First Command (23 page)

* * * * *

      
Steven Maynard conducted a captains’ conference in his main conference room on Barataria.
 
He was a medium-sized, but big muscled man in his late fifties.
 
The deference paid to him was due to his ability to guarantee good captures/profit and a safe haven in which to enjoy them, more than anything else.
 
He was not about to disappoint them now that things had slowed down.

      
“Looks like we’ll need to shift our operations to in-spiral for a while.
 
The Rigel to Aldebaran run is starting to dry up.
 
We’re seeing too many armed escorts and convoys since that last container ship that the Leviathan brought in.
 
The passenger liner captured today was a fluke.
 
Even our attempt to infiltrate a few of our ships into the escort fleet isn’t paying off any more.
 
Captain Craig, brief us on that route you were surveying to get us out to the Perseus sector.”

      
Captain Sam Craig got up from his chair and motioned for the terminal operator to bring up his plot.
 
The lights dimmed and a 3-D view of the star cluster appeared before them in the center of the table.
 
As the image built, several red paths from Barataria led out, but all terminated before reaching the edge of the field.
 
One crooked blue path led all the way through the field and out into space in the K’Rang end of the Perseus sector, where several green lines stretched from system to system.
 
Several systems were highlighted in orange or yellow.

      
“As you can see, I’ve successfully piloted my ship out of the star cluster into the edge of the Perseus sector, represented by this blue line.
 
It’s our back door into the K’Rang Empire.
 
I’ve done a sensor scan and found several cargo runs that would be worth our while, shown here in green.
 
There are at least ten runs here that would provide us with good captures.
 
The best point is that these here, here, and here, marked in orange, are new worlds and get a lot of high tech and machinery cargos.
 
The two more developed systems here and here, marked in yellow, get a lot of deliveries from outside the sector that will be on the edges of our ability to patrol, but high value enough to make it worth our while.”

      
The captains murmured at Captain Craig’s comments, with hungry looks in their eyes.

      
Steven Maynard signaled for quiet.
 
“Thank you, Captain Craig.
 
Gentlemen and ladies, we will need to harvest this new area carefully.
 
If we continue to hit the Rigel to Aldebaran run selectively and develop this new area as well, we can all live very well for as long as we remain smart.
 
In addition, we might find fertile markets for trade between the empires.
 
I’m sure there are many that would pay top dollar for proscribed goods from the other empire.”

      
Maynard brought the meeting to a close and the captains drifted off in ones and twos.
 
Captain Craig and Captain Chang, captain of the Leviathan, remained behind.

      
“Steven, this path I found is just barely large enough for the Leviathan to make it through.
 
If the navigators get sloppy, we could lose her to a gravity eddy.”

      
Captain Chang, a grizzled man in his early sixties, bristled at the comment.
 
“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have any sloppy navigators, then.”

      
Captain Craig turned to his fellow captain and said, “Lee, that’s not it.
 
It’s just that we all have so much invested in your ship and depend on it so much.
 
I just want to make sure you understand the risk.”

      
“It’s all right, Ron, I understand your concern.
 
I think once we fit the new thrusters we’ll pull off that container ship I brought in, she’ll pirouette in space like a ballerina.”

      
“Pirouette?” laughed Maynard.
 
“That I’ll need to see.”

      
All three left the conference room and went their separate ways, chuckling at the vision of a ship larger than a Fleet carrier twirling in space.

* * * * *

      
Maynard made his way to his private quarters on Helge’s Ridge.
 
He walked out onto his terrace and surveyed what he had built so far.
 
Below him lay a twelve-kilometer wide city, with over 300,000 members of the brotherhood and 100,000 captives.
 
It nestled in a valley between two medium mountain ranges and had all the facilities of a second tier world in the Galactic Republic.
 
Every resident, including captives, had private quarters, free medical care, entertainment of all types, and all the modern conveniences.

      
To the north was a spaceport that could handle any size atmospheric ship or spacecraft capable of landing on a planet’s surface.
 
The ancient artificial moon above them serviced all other ships and served as the wrecking yard for all captured ships.
 
Nothing went to waste.
 
The yards here were capable of stripping all the usable parts off the captured ships down to just structural members and rebuilding them in four different classes of ships.

      
The largest class was the Leviathan, named after the biblical sea beast that swallowed Jonah whole and spit him out again, and there was only one ship in the class.
 
The next two classes were torpedo ships designed for system defense.
 
The Scylla class was fast, almost a fighter, and capable of firing four homing torpedoes.
 
The Charybdis class was slower, but carried six torpedoes.
 
If the Galactic Republic ever ventured into the star cluster and got too close, they would find a swarm of torpedoes heading their way.
 
Maynard would prefer hypervelocity missiles, but the Fleet chips capable of guiding hypervelocity missiles were too closely guarded to acquire.

      
The final and most prevalent class was a combination patrol craft and marauder vessel.
 
It was fast, maneuverable, heavily armed for a ship of its size, and with a spacious cargo capacity.
 
The lead ship in the class, the Undefeated, was due back in a few days.
 
It was escorting a captured Galaxy class transport with some wealthy hostages.
 
The ransom would probably pay off the captain’s mortgage on the ship.

      
Life was good for Steven Maynard.
 
He had farms, mines, mills and factories, all at his command.
 
In a decade, after he populated this planet some more, he would deed a township to each of his captains, and expand outward where three habitable systems were awaiting settlers.
 
Steven had dreams of an empire, and he was well on his way.

      
He read the latest reports from the moon station and wondered how loudly Captain Mabry would yell when she found out he was taking her pilot to captain his latest Undefeated class ship coming off the ways.
 
He’d probably have to give her a bigger cut of the ransom to keep her from blowing up.
 
She was a good captain, but could be such a drama queen at times.

      
Steven remembered back thirty years, when the idea of Barataria first occurred to him.
 
It was back when the Algol-Aldebaran conflict was simmering over control of the high iron asteroids in the local fields.
 
Iron was needed to make the steel required for high-rise buildings, combat ships, and other requirements of developing worlds.

      
Steve captained the Survey Ship Pericles and was always looking for contracts.
 
The Pericles had been a wedding present from his industrialist father-in-law.
 
It was meant to provide Steven with an income suitable to keep his father-in-law’s little girl in a manner to which she was accustomed.
 
Unfortunately, she was accustomed to more attention than a wandering survey captain could provide.
 
One of her lovers was the jealous type and, when she wouldn’t leave Steven for him, killed them both in a murder-suicide.
 
Steven returned home, buried his wife, sold all their belongings and left to make his life among the stars.

      
He found that contracting for survey work in a conflict zone was profitable but tricky work.
 
Both sides had hired privateers who were not always scrupulous when it came to deciding what was or wasn’t an enemy vessel.
 
Steven had some medium plasma guns in hidden mounts fitted in the Pericles, to give him a chance.

      
One day, he was working a survey contract for an Aldebaran conglomerate in dire need of certain minerals.
 
Steven was picking his way through an asteroid field, doing remote assay work looking for high concentrations of the minerals in question.

      
An Algolian privateer happened upon him and called for him to heave to and be boarded for inspection.
 
Knowing that his Aldebaran contract would brand him an enemy vessel, he allowed the privateer to get close and then cut him in two with his guns.
 
Unfortunately, the privateer wasn’t alone and Steven found himself in a four hour running gun battle.
 
His ship thrusters gave him an advantage in being able to run up to full speed then face rearward to fire.
 
It kept the privateer back and gave Steven running room, but he needed to find someplace to get away, to hide and wait out this tenacious captain.
 
As he ran along the face of the Pleiades Star Cluster, he thought he saw a pathway inside.
 
He turned in against the wishes of his crew and, surprisingly his ship wasn’t crushed by the gravity or swept into an eddy never to be seen again.

      
The privateer chose not to follow him, but waited at the spot the Pericles entered.
 
With his exit closed, Steven led his ship further into the star cluster, looking for an alternate way out.
 
He did not find another way out, but he did find something wondrous – an abandoned habitable world.

      
Steven spent three days conducting a full survey of this empty planet, hoping their friend waiting outside would tire and go away.
 
It was a Class M planet orbiting within the Goldilocks zone, where the effects of solar radiation were not too cold, not too hot, but just right for human habitation.
 
He found scattered ruins and an artificial moon from an ancient and long absent society.
 
He couldn’t tell if they had abandoned the world or died off.
 
In fact, he found no physical evidence, no bones or images, beyond the ruins, that there had ever been sentient beings on the planet.
 
He estimated that it had been millennia since the planet had been occupied.

      
His exploration of the artificial moon found it to be fully functional.
 
Thankfully, the old civilization used pictures for labeling their controls; so most functions were easily discernable.
 
One of his engineers found the controls to pressurize the workspaces and did so.
 
The air was musty, but breathable.
 
It gave them freedom to explore the space station and discover its secrets.
 
What they found was a shipyard capable of building and repairing medium-sized ships like the Pericles or their privateer friend waiting outside.

      
Steven was considering the best way to profit from this discovery, when one of his crew suggested that their food was getting low and the pirate at the gate wouldn’t have long to wait before they had to replenish their stocks.
 
He mused how the privateer would probably love to have a hole like this to duck into when things got too hot on the outside.

      
Steven grasped onto this idea as a way out of their current predicament.
 
He saw it through to its logical conclusion.
 
He could offer to populate this world with a society of pirates.
 
It had fertile land for bountiful crops and raising livestock.
 
It had space for large estates and city houses.
 
Steven saw the draw this planet could have for the right clientele.

      
Steven prepared a sales pitch to use on their tenacious friend still waiting outside.
 
He ran it by his crew and they were all for it.
 
Land on developed worlds was expensive and hard to come by.
 
Land on new words was limited by Galactic Republic environmental and settlement bureau red tape.
 
Here was as much land as one could want.
 
A man could claim a whole continent if he had a mind to.