Auberon (The Jessica Keller Chronicles Book 1) (10 page)

Denis did some quick math in his head. “That’s nearly three weeks sail from here,” he said with surprise. “Clear across the
Kaldwell Gulf.

“Yes,” she replied with a hard grin. “They’ll never see it coming. That’s why we stopped at
Surat Thani
to take on as many supplies as we could hold. It’s like a thumb that sticks out into the Gulf itself along here, and makes it a shorter jump. Commercial ships normally run a horseshoe–shaped trade route clear out beyond the borders and back. We’re cutting straight across.”

She paused, but he had no more questions.

“So you take us out and get us lined up for the Jump,” she said, “while I get cleaned up and join you on the bridge in about three hours. I’ll let everyone know then.”

“I see,” he said. Finally, he did, at least a glimmer.

In addition to trials by fire and combat, they were apparently going to become famous for acts of extreme navigation.

He looked down at the weapons rack beside her once again.

As they say, live by the sword…

Chapter XIV

Date of the Republic October 25, 392 Jumpspace outbound from Surat Thani system

Fidgets? Really? Now?

Jessica sat at her desk, reviewed random notes while she waited. And fidgeted.

She was generally good at waiting. One former commander had likened her to a moray eel more than once, tucked down into a dark hole and waiting for something interesting to swim overhead.

Today, she just had the fidgets. It was unlike her, but this was an abnormal day.

A knock at the hatch broke her out of her reverie.

“Enter,” she called, pushing a button on her desk to unlock it from the inside.

Marcelle came through first, carefully, as though scouting her mood. Apparently, the fidgets had been obvious. Or perhaps contagious. They shared a quick, secret smile before Marcelle gestured for her companion to enter.

Yeoman Kermode, Moirrey, was extremely nervous.

Perhaps a touch guilty? Called suddenly to the headmaster’s office because somebody blabbed? All hell about to break loose and the past going to suddenly catch up with you?

Jessica made a mental note not to look too deeply into the woman’s past. Perhaps get her drunk sometime and pick her brain, but that could be later.

“Sit, please, Moirrey,” Jessica said, pointing at one of the chairs. She looked up with a smile. “Thank you, Marcelle. I promise to be nice to her.”

Marcelle actually blushed. “Aye, sir,” she said and was gone out the door.

Jessica took a moment to study the young engineer before she said anything.

She was tiny.

Not as ethereal as Nina Vanek, although they were almost of a height. No, it was someone had taken a perfectly–proportioned woman and shrunk her down to a ninety percent copy.

Right now, Moirrey had the fidgets as well. There must be something in the air today.

“Relax,” Jessica said suddenly into the silence. “Whatever it is, nobody ratted you out. I want your help on a project.”

From the way the woman suddenly collapsed back into the chair, Jessica decided whatever it was she was dreading, it must have been good. All the more reason not to dig. And to take her drinking sometime.

“I was impressed with the solution you came up with for Vanek’s missile launcher,” Jessica continued. “I would like you to think of this as your reward for a job well done.”

“Sir?” the woman asked. The voice was even tinier than the body right now, very much unlike the confident, competent engineer Jessica had seen making the presentation.

“By now,” Jessica continued, “everyone knows we are going to raid
2218 Svati Prime
. They don’t know why.”

Jessica paused to observe. Moirrey was recovering her aplomb, slowly. Good enough.

“We’ll have the firepower to destroy their local defenses. It’s just a small mining colony, so it’s not that important. And, please keep this secret, it is only our first stop. I plan to hit several worlds over there before heading home.”

Moirrey nodded at her with a card–sharp look in her eyes. There was a fire brewing inside, if slowly.

“I looked up your playwright,” Jessica said. “Even watched one of his plays, translated out of the ancient tongue. He was a master showman, Moirrey.”

“Aye, sir,” the Yeoman replied. “One of the best the race has e’er birthed.”

“It got me to thinking,” Jessica continued. “I would like to do something that leaves a lasting psychological scar on the
Fribourg Empire
.”

“Are we going to bomb them, sir?” She got a nervous look in her eyes.

Jessica shook her head. “No, Yeoman,” she said sharply. “That would just piss them off, and invite retaliations on our worlds.
2218 Svati Prime
isn’t worth hardly anything in the grand scheme of things.”

“I see.” Moirrey said meekly. “Sorry about that, sir.”

“No,” Jessica said. “It was a good question, Moirrey. I was thinking about how all the world is a stage. I want you to build me something that is all flash. It doesn’t need substance. The substance is the fear it will invoke, up and down the Imperial frontier, that they might be next.”

Moirrey leaned forward with a tight, wicked smile. Jessica knew, right then, that she had the right person.

“Limitations, sir?” Moirrey asked.

“Keep civilian casualties to an absolute minimum, Kermode,” Jessica said. “Preferably zero. Dead enemies are martyrs. Frightened ones have to be protected.”

“Aye, sir,” she replied, licking her lips, warming to her topic. “It’ll be just like designing a stage set. Ye have to induce the belief, but people be willing to play ‘long.”

“Why did you join the Navy, Moirrey? Seriously?”

The woman lost her pixie look for a moment as her faced turned deadly serious. “There’s no money in theater, ma’am.”

“I see,” Jessica replied simply. “But if I wanted to turn engineering into a special effects department…?”

“Oh, ma’am,” Moirrey smiled dreamily. “We’d make the Bard jealous with envy at what we could accomplish, were minds set to mischief.”

“Consider yours set to mischief, Yeoman. I’ll have a talk with Ozolinsh about your workload going forward.”

“Aye, sir,” Moirrey said. “I’ll make ye proud, ma’am.”

“I’m counting on it. Dismissed.”

She watched Moirrey practically dance out of the room with glee. She felt like she had just let a fox loose in the hen house, but then, hadn’t that been what Kasum had done with her?

She looked down at the desk. The fidgets seemed to have left the room with the young woman from engineering.

Now the serious business could start.

Ξ

Jessica came up from a groggy sleep as her system chirped a message. She was deep in the middle of her sleep period, so it must be one she had flagged important, but not critical enough to rouse her. As if she slept much anyway.

She touched the bedside screen to bring the message up, noted it was from Moirrey. It was entitled simply
Mischief
.

Inside, she found a wealth of design images and technical specifications. Way more than she wanted to deal with at this time of night.

Jessica replied with an acknowledgement and tried to go back to sleep.

Would it be enough?

Chapter XV

Date of the Republic November 13, 392 Jumpspace approaching 2218 Svati Prime

The Junior Varsity was in charge up on the bridge right now, because everyone important was here for the briefing.

Unlike last time, the pilots were even paying attention.

Jessica looked out over the collected faces of the flight crews, as well as the flight engineers and several of her bridge officers. She took a moment to look over at
Jouster
, the Flight Commander. Most of the pilots were paying attention.

“According to civilian intelligence covering at least the last three standard years,” she said to the group, bouncing her unaugmented voice off the back wall, “
2218 Svati Prime
is protected by an Imperial fighter squadron, made up at the old one–man
A–7 model b
snub fighters. Fine against pirates. Useful to overwhelm a single raider. You should be able to slaughter them, even out–numbered.”

Jouster
was apparently feeling his oats this morning. “That’s if they can even launch on such short notice,” he sneered. “This is the back end of beyond. The crews here are going to be second rate.”

Jessica fixed him with a hard eye for a second. He was smiling the sort of smile the class clown gets when he thinks he’s scored a point and wants the whole room to acknowledge his witty awesomeness. Others started to snicker, and then got a good look at the commander’s face.

“I don’t think,
Jouster
,” she smiled back, “that we should necessarily assume incompetence from the kinds of fighter squadron commanders that end up on the frontiers. Or were you speaking from experience?”

A few snickers seemed to come from the side of the room where the flight engineers were seated. The rest of the room had fallen to an awkward, stunned silence.

Jouster
looked as if he had been slapped. Probably not the first woman to have done that to him. Most likely the first who could make him sit there and take it.

Jessica let the moment hang a bit longer, but
Jouster
seemed to be over his need to be heard. At least for now.

“We’re going to drop into realspace four light hours out, well below the ecliptic plane, just long enough to observe the layout. Then we’ll hop closer. Launch order will be
da Vinci
in the scout, followed by the entire flight wing. Saturation wing after that, and then
Necromancer
, the gunship. Questions?”

She watched the Dropship pilot, Dyson, raise his hand with a hopeful smile. “What about
Cayenne
?”

“Search and Rescue only,
Gaucho
,” she replied. “You’ll be on the deck and ready to launch, but I’m not planning a planetary assault. This time.”

“What about
the bomb
?” a female voice piped up from the engineering cluster.

From the emphasis on the words, Jessica presumed that it was an open secret. And not one she was sure she was using. Not yet.

“You kill the defenders first,” she said after a beat. “
Rajput
will come up close enough to savage their station and knock it out of use for six months. Then we’ll talk about
the bomb
.”

“Why not just kill it?” one of the pilots asked from the front row.

“Because, little miss
Bitter Kitten
,” Jessica replied with a feral smile. “A badly damaged station has to be repaired, and that takes time, and money, and people. Plus they have to find a new place to house a squadron while they do that.”

She watched them soak that up for a second. She took a deep breath and cast caution to the wind.

“I’m not fighting a military war here, people,” she said, a deadly earnest note creeping into her tone. “This is an economic and political one. My tools of diplomacy happen to be you, but make no mistake, this is about costing them a lot of time, energy, and resources. You kill a pilot, they have to train a new one. You cripple a station, they have to fix it. You raid a planet, all the others get nervous.”

“But bombing civilians?” another pilot asked. He was a tall, blond, viking–looking fellow, one of
Jouster’s
two wingmates.

Jessica thought about the information in his file. Friedhelm Hannes Förstner. Call sign
Uller
. A polite young gentleman serving honorably with his enemies, whose family had made it out of the
Fribourg Empire
one step ahead of being arrested and disappeared for being politically unsavory.

“Surprise,
Uller
, is an event that takes place in the enemy commander’s mind,” she replied, reducing the conversation to just the two of them. It was a trick Kasum had taught her. “We just may end up dropping a very large bomb on
2218 Svati Prime
, but we won’t be hitting any cities with it. We will be doing something far more important.”

She paused, watched him gulp slightly, nod at her.

“We will be destroying their peace of mind.”

Chapter XVI

Imperial Founding: 170/11/14. Imperial Traffic Control. 2218 Svati Prime system

His bags were packed, waiting patiently for him in the broom closet. All he had to do was grab them, bip down to the transit station, and catch the next shuttle down to the surface of
Ao–Shun
, one hour and twenty–seven minutes from now.

Not that he was counting them.

Heaven forbid.

He was a good little Imperial bureaucrat, you know.

Work, work, work.

Tomas sipped his coffee and tried to stay awake. His shift ended in thirty–four minutes and then he had an entire three days off coming up.

Paradise.

Stereihofen, the capital, was in early summer right now. Pretty blond girls in barely–there swimwear, lounging on a beach. And redheads. And brunettes. And every flavor in between.

Tomas finished his coffee and stared at the bottom of the mug. More? Or maybe just catnap on the shuttle flight down?

Decisions, decisions.

His control board beeped once. It was the high tone, indicating that someone had just dropped out of Jumpspace and been picked up by the Traffic Control scanners.

Odd. He wasn’t expecting any more freighters today. The incoming arrival boards were clear for the next nineteen hours. Probably a yacht on an unscheduled run.

Maybe some pretty little debutante come out to enjoy the beach, and maybe several of her friends.
Ao–shun
wasn’t so small as to be insular, but the whole planet had a population of only about five million, heavily tilted towards men.

Tomas sighed. It was a downside of Imperial life that women weren’t considered strong enough, tough enough, to handle the kinds of heavy manual labor you got on a mining colony.