes, search and rescue prepped and ready."

"Is this wise, sir?" Tilda asked, a smile on her lips as the men began to run and shout. Kaiden rolled his eyes, and luckily no one heard her.

"It's not wise to ask if this is wise." He said in no uncertain terms.

Sabatine felt considerable relief when Kaiden made the decision. Leaving men to slowly suffocate beneath tons of dust would have been a grim end to the battle. It was strange how one could be at peace with being vaporized when a missile ripped through a vessel but fear to slowly choke for lack of air. It didn't hurt that the decision irritated Tilda either. With the course decided they were faced with the how. The wreck of the Hikendorf was buried by twenty meters of dust and rock. Sabatine and Savachev discussed several options before settling on the one they felt would be both fast and safe.

"Switch on!" Sabatine called across the unit push. She was wearing her rigging suit, clumsy under the light gravity. She stood in the umbilicus with three other riggers, each attached to a mast that had been swayed out above them by ships cables. The umbilicus, at maximum contraction stood above them, a three meter wall of plastic and steel. All four spacers gripped the square handle they had welded around a spare waterline. She felt the thrum of water racing along the pipe at firehose pressure. It blasted into the dirt in a muddy spray, the force of which almost lifted the four spacers in the low gravity. A second house began to gurgle and slurp, sucking up the slurry. By slow increments they dug into the dust, the umbilicus extending around them like a well casing. Danzetti hung above them on the cable, spraying the walls of the umbilicus with plasticizer as it extened, strengthing it so the weight of earth didn't crush it shut.

"How is it going?" Kaiden asked on a private channel. By now, Sabatine's world had been reduced to blindly fumbling in the muck, running her hand around the base of the umbilicus by feel to lower it another inch. A scum of plasticizer had formed on the water and gathered like dandruff on the head and shoulders of her suit.

"If I wanted mud," she gasped, breathing heavily, "I'd have joined the bloody pongos." Kaiden chuckled over the comm and might have been about to ask more, when water splashed on something metallic. Shoulder mounted lamps lit sparkling reflections from the spray as they exposed a section of hull plating.

"We are there," Sabatine replied, it took another minute or two to clear the three meter circle and secure it with the plasticizer.

"Think we should let them know we are coming?" Sabatine asked. She made a hand guesture to Danzetti who began to shimmy up the line, disappearing into the darkness above.

"Let's not give anyone a chance to be a hero," Kaiden replied. Sabatine didn't think it was too likely that spacers trapped in a wreck were likely to open fire, but she wasn't in command. A moment later Kaiden slithered down the line, a diamond saw in one hand and a pair of slung submachine guns. His beet touched the deck and he let go of the line, handing the saw off to one of the spacers. Sabatine leaned close and pressed her helmet to Kaiden's so they could talk without the radio.

"Kaiden, I don't know its a good idea for both senior officers to be involved in a breech," she said. He unslung one of the guns and passed it across to her.

"Wan't to climb back up then?" he asked, the amusement clear in his voice. She took the gun, her eye roll concealed behind the face shield of her helmet.

"Pressurizing," Savachev's voice came across the comms. Air began to pump into the umbilicus and the indicator light in Sabatine's helmet went green, indicating the air was breathable. She didn't open her helmet, breathable didn't mean pleasant, and she doubted the plasticizer would do her lungs any favors. Kaiden stepped back and made a curt gesture. The spacer flicked the saw to life and sank it into the hull plating. Sabatine felt the scream of it through her boots as the blade cut into the hull, there was a slight outrush of air, indicating that the hull section was at least still pressurized. The spacer reversed the blade, making two more cuts that dropped a triangular section of hull plating into the ship. A greenish glow of emergency lighting washed out. Sabatine stepped into the hall, falling into the ship under the low gravity.

"Entering," Sabatine reported, engaging the magnets in her boots at twenty percent strength. She shuffled forward clearing the way for Kaiden and the other armed spacers who were already coming down the line. The interior of the ship showed signs of the trauma she had undergone. Cracks and stress fractures ran through the bulkheads where the impact waves had torqued the hull. An alliance spacer came around the corner, his face discolored by a dark bruise and with an arm full of spare air bottles. His eyes widened in shock and he dropped his armful raising his hands.

"I surrender," he gasped, pressing himself back against the wall.

"I would say it was smart, but that implies you have a choice." Kaiden said, lowering his gun and pulling the man forward to get detained by the strike team behind him. He and Sabatine cleared the hallway, his right and her left. Kaiden had always felt strange in pressurized suits, but he had spent enough time in basic to keep himself going without much complaint. Howarth presented the intel they could gleam from the alliance spacer that the rest of his crew was down the hall to the right.

"Armed?" Kaiden asked.

"He says no, but..."

"Right," the prince said, leveling his firearm with Sabatine right on his heels. He didn't know why, but somehow he felt comfortable with him having his back more than any of his men, despite his trust in them. He supposed he knew her well enough to make that judgement. Ex-Lovers did not tend to get along because they found they knew the other too well. "Cover our asses, Higgs."

To his surprise, Kaiden had suspected they would have to take a few extra turns and possibly get turned around thanks to the size of the ship, but the crewman was right. A quarter of a click straight right sent them to the blast doors of a pressurized chamber that opened up to reveal a crew of seven disheveled alliance crew, along with two wounded who had shrapnel in their abdomens. One female alliance medic pulled a knife, but only so far as a honed reaction. No guns were raised, and there were none Kaiden could see.

"We surrender," the lieutenant said. He was an older man, not elderly but getting up in years. He had a black mane and beard that would suit a civilian far more, but Kaiden didn't pretend to know alliance protocol. He held his head high, unflinching from the trained guns. "Please, just help my men."

"Are there any more aboard?" Kaiden asked, stepping closer, eyes glancing at the crew. The room looked to be made for storage, hard ground and no place to sit save for locked steel crates.

"I don't know. This was all that I could find." The lieutenant remarked. His breathing was audible. Kaiden guessed he was hiding hope behind his calm facade. "Will you look through the ship?"

"We'll take your wounded." Kaiden commanded, two of his men already hustling over to gather them up. The two alliance medics helped them with the stretchers. "You send two of yours to search the ship for anyone else. If they aren't back in twenty, or if they come back with anything besides another, unarmed crewmember, this all goes south very quickly. If you attempt anything, even if you're able to take me or any of my crew hostage, my crew on deck will leave us to cold oblivion regardless of the consequences. Cooperate and you'll be unhurt."

The lieutenant calmly blinked, and then lowered his hands. "Well, you didn't need to lay it on so thick." He remarked, and sent two of the survivors to go search the remainder of the ship.

At first it seemed like there might be no further survivors. The ripping torque of the missle strike had started seams the length and breath of the Hikendorf. Most of her crew had been outside working on the repairs, killed outright or suffocated when their air bottles ran out, but enough had been inside without suits when rents suddenly appeared in the hull. Probably the only reason anyone was alive at all is because a number of the internal partitions had been closed as a reaction to damage from the previous attack. Those survivors, such as their were had been in the core of the ship, where the flexion as tons of dust had been converted to heat energy had been minimal, the way the core of a branch might survive a greenstick fracture. Sabatine helped supervise the move of Alliance spacers up and onto the commandeered mining ship. There didn’t seem to be much fight in them. That was probably to be expected. A minute ago they were facing the likelihood of a slow death by asphyxiation, RCN custody, a term in a prisoner of war camp or a prison hulk, probably seemed like a vast improvement.

“Sir, sir!” one of the prisoners called, pulling on the arm of Sabatine’s suit. How he had deduced she was an officer in a faceless sexless rigging suit she had no idea. Perhaps he was just observant of how the other RCN treated her. Danzetti lifted his submachine gun to deliver a butt stroke. Sabatine held up her hand to forestall the action, not only did she not want a random spacer brutalized, she wasn’t that confident that Danzetti knew enough about guns to have the saftey on. The last thing they needed was for him to accidentally trigger a burst that ripped them all to shreds as rounds ricochet around inside the corridor.

“What is it spacer,” she asked, not friendly but not openly hostile. The man’s name was Pollock, or Pollack judging by the faded name tape of his fleet green uniform.

“I was wondering what the chances were that I could list you know, rather than prison or whatever,” he burbled nervously. Sabatine cocked an eyebrow, a gesture that was totally invisible inside her helmet. It wasn’t unusual for crews of captured prizes to be given a chance to sign aboard the winning ship if they were short of crew, which every naval vessel was of course. Spacers didn’t typically have ideological or political loyalties and saboteurs were disincentivised by the fact that the were all, very literally, in the same boat. There just weren’t enough experienced spacers to crew the warships of the fleet and the merchant service simultaneously. He must have mistook her lack of verbal response for skepticism.

“We have a communications officer, he ran off when you…” he blurted out, finching back as the Alliance Lieutenant stepped forward with a snarl. Danzetti hit him in the face with his submachine gun. He got to hit someone and it was an officer, a banner day for the power room tech. Sabatine wasn’t shredded by an accidental discharge which pleased her also. The lieutenant staggered back, clutching a bloody nose and cursing like a spacer. Sabatine’s eyes widened as they met Kaiden’s.

“Danzetti, watch them, you Pollock, where is your comms room?” she demanded, pointing her own weapon at the spacer unintentionally. He cringed back against the bulkhead hands raised.

“One deck down on the starboard…” but Sabatine was already running, or at least shambling as fast as she could in the cursed suit. Kaiden was on her heels clearly reaching the same conclusion as she had. Every major Alliance fleet unit would have a code book which held the various signals and encryptions the Fleet used to keep its communications secure. It wasn’t a physical book of course, but it was a separate computer that could be physically firewalled to prevent digital intrusion. The Alliance hadn’t known that the RCN was coming, why would they? The odds of a single corvette driving off two destroyers were beyond astronomical. Therefore they would have had no reason to purge their computers before Sabatine dropped through the hole in the hull. She pounded down the companion way a step ahead of Kaiden, caroming off the steel wall in her haste. They hit the deck below at the same instant, Kaiden’s longer legs closing the distance. Halfway along the hall a thin man in an Alliance warrant officers uniform was heaving at a hatch with a prybar. The impact of the missiles must have torqued the hatch, trapping the communication’s officer on the wrong side. That hadn’t been a priority before, but now he had to sanitize the equipment before it fell into RCN hands. He turned to see the two RCN officers emerging from the companion way, his face contorting with frustrated hate. Dropping his prybar with an echoing clatter he whipped a pistol from his tunic pocket with surprising speed. Sabatine stared in dumb amazement. Kaiden’s shove knocked her to the deck a moment before the pistol cracked. It struck the facing plate of the companionway and ricocheted wildly, drawing white sparks. Awkward in her rigging suit she struggled to raise her own weapon.

Kaiden hit the plating of the wall hard, somehow keeping his sub-machine gun somewhat level. He clicked off the safety and grit his teeth, giving a burst of fire that would have hit the man had he remained stationary. The warrant officer had seemed more pissed than afraid, but that didn't mean the fear wasn't there. He ducked behind a doorway on the opposite end of the hallway, Kaiden hot in pursuit. Instead of turning the corner and firing, however, Kaiden leaped past the door as accompanying gunshots rang out from the doorway, before the tell-take 'click' of an empty magazine. The newly promoted captain took no time to himself, pivoting back and springing into the doorway as the warrant officer hastily tried to reload.

"Drop it!" Kaiden ordered, gun trained on the man. He looked disheveled and angry, and unfortunately beyond reason. He froze for a fraction of a second before continuing his reload. Kaiden let out a breath as he pulled the trigger, punching three bullets into the warrant officer's chest. The blood slapped the floor moments before the body hit it, and Kaiden shook his head wondering what the point was. He admired the man for doing his duty, but it was going to be in vain regardless. The captain approached the gun the fellow had carried, recognizing it as an old L106A1. Good gun, but little ammo capacity.

"Sir!" Sabatine said when she rounded the corner, her eyes and gun scanning the room for any potential threats. Kaiden didn't acknowledge her presence for a few seconds, realizing the man he just killed was the first direct ground casualty of what was to be a system's spanning war, barring the naval deaths.

"When it's just us, you can call me Kaiden, Sabbie." He said, suddenly tired. The man took a deep breath for a moment. He knew his fatigue could be heard in his voice, but when he turned around he was as charming as always, his striking eyes still full of luster behind the bland helmet, an amused, almost wry smile on his face. "After all, you've called me far worse. Now, help me with this crowbar..."

He shoulders his weapon and bent down, his subordinate kneeling to help him with her weight as the two of them gripped the handle of the crowbar and pushed with all their strength. The metal screeched, the two of them making short work opening it up. Once it was three feet off the ground, the door opened automatically, sliding up on its own accord. They checked their twelve and their six, and then walked in to gather the intelligence.

"I wonder if he was Fifth Bureau," Sabatine pondered aloud. There were bruises beneath her suit from the collision with the deck, but nothing worse than a hard shift on the hull. It certainly trumped being shot all hollow. It was common knowledge that Guarantor Pora's secret police maintained a presence within the fleet, and the communications officer would be a logical choice. Feet were clattering down the companion way.

"Shit," Sabbatine muttered, slamming the door shut behind them. Trigger discipline among spacers was never the best and she didn't fancy getting wasted by her own side moments after an enemy round.

"Sir?!" Danzetti's voice called from the hallway.

"We are all good spacer," start getting the prisoners out of her," Kaiden ordered.

"Sir!" Danzetti responded and then began clamping back up the companionway. Sabatine knelt down beside the communications terminal. She took a wrench from the toolbelt on her suit and fitted it to the rachet that held the communications console in place, laying down so she could observe the wiring. There didn't appear to be any booby traps or fail safes.

"I have called you much worse," Sabatine agreed with a grin. She thought back to the night she learned he had cheated on her. The old fury wasn't as hot as it had been with the passage of time. It hadn't been as though there were any chance that a Calawarden would ever end up with a penniless minor noble on the verge of ruin. Still it had burned, burned deep. She cranked the first bolt around. It gave easily, doubtless the communications consoles were changed out often as Fleet codes were updated. She paused for a moment as the first bolt came free.

"You know, assuming we get back to Herculaneum safely, I'm due one tenth the cost of a destroyer in prize money." Kaiden himself, as captain, would get a fifth. That was a staggering amount of money to Sabatine, and even to Kaiden would probably nudge a balance sheet.

"Assuming they don't hang us for mutiny of course," Kaiden put in. Sabatine snorted as she freed the second bolt.

"Still the eternal optimist I see," she snickered.

"I can't see them hanging a highly placed noble with a victory like this one to back it up." The final bolt came free and she pulled the remaining connectors, freeing the console.

"Micha dosen't have the political pull to make it stick and the Admiral..." she thought back to his words to her before they set off on this cruise.

"Well I think he had his doubts too." She pulled herself to her feet and grabbed the console with both hands, lifting it with some effort.

"Can you get the door?"

"Micha won't have any pull soon," He said grimly. He didn't want to throw the conversation away from the snark they both so enjoyed, but it was something he still couldn't quite come to terms with. Granted, his life was still very strange to him, and he hadn't really stopped to consider it. The military runaway of a high noble family found himself usurping his superior, launching the first shots in an extrasystem war, crawling on the ground in an enemy ship with his ex-girlfriend who happened to be his second.

At her request, he gave a "Yeah, sure" and went to the door, preparing to open it with his crowbar in case there were any problems with the inner latch, but something up there smiled on them, and it slid open without a problem. Sabatine marched out of the hatch, and Kaiden placed his hands around the console she carried. "Let me."

"I've got it," she insisted, not irritably, but he could tell she wasn't going to take no for an answer unless it was explicitly said to be an order.

"You are probably the only one that could pull this shit with me," He told her, shaking his head in his suit. The air-tight suit hardly budged with any movement except the wide movement of their arms or the broad strides of their legs, but it was surprisingly how much one could glean from the tone of your voice. "I'll keep watch."

"Well since we're being less formal, I let you get away with more than your fair share before we worked together. Old Baile-"

"We will not talk about that," He said, but it wasn't so much as forbidding as embarrassment. Sabatine laughed, and Kaiden couldn't help but chuckle breathlessly, even if he didn't want anyone in a hundred kilometers to hear that story. It involved Kaiden getting blind drunk and skinny dipping in the pool of a Rear Admiral nicknamed Old Bailey. Sabatine had done some fancy maneuvering that night to save Kaiden's ass from a scandal. She had always said he had sufficiently paid her back by sweet talking a few aides to help get her in the right places to get the ears of the right supervisors, and there had been that midshipman Kaiden had ostracized that had tried to get her thrown out when she had rejected his advances. But still, she hadn't done anything that could get her shunned by her family or peers, unless one counted some vulgar remarks and a few bar fights.

"I'll let you off the hook this time," She remarked wryly.

They couldn't continue the conversation by virtue of reaching the cargo chamber where the alliance crew had been found. Now there was just Higgs waiting for them, giving a salute. Even the medical supplies had been gathered up. Quick work, Kaiden noted. He gave them a "everyone is off the ship" with a bosun's surety.

"They better be, because we're not coming back." Kaiden replied, and the three climbed back about the RCS Vicount.

The K-21 was of the Grimwold class destroyer from the Alliance yards at Biscane. Under optimal conditions it had a crew of 120 spacers plus officers ands supernumeraries. Sabatine had to handle it with a prize crew of twenty. It had taken the entire rigging crew of the Vickie nearly two days to put the battered rigging into something of a workable condition. Fortunately the rig had been mostly down when the plasma cannons had hammered the vessel, but there had still been half a dozen masts that were welded to the hull, and everything from A through D had been sheared away. The partial jury rig they had assembled would have made their sailing instructors in the academy physically sick. The roll alone meant they had to re-enter sidereal space every twelve hours to perform a manual correction and recalculation. They made three stops on the voyage to Herculaneum. Each time the Vickie was waiting for them, much handier with its full sails and larger crew. Each time Sabatine transmitted a quick report of their progress. It made for dismal reading about it didn't quite do justice to the reality of being woken every hour or so to deal with some new problem with the rig, or to help the three techs assigned to the power room nurse the plant along. It was one of those thankless jobs that seemed to make up the bulk of RCN life. It didn't win any glory, nor would it garner any renown. The best Sabatine could hope for was that an admiral reading the report would grunt with approval before moving on to his next task. In the spacer's bars however, the tale of grueling endurance would be told and exaggerated. Spacers would say things like, that bitch never gave us a moment's rest, or everytime we turned around there she was. It would sound like complaints, but there would be an undertone of respect. Spacefaring life, and the RCN in particular, was too dangerous a place for officers to survive on rank alone. You needed your crew to respect you, and the only way to do that was to be in the same hard places they were.

“Transition,” Sabatine announced and immediately felt her teeth bore up into her brain as they dropped back into real space. She was sitting alone on the bridge of K-21, the rest of the prize crew either on the hull or in the engine room. The only other person onboard who could operate the astrogation computer was Shapti, an able spacer who was striking for a sailing master’s warrant, but she was grabbing a few hours sleep in the captains cabin across the corridor. Opinions varied on whether sleeping through a transition made it better or worse, but if you got tired enough your body would make that decision for you.

“K-21 break, break, break!” Kaiden’s voice broke into the comm circuit. Sabatine sat up feeling like she had been doused in cold water. She nosed the ship sharply downwards towards the ecliptic, high drive motors flairing to life with a buzz.

“Vickie this is K-2…” she began, trying to puzzle out what was going on from the PPI. Everything looked normal. The RCS Hamptor, an aging destroyer was on picket just outside the minefield and. There were missile tracks streaking between the Hamptor an the Vickie.

“Herculaneum is in the hands of the Alliance. Disengage and run for point Delta 3 Seven.”

Nothing made sense. How could a major fleet base be in the hands of the Alliance? How had they captured the Hamptor? Why was Kaiden still here if the base was in hostile hands? The last point clicked into place. He had waited for her, slugging it out with the destroyer to warn her before she drifted into range of the minefield.

“AFS K-21, engage Cinnibar vessel Victory at once,” her comm panel blurted. Sabatine stared at it for a moment. Of course the Alliance didn’t know that K-21 had been captured. They would figure that out in a few moments though, once they realized she wasn’t responding to their coded IFF.

“Acknowledged control,” she responded, trying to mimic the nasal Plesance accent she associated with the Alliance. There was no way she could fight the ship with only twenty spacers aboard. The only option was to run as Kaiden had ordered. Shapti burst through the door looking alarmed. Sabatine made a quick gesture to one of the jump seats, her other hand bringing up an attack board.

“Signal the Vickie on microwave and acknowledge,” she snapped, unable to split her attention to a third task while she handled maneuver and the attack board, modifying the preset attack plan as quickly as she was able. The Hamptor was already closing on the Vickie, its four tubes launching another salvo. It was going to make it very difficult for Kaiden to safely transition.

“Launching one,” Sabatine announced with what she hoped was appropriate sangfor. The ship jolted as super heated steam shoved the missiles out of their tubes and clear of the hull a moment before their high drives ignited, streaking them off down range as blue lines on Sabatine’s attack board.

“Launching two.”

The comms board crackled angrily to life. Shapti should have caught the comms but having no idea what was going on simply let it pass through to Sabatine with an alarmed look.

“K-21 what the hell are you playing at those missiles…” she dumped the link, too busy to give it any thought. As the commander of the Hamptor correctly noted, the missiles she had fired were not aimed at the Vickie. They were aimed at the point Sabatine calculated the Hamptor would be at when the missiles arrived, a staggered area between the hostile destroyer and the Cinnabar corvette. Three were aimed slightly ahead, another aimed slightly behind in case the destroyer opted to brake. She pulled up the astrogation display and cut the high drives, allowing the charge on the ship to zero out. There was no time to actually plot a course anywhere, besides off the top of her head she had no idea where Delta-3-7 might be.

“Launching, three…. Four.” Sabatine reported mechanically. There was the dull rumble of the missle tracks as the ship began to crank fresh ordnance into the four missile tubes. She dumped the attack board. She wasn’t going to wait around for the minute and a half it would take for the next salvo to be ready.

“Vickie, K-21 withdrawing as ordered,” she broadcast and punched the insertion button with her thumb. The destroyer shuddered back into the safety of the matrix, leaving Sabatine drenched in cold sweat with her heart pounding in her throat.

It took two more jumps to get to Delta-3-7. Kaiden had a cold sweat for the entire trip, or at least that's how he would remember the journey. It was absolutely miraculous that Herculaneum had gone under attack while they were gone, much less were in Alliance hands before they had even returned. Kaiden had heard strange rumors about jumpspace, where time became disjointed and unreliable, and though he knew it wasn't the case, he certainly felt like the prelude to the war and its first offensive had past him by below his notice.

"Bushman, Harwen, go help lower the sails." Kaiden ordered. Higgs would have done so but he was busy on the aft. The Vickie wasn't nearly as poor off as the K-21 Kaiden had given Sabatine, but twenty odd crew still gave everyone a bit more work on their hands. They gave curt salutes and hustled out of the bridge to the main deck.

"Are we absolutely, crystal clear, that K-21 is clear for us?" Kaiden asked, his gaze swiveling to Howarth with a stern countenance. Nothing was Howarth's fault, but Kaiden felt either sick or angry at anything in his vision. "How's the Vickie?"

"Yes Captain. All signals clear! We were a bit slow on the uptake with a few kinks on the engine, but Colby and Randals got it fixed before the second jump. We'll sail in smoothly from here on." He explained just when the K-21 made visibility.

---

"Sir, might I suggest-"

"No, you may not." Kaiden warned Tilda, and the woman blanched at the uninhibitedly threatening look he gave her. His eyes lingered for a few moment, in no mood to flirt or be questioned with. The blonde woman closed her mouth and nodded, turning about face and walking away. Kaiden closed the door behind him.

Delta-3-7 was an old mining outpost, quietly commandeered by the Republic a score of years previously and reorganized into an outpost for military applications due to the increasing mobilization of the government. The Bureau of Ordinance had nestled itself there snugly. Once the Vickie and K-21 had arrived, the RCS Whitehall, a refitted sloop, had been at dock for repairs. Kaiden had hailed the Captain, a one Timothy Rachet personally, to his relief finding the ship had been dealt a damn bad one by a few scattered asteroids. Captain Rachet had little news to provide the Vickie, instead desperately asking Kaiden for a briefing. In true military fashion, Kaiden kept it short but grim, and then told Rachet he would contact him later once he reconvened with his officers.

"You do a hell of a good job," Kaiden said to Sabatine, who had been waiting in the room for his arrival. The lunar facility had seen a flurry of activity in recent months, but there was still plenty of room for Republic personnel. He didn't trust the skittering agents from the Bureau of Ordinance lurking around every corner, however. The organization did good work and he would normally be keen to speak to a representative, but there seemed to be little oversight at Delta-3-7. His grandfather once told him, 'every spoke in the wheel is important, but a wandering spoke means a broken wheel.' Kaiden took a breath, crossing his arms. "That being said, how the hell did they move that fast?"

Sabatine rubbed her brow with the heel of her left hand, managing to avoid touching her eye and leaving it stinging for the next several hours. She was beyond rung out and was working hard to keep from trembling.

“Sit,” Kaiden directed, making an off handed gesture to one of the seats. Sabatine gratefully sank into the uncomfortable chair, grateful to be off her feet. The conference room of the Bureau’s facility was converted from what must have been an old longue or bar, still faintly redolent of tobacco and beer despite countless steam cleanings. It offered a view out over the lunar landscape, a broad vista of grey white dust and rock. Here and there mining vehicles, rusted behemoths on caterpillar treads, rumbled to and fro on unknown errands. The mining hub had been built in a crater to protect it from meteor damage and the looming kilometer high lip of the crater was visible in the distance, the lights of the massive freight elevator that took vehicles took and from the lunar surface glittering against the stone..Both the Vickie and the K-21 had landed at the docking facilities meant for much smaller mining vessels and were now taking on reaction mass from melted ice deep beneath the mantle. Tilda, acting as a proper servant for once, produced a bottle of something and poured a measure of liquor into two plastic glasses. Sabatine was so grateful for a drink that she momentarily forgot her dislike for the former reporter and nodded her thanks.



“Thank you sir,” Sabatine responded formally, lifting her cup to clink against Kaiden’s before sinking most of it in one pull. It was a bourbon of some kind, and pretty good for a station here at the end of nowhere. She wondered if Tilda had scrounged it locally or if it had come from Kaiden’s stocks. Probably the former, nothing but the best for the Prince afterall.



“As for how they took Herculaneum, I’ve been thinking about it since we bolted,” she admitted.

“And?” Kaiden pressed, sipping at his own drink and gazing out at the lunar landscaped. Sabatine shrugged her shoulders.

“Dammed if I know. Maybe the locals sold us out, most of the aristocracy was pretty solidly RCN but there is always someone out of power who thinks they can do better under a different master. Bring troops in on merchantmen a few at a time and seize the control centers in the dead of night? They must have caught the Hamptor on the ground, maybe some other ships too. Hold out long enough to bring in the rest of your fleet lurking on the edge of the system,” she mused, finishing her drink and holding it out for Tilda to refill. The loss of a base like Herculaneum with its defenses intact, even out here in the sticks, was a calamity. Heads would roll when Navy House investigated what had gone wrong, assuming of course those heads hadn’t rolled when the Alliance moved in.



“They took Kostroma that way a few years back, briefly anyway, before Leary took it back with Admiral Jessup,” she continued. That had been different of course. Kostroma was a Cinnabar ally but a wog was a wog and what could one expect? But an RCN base? It was unthinkable.



“Sorry I’m late,” a lean looking man in the uniform of an RCN Lieutenant announced as he stepped through the door. He was in a set of grays that had seen better days, probably been second hand when he bought them and since picked up numerous grease stains. He had a commo helmet under one arm and the pimpliest midshipman Sabatine had ever seen in tow. The midshipman’s neat fatigues clashed jarringly with his superior’s dilapidated appearance. Both Sabatine and Kaiden pretended not to notice. It was a fact that even under the best of circumstances an RCN officer without private means could find himself in financial straits, particularly if he had a family to support and no access to prize money, something that certainly wouldn’t come to the commander of a supply ship. RCN convention at least at their level, demanded they not acknowledge it.



“Lieutenant Hickoring this is Lieutenant Rachet, commanding the supply ship Whitehall,” Kaiden announced formally. Sabatine stood up, managing to avoid swaying and shook hands with the greasy officer.

“Charmed, I was in the class behind you in the academy, saw you shoot once, topping!” Rachet gushed with friendly bonhomie.” Sabatine smiled and relaxed slightly, sinking back into her seat. Rachet had done well to earn himself a command so early in his career, even if it was a clapped out supply barge like the Whitehall, but at least that left Kaiden in command by virtue of his commissioning date. The last thing they needed now was some barge driver looking to take command and make a name for himself. That was uncharitable, but Sabatine was too tired to be polite in her thoughts as well as her words.



“I suppose the how of it doesn’t matter that much,” Sabatine said, taking a more measured sip of liquor. The warmth of the bourbon was already spreading through her and if she wasn’t careful she was going to fall asleep.



“The question is what should we do about it?”

"They'd probably been planning it for months," Kaiden muttered, gazing out of the window into the hall. Herculaneum's fall must have been executed from the inside at nearly all levels of the administration, like Mithridates and the Asiatic Vespers of old earth. It must have taken an extreme amount of precision and discipline, which only made Kaiden even more wary of the Alliance's capability for subterfuge. If he wasn't absolutely certain of his crew's loyalty, he would be sweating cold.

What were they supposed to do? They could try and make it back to command, but could they do more good out in the boonies of K-12? Alliance forces were likely close, and he doubted the Delta-3-7 was useful for anything but resupply. They didn't wish to lead anyone here because it wasn't a very defensible cluster of asteroids. Every rock was thousands of kilometers apart, Higgs report he had given Kaiden had said. Belts could be good defensive measures, and only madmen or ambitious miners delved into them.

"Or insurgents," Kaiden mouthed, pondering.

The Delta-3-7 wasn't too far from the Sega Cluster, which, if he recalled correctly, was a dangerous lane for ships for more than just the rocks. Alliance insurgents turned pirate had taken up residence there, the Republic's main interest in their existence before the conflict was protecting their own shipping, but maybe they could use them to their advantage. They like as not held no love for the Republic, but chances are they loathed their previous government. Kaiden wasn't insane enough to try and recruit them into the military, but perhaps if he knew the Alliance shipping lanes, they might wreak some havoc before they themselves hit them hard.

"The what?" Sabatine asked, raising her head curiously.

"I need a map of the system, if at all possible. Lieutenant Rachet, do you have any information on Alliance routes close to the neighoring systems?" He inquired. Captain Rachet inclined his head thoughtfully, confusion on his face.

"Lieutenant, you're not planning on launching an attack with our relative strength, right?" He tried to confirm.

"If I was, you would do well not to question that." Kaiden reminded him, and the Captain gulped audibly. Kaiden was correct. During times of full-scale war, some more ornery or stern superiors might consider that insubordination. "As it stands, no. But we can't sit here and wait for orders. I want to know where the nearest alliance forces are."

"Unfortunately, sir, they are merely a quick jump away." Rachet replied. "Perhaps not the main body of any real force, but a small fleet is located at the Hytegero Sector, not a week's sail from Delta-3-7. They've begun to flourish in activity, so the Bureau has told me. They were surprised I made it in undetected, as they were about you. I don't think we should fight fate and try our luck thrice, but I'm with you whatever you decide, sir."

"What are you planning?" Sabatine asked. Kaiden would explain in detail, once he had that map.

It took a frustratingly long time to link one of the BO holoprojectors to the Vickie’s astrogation computer. The consoles out here were old, nearly eighty years old, and many iterations behind current operating systems. Anything used out on the frontier had massive backward compatibility for obvious reasons, but this thing had been made when Sabatine’s grandmother had been a midshipman. In the end she solved the problem by simply slaving the unit to her commo helmet and using the existing link. It was a little grainy but it was able to project a 3D representation of the Rayleigh Stars and the surrounding sectors. Although it bore some relationship to actual sidereal positioning the chart actually depecticted average sailing times at ambient conditions in the matrix.



“We should send word back to Cinnabar and warn them what’s going on,” Sabatine mused aloud. There was no chance this was an isolated attack. Fighting here meant there was fighting everywhere, but they still needed to report the loss of the rest of the RCN. Otherwise Cinnabar ships could blunder into a minefield that they still believed was in friendly hands.



“You want to take the destroyer back?” Rachet asked, sounding a little wistful. Riding in on a prize of war would burnish an officer’s reputation, not to mention put some coin in the pocket of its captors, something the disheveled Rachet could have clearly used.



“No we cut her rig all to bits when we took her,” Sabatine replied, “It’d take us six weeks at least to make it back with the cobbled together scraps we have aloft. Maybe we could pool spacers and re-rig but without dorsal A and with ventral D fracturing…” Kaiden cut off the discussion with a decisive gesture.



“K-21 isn’t going,” the prince declared with aristocratic authority, “with the best will in the world it would be too slow, plus we are going to need to shift missiles to rearm the Vickie. We only have four rounds left.” A corvette like the Viceroy only carried 20 missiles in her magazines a dozen of which had been expended before they arrived back at Herculaneum.



“Even if we didn’t it would take more time than we have to re-rig her,” Kaiden continued, swirling his drink in his glass. Rachet straightened clearly expecting Kaiden to order him to make the run back to Cinnabar orbit. Instead he turned to Sabatine.



“You think if we pressed a tramp freighter that Otis could handle it?” he asked, a genuine question not a rhetorical one. Sabatine sucked her breath in through her teeth. As first lieutenant it was her job to see to the education of the midshipman and so she had a lot more day to day experience with them than Kaiden did.

“Uh… midshipman Otis’ heart is in the right place sir, but that is more than I’d be willing to say for any ship he was astrogating alone.” Otis’ astrogation was something she was working on, but it was clear to her he had no talent for the business. Fortunately for Otis he seemed to possess a certain steadiness under fire, a trait that would secure him a future in the RCN more surely than skillful shiphandling or a feel for the matrix. Rachet drew in a breath, clearly about to volunteer but he was cut off again, this time by, of all people, Tilda.



“What about Captain Micha, you said he is a good astrogater didn’t you?” she put in, setting the now empty bottle down on the bar and rummaging underneath for a new one, deliberately or accidentally affording a view of her cleavage. Sabatine opened her mouth to suggest that she leave RCN business to the actual spacers, but the words died in her mouth. It was actually a pretty good suggestion. Micha was a good astrogater, the best of the group infact. The captain had also come up through the merchant service and so had more experience on small ships with short crews. He was also very, very, motivated to get to Cinnabar as quickly as possible to lay his complaints before the admiralty. That last bit gave her pause but she was sure that if he was given sealed dispatches he would deliver them. It would be as good as admitting to cowardice to do otherwise. Their duty to the republic outweighed any embarrassment his arrival on Cinnabar might cause them, plus it would get him off the ship and out of the way, something that everyone would feel better about.





“Well its not the worst idea,” Sabatine admitted, feeling almost physical pain in doing so.

“But before we get to details we should probably hear what the Captain has in mind.”

Cool air rushed in to fill Sabatine’s hard suit as she wrenched her helmet off. The airlock hadn’t yet come to full pressure and the partial vaucumn plucked at her sinuses. The sweat that slicked her body immediately chilled and became clammy, but it was a blessed relief compared to the heat she had generated in nearly two full watches on the hull. The rest of the crew were doing the same, faces red and flushed from hours of heavy labor in zero-g. Cockburn, a landsman groaned and cradled his arm where a parting line had stuck it. It was probably broken, but he was lucky enough not to have lost it when the woven beryllium monocyrstal was suddenly pulled beyond its tensile strength. A few hours in the autodoc would see him healed enough for light duty.

Kaiden’s plan called for the K-21 to be re-rigged and several of her masts stepped to new rings beside. It was a huge undertaking without a dock yard, and only possible at all because they had stripped every spare sail and cable from the Whitehall. That hadn’t pleased Rachet, but he had grudgingly complied. It had pleased the sallow faced lieutenant even less when Kaiden had taken nearly two thirds of his crew, a third to help Sabatine with the repairs to K-21 and the other third to reinforce the Vickie for the next phase of the operation. Even if everything went completely according to plan, all three ships were going to be running with near skeleton crews if and when they got into action with the Alliance. To Sabatine’s personal annoyance, Kadien had left her with a grand total of two petty officers, Klave the Bosun’s mate, and Creavy the Whitehall’s chief engineer. The rest of her crew consisted of six riggers and a score of landsmen who didn’t know a cable splice from their assholes. All the experience spacers were doing yeoman’s work to stop the clumsy landsmen from killing themselves, or worse.

“You should get some sleep ma’am,” Klave suggested as they sucked in lungfuls of reprocessed air.

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” Sabatine responded, her mind running through the next hour and the myriad tasks she needed to accomplish.

“Begging your pardon ma’am, but we might be all be dead if the Alliance jumps in here and you are too exhausted to function. You are the only astrogater we have on board. Sabatine rubbed her eyes with her balled fist. The shortage of astrogaters was a real problem. Kaiden had taken Lieutenant Rachet with him for the next stage of the plan but she wasn’t all together sure that had been the right decision.

“Right,” Sabtine responded noncommittally, “good thought.” The airlock came to pressure and one of the landsmen, Gautso?, spun the dogs and opened the door. Sabatine made a gesture to the man helping half carrying Cockburn to enter first, and he lugged his moaning mate out of the lock. Sabatine followed along till they reached the autodock. The destroyer had a larger unit than the Vickie did, with four independent pods. Sabatine helped Cockburn into the first pod and closed it with a hiss, then finished stripping off her suit and climbed into another. It sealed around her with a crackle and she felt the spray of antistetic preparatory to the placement of IV access. Twenty minutes later she awoke as the pod opened, feeling much better now that the machine had purged her blood stream of metabolites and toxins built up from too much work and not enough sleep. It was an old academy trick, the kind that would get you running laps with a hundred kilo pack if the instructors ever caught you. She stopped by her cabin for a change of clothes and a restorative tot of brandy before heading down to the power room to see how Creavy was getting on with the ships internal systems. After that, if all went well, she could squeeze in two hours sleep before she needed to be back out on the hull.

The engagement was over before it had begun.

The Vickie was generally judged as no match for an alliance cruiser, even though Kaiden would claim the crew could take on any opponent. But even if the Vickie was under a different crew, the merchant vessel wouldn't have stood a chance. They had laid in wait, and as soon as the vessel was 120,000 kilometers off, they approached bearing their guns. The Vickie usually had twenty missiles, but they could only restock five after arriving at Delta-3-7, which gave them a grand total of 13. However, they had 4-inch plasma cannons in turrets on the dorsal bow and ventral stern, giving her four guns in total. Fairly average for a corvette of its size, but easily able to outmatch any merchant vessel in what they had assumed had been a clear shipping lane.

"Bring them in Higgs," Kaiden said, turning from his vigil on the bridge.

The surly Bosun opened the hatch. Tilda sat chewing on a pen, watching with interest as the captain of the merchant vessel The Nestor was brought in under guard. Kaiden guessed he had a kind face when going about his daily business, but he looked more grave than he likely had in years, thinking he was about to be executed or sent to some unforeseeable doom. Kaiden wanted to dispell his worries immediately, saluting the man as if he was a peer.

"Greetings Captain. First Lieutenant and acting Captain of the Viceroy Kaiden Caladwarden. I apologize for the need to requisition your vessel, but you have my word you nor your crew will be harmed if you follow our orders accordingly."

"Acting Captain?" He asked curiously, then noticed the Prince was gazing at him expectantly. The striking blue of Kaiden's eyes was always captivating or commanding, in whichever situation suited him. "Er, yes. Captain Dobbs of the Nestor. I hope you know what you're doing Lieutenant, you could very well have started a war, you realize."

Kaiden hid a smirk. Either the merchantman did not know, or wanted to play dumb. Either way, he wasn't going to grant him an inch. "We'll see. Let's work together to make sure that does not happen, shall we? Now, if you follow my Bosun, he will show you and your crew to your quarters for the time being. Except for three handpicked by me to help navigate your ship."