Unfair, page 13
“Of course you can. The main problem is what to do with the debris, and how bad I hurt the freighter.”
“I can see in the bridge windows,” said Darren. “There’s someone standing there miming choking. That suggests their life support is down.”
“Three torpedoes up the arse shouldn’t have hurt them that much.”
“They might be trying to lure us into boarding,” said Doug. “I might even be tempted if I had combat droids in my airlock.”
“We still can, but I’m not sure I want to.” I looked at Aisha. “Can you jump them back to your shipyard, and deal with them there?”
“For a fee. Otherwise it’s my salvage.”
“Fine. Take the fee out of the sell price on the ship, assuming we get it adjudicated to us.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then just bill me. In any case, if they genuinely don’t have life support, then they need to be taken somewhere with air in a hurry.”
“Or you put repair droids on board.”
“Or I could do that, but that also means opening this ship up to them boarding us. It’s not as if we have a decent sized shuttle for boarding operations, so I’d have to dock with their main airlock.”
“Up to you.”
“Jump them to wherever you want to put them. If we need to, we can always bring the ship and crew back.”
“I can hold them pending those decisions being made. But I seriously doubt the ship will be going anywhere. I may need to send the crew back into local custody though, but we’ll see how that goes. It’s almost certain they’ll have cargo needing to be returned.”
A moment later a dot appeared on the navmap near the freighter. It vanished again, appeared right on the freighter, and then both vanished.
“I’ll send the tug back for the debris,” she went on. “You’re almost done, and one sled should be able to handle it all.”
“Thanks, I guess. Do you do this for everyone?”
“Only those who bought ships from me, and attract this sort of attention.”
“So a lot?”
She laughed, touched her belt buckle, and vanished. The salvage droids finished a few minutes later, and the tug came back, taking all the debris from them. As she’d said, it was easily one sled’s worth. It vanished again, the salvage droids started back, and I told my fighters to RTB.
With only a half hour delay, we were back on course.
Twenty Nine
Several hours later, the ship was adjudicated to us.
But as well as the fee to jump the ship out, we were also billed for jumping the remaining crew back to a designated station, along with the sealed cargo. Between three jumps, people containment, and cargo handling, that was a solid fee which would come off the sale of a damaged ship.
To offset that, the bounties on the crew and ship came in just before dinner, along with a ‘no comment’ from the Mercenary Guild as to why they’d ambushed us. But I had the impression there’d been an actual hit contract taken out on us by someone, and the dark mercs had accepted the contract. It made me wonder how often that sort of thing happened, and if the merc teams actually got pitted against each other on a regular basis.
We were all in the mess for dinner, but there wasn’t much to be said. I think we were all missing the pilot’s mess atmosphere after a successful mission, but maybe we were hitting the limit on small talk between us already.
After, we moved the shares together, and just before we could break up to individual evening plans, two people appeared.
“Got a minute?” asked Aisha.
“I guess,” I said, looking at Leanne Waters, and wondering why she was here.
The two of them took seats where the water feature wouldn’t hide them from anyone.
“You damaged that freighter pretty badly,” said Aisha. “It will sell readily, but whoever buys it will have to rebuild the engines and power supply. Couldn’t you have hit it somewhere else?”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything other than stopping it jumping out.”
The two of them looked at each other, and the sighs were implied.
“What’s going on?” asked Darren. “So it was a messy kill. Why does that matter?”
“Because you could have achieved the same thing in better ways,” said Leanne.
“I don’t see how,” I told her, with the others nodding.
“And that’s your problem. All of you.”
“Sorry, what?” asked Tom.
“You don’t see. You’re not asking the right questions, and so missing out on things, or doing them the wrong way.”
“Such as?” I asked.
“You upgraded your cargo bay cams today. Good call, but it never occurred to any of you there were other upgrades you could do?”
“Why would there be?” asked Nyle.
“Exactly my point. All six of you feel hard done by, don’t you?”
“If you mean by being booted out of the military,” I said, “then yes.”
“Unfair was the word you used with me. But none of you have really thought about why it happened.”
“We know why it happened. And it was unfair.”
“No, it wasn’t. Take you two for example.” She looked at Doug and Tom. “You were both average pilots who were never going to make flight leader. Your kill to ship loss and damage ratio was good enough to keep your jobs, but then the Imperium broke up, and you went home. Both the American and British forces kept their successful squadron leaders and flight lieutenants, and the pilots on track to make flight lieutenant, and they downsized the rest. That was unlucky for you, but hardly unfair.”
Tom looked unhappy, but nodded. Doug just stared at her. She looked at the other four of us.
“You three were pretty much in the same situation. You were not on track for flight lieutenant, your kill to ship loss and damage ratio was only adequate, and then you were involved in a wing sized loss, resulting in AI’s refusing to fly with you again, and no-one else wanting to either. But the biggest thing for all five of you is you simply don’t see what good flight lieutenants see. That was always going to restrict your careers. It’s not unfair, it’s just reality.”
“And me?” I asked, not sure I really wanted the answer.
“You see more than they do, but you were promoted to squadron leader because we needed more after the Imperium broke up, and it was hoped you could be trained up into that level of awareness. Instead, you just continued on with a flight leader’s awareness, and were closely supervised. And you’d have been fine, except you started grousing about not getting enough independence, and they sent you to Wing Commander Pound’s command, because she needed someone like that.”
She paused as I flinched at the name being used.
“Instead of showing you had what it took, you told flight leaders who saw more than you did to shut up, and led your double squadron into a trap you decided to ignore. I know you blame Knight Space Marshal Pound for being dismissed, but she only put two words on your file, and left it up to those above her to decide your fate. But it was you who did that, when all four of you failed to take any accountability for what happened on yourselves. It wasn’t unfair, it was your own shortcomings that bit you in the arse.”
I think we all felt a bit angry now, but I stopped myself from saying anything.
“That being said, you are coming together as a decent flight now, and maybe, just maybe, you’re all starting to grow a bit. But you seriously can’t see what is in front of your faces, and while Aisha and I don’t want to see you get killed, there’s a limit to how much we can do to help. Jane as well. The three of us try to help anyone having to start again, but you have to want to be helped.”
“And you six,” added Aisha, “are clueless.”
“That’s…”
“Unfair? Why? You made the connection to the outdated cams, but completely missed the rest.”
“What rest?” asked Darren.
“You see? That’s what we mean. How old is this ship?”
“About four years?” I suggested.
“Yes. And the cams were, and for most of them, still are, outdated. The software was outdated as well. What does that suggest?”
We all looked at each other with puzzled looks.
“Likewise,” said Leanne, “your fighters are nearly two years old. What does that suggest to you?”
“They can’t be that out of date,” I said. “Four years for a ship is still young.”
“Not when you take into account the advances made in that time. There’ve been multiple wars in that time, and war advances tech.”
“How would we know that?” asked Brook.
“You all flew Excalibur Fours back in the day. How do they fly now?”
“The same,” said Doug.
“Exactly.”
“Are you suggesting they shouldn’t?” asked Darren.
“I’m saying that none of you had the initiative to find out what upgrades were available. And that is an example of why you’re mercs now, and not still military fighter pilots.”
“We didn’t have the…” started Tom.
“Funds to do upgrades?” He nodded. “You and Doug would have been cutting things fine, but the other four certainly wouldn’t have been. And once you sold that first ship, you all had the funds to do anything. Yet you didn’t. We had to tell you to get more combat droids.”
“I did the cams,” I said.
“Sure, but have you begun looking at what else?”
“No, and now is probably not a good time.”
“When else?”
I didn’t have an answer to that. I tried to change the subject.
“What was wrong about me torpedoing that freighter this afternoon?”
“Nothing about torpedoing it, but where you torpedoed it is the issue. You went for easy, instead of smart.”
“Explain that,” demanded Darren.
“In some ways it’s a shame you didn’t get a couple of days with Liza Pound before your near fatal episode happened. She’d have taught you how to do this properly.”
“Do what?” I demanded.
“Have you wondered how she was able to pay you so much for breaking your contract?”
“I did wonder a bit,” said Nyle. “But there was no way of knowing.”
“You could have asked. On the day the Black Sheep Squadron was almost wiped out, she and her other forces sent more than fifty ships back to Thorn’s World.”
She emphasised the fifty, and we all startled badly. With what we’d got for the last freighter, that was a serious fortune, and did explain what we’d received of it.
“And all of them were very lightly damaged. Granted the foxes didn’t seem to know what a bulkhead was, but all her people were doing was poking a hole in them, and letting the crews die, then collecting the ships. The first carrier she obtained was bought after they poked a single hole in a Keerah Battleship, and destroyed its control nexus. Then they took the ship with marines. One very lightly damaged battleship was used to buy a fleet carrier with.”
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“I’m saying that the specs for every freighter used at this end of space is in your database, and finding a good spot to disable them should be relatively easy to do, given once the fighters were killed, the freighter couldn’t escape you.”
“And we’re saying,” added Aisha, “that a lot of your issues here have solutions, if you’d only ask the right questions, and do some research.”
“For example?” asked Darren.
“You all missed your hollos this afternoon, didn’t you?”
We looked at each other. Tom and Nyle nodded. I had myself, but didn’t give any indication of it.
“So?” I asked.
“Hollo tech is not League military tech.”
“Whose is it then?”
“Corona. And they sell it to anyone.”
That surprised me. And yet, it shouldn’t have. The meerkats were the masters of hollo tech, and everyone knew that. But it had never occurred to me they sold it to anyone but governments.
“We’ll look for it,” I said, looking at Darren, who nodded.
“There’s also older military tech on the market,” said Leanne, “if you ask in the right places. It scales up in price as the usefulness grows, but you’re past the point where you need to be concerned about running out of credits. And you should be more concerned about being ambushed again.”
“Ask who?” asked Darren.
“You need to work that out yourselves. You were told as ex-Imperium and League pilots you had access to some military tech. You’ve not followed up on that at all. In fact, you’ve done nothing about ensuring your own survival that wasn’t pushed at you first.”
“So why are you telling us all this now?” I asked.
“Because someone here wants you dead, and you’ve all got chips on your shoulders blinding you to reality. You’re overdue for some truth, and before it kills you. And as we said, we don’t want to see you getting killed when you can avoid it.”
“We’re doing alright,” said Brook, sounding hurt, and very defensive.
“You think you are. But you’re walking a tightrope over an abyss, when you don’t need to be.”
“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” muttered Doug.
“Maybe so, but now’s the time for you to decide if you want to be an effective mercenary squadron, or you’re just going to react to others taking pot shots at you all the time, until someone actually scores.”
“And how do we do that?” I asked.
“Talk it out among yourselves. Once you start really thinking, you should work that out.”
“That’s a lot of help,” said Brook, who I could see wasn’t interested in thinking about any of it at all.
On the other hand, Darren and Nyle were looking thoughtful, and Doug and Tom were looking at them.
“Noted,” I said. “Anything else you want dump on us?”
“No, that was all,” said Aisha.
The two of them rose, and looked expectantly at us.
“Sell the freighter for whatever you can get,” I said, “and we’ll be in touch if we need anything more.”
The two of them looked at each other, then both touched their jump buttons at the same time, and vanished.
“I wonder if the jump buttons are for sale,” asked Brook.
Thirty
The jump buttons were not for sale.
No surprise there. But Brook was the only one to ask anything that night. We’d separated just after the two avatars had left, everyone to think about what had been said, with the understanding we’d talk about it at breakfast. We had one jump to do during the night, and breakfast would be late.
I went back to the bridge, and checked for the spec of the freighter I’d torpedoed. And found it. There was enough there to suggest places where I could’ve hit it, and the result would have been the same. Like the ship’s computer. Take that out, and everything fails, or becomes totally manual to operate.
It sounded like a high price item to replace, but I was wrong. The engines and power generators of a freighter that size were significantly more expensive to replace than a computer room. In fact, I’d probably hit it in the worst possible place out of sheer ignorance. But then again, this was part of our learning curve, and at this point, the credits wasn’t an issue for me.
And thinking about it, once the fighters had been destroyed, I could have taken all the time I wanted to figure out where to hit the freighter, and what with, to disable it without doing major damage. I might have had to jump back to the previous system to catch them, but we had the legs on pretty well everything out here, even if not by much in some cases. Ten minutes studying a plan was not going to change the outcome for them, just delay it a bit.
That led me to think about Camel. The cam system had needed upgrading. What else did? I’d assumed a four year old ship was up to date, and that the previous owners had kept it that way. But once I started looking, I found nothing had been updated since it’d left the Japanese shipyard.
When I requested a list of possible upgrades from the Thorn’s World shipyard, what came back left me speechless. More than half of it required an actual shipyard, but there were upgrades to all the launchers available, the thrusters, power generators, and of course, the ship computer itself. Most of the software for running the ship was out of date, including the turret auto-fire routines.
There was even a complete conversion available, removing most of the accommodation areas, and replacing them with better and more shield emitters, the power to run them, and what was most amazing, one of the small crystals the League used to augment power generators. All that needed a shipyard and a major rebuild inside, but the resulting corvette would perform like a destroyer, and with likewise updated guns. But for what all that cost, you could buy an old destroyer. Or a Q-ship. But if I was alone, it maybe was worth considering.
Replacing the ship computer while not in a shipyard was out of the question, but the software could be updated. So I started making a list of what was recommended that I thought should be. Pretty obvious on the list was scanner software, although without updating the hardware, there was only so far it could be software upgraded. All the same, it was worth doing. I added the turret firing update without even thinking about it. There was even an upgrade to the guild interface software.
Time flies when you’re engrossed, and instead of going to bed, I ended up still on the bridge when the others emerged ready to launch for the next jump point. We went through fast as we’d done last time, but there was nothing there to worry us. But I could see Darren was worried about something, even though he said nothing.
Back on course to the next jump point, we all went to bed this time. I slept solidly, and woke up when the ship computer bleeped me awake for the next jump point. There was nothing waiting there either, and I went to breakfast feeling a bit lighter. I’d woken thinking maybe the last ambush had merely been someone else wanting our cargo, and it hadn’t been about us at all. But I also had the feeling that was just wishful thinking.
The others were more animated this morning, but it seemed only Darren had been thinking about what we needed. I mentioned software upgrades for Camel, and suggested they check on what upgrades were available for their Excaliburs. It was possible that some of what went into the Spitfire, might still be compatible with the Fours. If not the Spitfire, then the Excalibur Six.
