Birthright: Battle for the Confederation- Pursuit (6 page)

"Recap?" Elco asked as he
opened the document on a data pad.

"The diplomatic mission is a cover
for our tasking to find illegal, underground Artificial Intelligences and use
that information to discover and retrieve a weapon to destroy the Primans and
win the war."

"Hmmm," Elco grunted as he
scanned the text on the screen in front of him.  "Anything else?  Cure for
aging or bad breath, perhaps?"

Loren laughed.  "He didn't want to
overburden us."

Elco looked up from the pad and looked at
Loren with raised eyebrows.   "He's serious?"

"Well," Loren replied, "he
says he has some good leads.  They'll need to be thoroughly run down, but I get
the feeling he had enough tidbits put together that he thought it was time to
let somebody have a crack at it."

Elco just grunted again as he took a sip
of his drink, then swirled the liquid in the glass as he looked at the
compartment's ceiling while doing some mental math.  "Rough numbers here;
the first place Admiral Bak wants us to go is already past the arm and into the
main galactic disc, through occupied Priman territory.  It'll take almost a
week at our max cruise speed to get there.  He really wants us to just wander
around and hope for the best, eh?"

"I think he has a lot of faith in
us," Loren countered.  "The problem is that I also think he assumes
we can perform miracles.  But, I figure we might as well give it a shot."

Elco grinned as he got up and walked to
his desk, toggling a comm line to the bridge. 

"Bridge, Mastruk here," came
the reply from Sarria Mastruk, the female Drisk who was Loren's subordinate in
C3, placing her third in line to command the ship.

"New orders, Lieutenant
Commander," began Elco.  "Set a course for the Reshing system, max
cruise power.  Plot a course around known Priman occupied areas and engage. 
I'll be up in a few minutes to review the plot.  And no, I'm not messing with
you."

To her credit, she barely missed a beat. 
"Understood, Captain.  Best speed to Reshing."

Elco severed the connection and
contemplated the remains of the brandy he’d be unable to finish anytime soon. 
He set it down on the table next to Loren’s own unfinished glass and headed for
the hatch.  "One day I'll be able to go a complete night without some
horrible crisis or situation of impending doom dragging me back out of my
quarters."

"But then what would you do with all
that free time?" asked Loren innocently as they walked out into the
corridor.

A full day later, Web was trying to look
casual and carefree as he sat at the bar of a crowded restaurant on the planet
Eras, a predominantly tourism-based planet with beautiful beaches, lush green
forests, and majestic white-capped mountains.  His orders had merely said to go
to the planet, turn over the transport at the Confed port facility, then obtain
civilian clothes and proceed to this bar at this time to meet up with whoever
had decided he should be a part of this scatterbrained op.  Something told him
he knew who this person was, and he deeply hoped he was right. 

He'd actually been here before, on his
last real leave before the Primans had invaded.  It seemed like a lot longer
than about two years ago, but he could also think of all the things that had
changed since then.

"What can I get you?" asked the
bartender, an attractive human woman about Web's age.

"I'll give it a few minutes until my
girlfriend gets here, then we'll order together," he said with a smile. 
She returned it, and then spun off to the next customer.

"I sure hope that means you deduced
I had asked for you to be on this mission and not that you were meeting another
woman," he heard a voice say behind him.

"I know better than to think I could
hide something from you," he said lightly, receiving a jab in the kidney
in response. "Not that I could ever conceive of such a thing."

He turned around and stood up, walking a
half step into the outstretched arms of Halley Pascal.  The athletic, dark
haired woman grabbed him tightly, then separated herself and kissed him,
letting it linger no longer than would be considered appropriate in public. 
Part of Web's still-rational brain wondered if she knew what the average time
that a public display of affection was considered to be appropriate.

She guided them back onto their bar
stools and motioned the bartender over.  They ordered, the woman quickly
returning with their drinks, and as soon as the bartender was out of earshot,
Halley turned to Web and talked softly enough that he could barely hear.

"So, what's new?" she said with
a smile.

"Nothing much," he replied. 
"Just got some crazy, vague orders to report here and become part of a
team to retrieve some very special jewelry from our invading friends."

"Hmm," she mused.  "I have
orders just like that.  Except I got to write them myself."  She gave him
an uncharacteristically serious look.  "I need a crew of two for this. 
Couple of reasons, but it boils down to the fact that two people are better
than just me.  Since SAR troops are in short supply and only the tip-of-the-top
officers in the SAR chain of command even know about the ring data, they
obviously don't want to read anyone new in on this.  So, I had an excellent
opportunity to suggest the name of someone I know who has skills, knowledge, and
ability who would love to help out."

"You forgot handsome and
great-smelling," Web cautioned.

"Oh, I wasn't talking about you. 
You were my fourth choice."

Web grabbed her hand and squeezed as he
smiled warmly.  "You're paying for your own drink."

She squeezed his hand back.  "Let's
get rolling.  We need to get you some clothes and supplies.  Then I'll fill you
in on what we're going to be up to.  But first, I have procured a room in a
fairly posh hotel near here.  I was hoping you'd help me sweep it for
bugs."

Web started breathing faster at her
tone.  "We should start by checking each other out thoroughly."

"Excellent thinking."

CHAPTER
4

The morning after they'd started on their
run to the Reshing system, Loren had wandered the corridors of Avenger, idly
roaming the passages of his ship; something he hadn't been able to do much as
of late.  He knew it was good for the crew to see him stop by and check in on
their duty stations, wherever they may be.  It was also nice to be able to
inspect the ship in an unhurried manner; he'd spent a lot of time lately
quickly checking and signing off on under-way repairs, supervising the effort
to keep the ship in battle worthy condition and ready to engage the Primans
wherever they were found.

Operating solo, without the presence of a
well rounded task force, was not the nerve wracking experience to Loren that it
would have been if he'd been the XO of a different class of ship.  While every
other Confed design was geared towards filling a specific role and creating a
well-rounded fleet, the Crusader class hunter/killers were meant to roam alone,
sneaking up on targets and hitting them where they felt safe.  Loren felt back
in his element.

Finally, his travels brought him back to
C3, the Combat Control Center of Avenger.  From here, he helped the captain
fight the ship.  Loren was in charge of making sure the laser batteries fired
on the appropriate targets, torpedoes were launched and guided true, damage
control was organized and the twenty-four fighter craft aboard were put to good
use.  C3 was also the secondary control point for the ship; should the bridge
be destroyed, he could seamlessly take over command from his station.

He nodded to Lieutenant Commander Sarria
Mastruk, the talented Drisk woman who served as his own XO and ran the place in
his absence.  He turned and stepped down off the command platform and headed
towards the aft of the command tower, the rear of his little domain.  There was
contained a briefing room that spanned the full width of the space; it was
where the captain or anyone else went to conduct in-person briefings, and also
where the senior officers could get a little peace and quiet if decisions
needed to be made.

"Commander," Loren heard as he
entered the space and saw Captain Elco at his customary port-side conference
table.

Captain Elco gestured him over and
pointed to a seat across from him, which Loren occupied with a weary thud.

"Thinking longingly of the days when
our biggest worry was what kind of parking orbit we'd get for planetary shore
leave?" Elco mused.

"Yeah," Loren replied with a
grin, "when I was just a lowly old CAG and only had a few dozen people to
worry about."

"Welcome to my world." Elco
returned the grin.  "Anything on your mind?"

"Just wondering if we've heard back
from the folks in the Reshing system yet."

Captain Elco pursed his lips and nodded
absently as he searched for a data pad among the small collection by him on the
table.  "I find it amusing at the least that we needed to file an
itinerary with Naval Command for the benefit of our political overseers,"
Elco grumbled as he glanced at the pads, obviously looking for something
specific.  "I can see how it would help grease the wheels with the
politicians to hear that we'll be calling on them, but it's a big galaxy out
there and foreign parties show up at other people's borders all the time and
ask for an audience.  It's going to make it a little bit difficult to explain
to the elected officials why we might be lingering in any particular place if
we're covertly running down a lead for the Admiral." 

"How are the engines?" Loren
wanted to know, changing the subject.  Running at 100% for days on end was not
exactly the norm.

"Chief Fyr is mildly
perturbed," Elco replied, "but he assures me the engines can take it
for as long as we need to."

Elco finally found the pad he was looking
for and handed it to Loren.

"Latest readiness reports and
FITREPs to be filled out for those that are due," Elco said with a smile. 
"I didn't want you to get bored in the next four days, so you can just
have a ball with that."

Loren looked at the data pad as if it
were covered in something particularly toxic.  "I strive to be useful,
Captain," he said with a straight face.

Halley had filled Web in on their
mission, and it was going to be interesting to say the least.  That was two
days ago, and now Web stood at the crew hatch that connected the massive deep
space transport to the orbital station he was standing on.

"We need to get to Callidor,"
Halley had said in their hotel room as she sorted through a few duffel bags of
gear.  "Military transport is obviously out of the question; they have
that place locked down as tight as the first year female cadet dorms at the
Academy.  They're still letting some civilians in and out, mostly at the
Primans' own beck and call, but there is low volume civilian traffic to and
from the planet.  Still, their checks on those passengers are incredibly
thorough these days.  So, we're going to try something similar to the last time
you dropped by Callidor; we're going in as crew on a ship."

That brought Web here, to the cargo and
commercial transport levels of the giant orbital station.  He'd been given a
very convincing fake ID package and gotten a job as a cargo loadmaster's
apprentice aboard a deep space freighter.  These monstrous vessels carried all
manner of goods and services across the emptiness between inhabited systems. 
They were long; comparable to a Sabre class fleet carrier.  The ships featured
a relatively thin and spindly main body connecting a large bridge and
habitation module in front to the mass of engines stuck on the aft.  In
between, the ship was ringed with lozenge-shaped cargo pods.  When in port, the
cargo pods were simply grabbed and removed by the yard cranes and then sent on
their way.  They were then quickly replaced with another cargo pod which the
ship would carry on to wherever it needed to go.  Some companies, such as the
one Web was now working for, were complete operations; they carried the cargo
in deep space and then had their own infrastructure to take the pods down to
wherever their delivery point was, be it a planet, outpost, or in-orbit
transfer.

"You going to stand there
eye-humping that ship," Web heard a voice growl behind him, "or are
you going to get moving?"

"Just a minute; almost done,"
Web replied with a straight face.  "Ah.  Ok, I'm ready now."  He
turned to look the disagreeable arrival in the eyes and saw the grizzled face
and stained uniform of what he knew to be one of the lead mechanics onboard the
Solar Venturer, the ship he was about to board.

"Just be glad you're not working in
my department," the man grumbled as he brushed past Web.  They were
standing at the large viewport by the gangway hatch which gained them access to
the forward boarding tube.  With the nose of the giant ship nestled into the
docking claw, the rear of the ship was pointed out and away from the circular
station's core as it was tended by tugs that carried cargo pods, fuel cells,
and personnel around the area.  Web could see the ships on either side of the
Solar Venturer, and they were even larger than his own vessel.  And he
was
glad, in fact, that he wasn't working in the disagreeable
man's department.

Web eyed the hull of the vessel through
the viewports as he walked down the gangway to the main boarding hatch.  While
the ship was obviously a working vessel and carried its share of pitted hull
plates and patched panels, it also appeared that the captain and owners paid
some attention to keeping her in good shape.  Registry numbers were freshly
painted, all the external lighting worked, and as he walked into the main
airlock his first impression of the interior was that it was clean and tidy.

After checking in with the First Officer,
he made his way to his bunk.  As a junior loadmaster, he had to share a cabin
with one other person, who wasn't around when he got to his quarters.  Web
picked the bare bunk, seeing that one side of the room was very obviously lived
in, and stored his few things on his side.  That accomplished, he left the
compartment and started the long walk to the main cargo control center in the
middle of the ship's spine.

As he walked, he realized his first
impression of the ship was accurate.  The Solar Venturer was a worn but
cared-for ship, whose crew was for the most part professional and competent; at
least, that was the opinion he formed based on the behaviors and attitudes of
the various people he passed.

Eventually, he found the cargo control
center.  He found a crewwoman who pointed him to the department head, and after
introductions Web was given a brief tour.  Crew normally turned over a bit at
major ports due to work rules, schedules, and contracts that were just signed
or expiring.  The tour was well rehearsed and gave Web the high points.  Most
of the cargo work was automated, and they were not expected to care for the
contents of the containers themselves, just decide how the pods would be
arranged and supervise loading and unloading.

"The only thing I should tell you
that wasn't in the standard everything-is-wonderful employee handbook is the
pirate threat," finished the department head.

"Pirates?" Web asked
curiously.  He'd dealt with the issue several times as a Confed officer and was
accustomed to the concept, though the senior crewman must have taken Web's tone
for mild fear.

"Don't worry," he replied. 
"They haven't hit this company yet."  The man cleared his throat as
he stopped walking to inspect the readouts on a systems monitor mounted to the
bulkhead.  "There have been more sightings and a couple of attacks these
last few weeks," he continued.  "The problem is this damn civil war
among Confed.  Both sides are more worried about keeping an eye on each other
than holding up their end of the security we were promised in the Confed
charter, and system patrols are almost nonexistent.  So, the pirates have moved
in and they occasionally pick off a transport on the outskirts of a solar
system when we revert to real space to link up with inbound traffic
routes."

Web just nodded, trying to go through
what he remembered of his briefing on this part of space.  There was no major
player here, no one big cartel that ran things, which made the threat more
unpredictable.  Were the players out there after ransoms, theft of merchandise,
recruiting?  "What about system security forces?" he asked.

"They try, but most systems have
more than one arrival spacelane and to be honest, Confed usually dealt with
that.  They had destroyers all over the place scaring off the likes of them,
and most local systems just don't have the homegrown resources to cover that
need yet."

"Are we vulnerable?"

"No worse than anyone else,"
the department head replied.  "We have a pair of laser cannons, one on top
and one on the bottom.  A real warship probably wouldn't even raise shields if
they saw those things.  Hell, they'd probably be insulted.  But legally it's
all we can carry, and financially it's all we can manage.  We'll have to damn
near take them apart before we get to Callidor, too, or the Primans will blow
us away before we get past the first nav beacon.  But don't worry," he
said in closing, tapping the monitor and resuming his inspection, "there
are a lot of targets out there, and we're not even the biggest ship in the
sector."

A Priman task force hung motionless in
space, drives silent, passive sensors straining to pick up anything of
interest.  The ships straddled a trade route, and while they could have cared
less about commercial traffic, they were always on the lookout for
Confederation warships to attack.  To that end, they'd seeded the area with
gravity-generating mines, designed to destabilize hyperspace fields and
forcibly yank ships into real-space.

"The sector is still quiet,"
Captain Vol said to the woman sitting in the chair next to him.  She was middle
aged, and attractive in a severe sort of way.  She was also next in line to
become Commander, so he was always under the microscope, always being
evaluated.

"Hopefully that will change
soon," Representative Ravine replied.  She relished the idea of striking
some more hulls from the Confed register, no matter which side of this
ridiculous civil war they were on.  It really wasn't even much of a war; the
warriors on both sides had taken great pains to not enter decisive engagements,
much to the chagrin of their high leadership.  She shook her head again at the
nature of these beings.  If only they'd accept the guidance her people had to
offer, waste like this would be a thing of the past.

Ravine was about to say more when her
private message buffer beeped, signaling new orders for her.  She noticed that
Captain Vol's was clamoring for attention as well.  She read through the orders
twice just to be sure she hadn't made a mistake, then turned to her captain to
see the devious smile on his face.

"All we had to do was ask, it
seems," said Captain Vol as he sat up straighter in his chair.

"If I were allowed to write my own
orders," agreed Ravine, "this is what I would command us to
do."  She looked at her screen to review the message that she knew had to
have been obtained by their spies and agents inside the Confederation
government. 
CSS Avenger
on diplomatic mission outside of Confederation space with mission duration at
captain's discretion.  Avenger required to file itinerary.  Time at each
location is indeterminate, but ship is expected to follow filed route.  Observe
at least one port visit to verify routing, then destroy with all hands. 
Verification required by Psychological Operations Department for use in
Confederation
.