A railgun round spranged off the bulkhead above me and I ducked reflexively. From where she crouched on the other side of the hatch, Saya shot me a glare.
“Great call,Yen!” she shouted. “Oh, come on Saya, it’ll be an easy trip. Just a quick recon run and then you and I can relax at a luxury resort for a few days!” she waved her arms around, imitating me.
“Yeah yeah,” I said and blind fired at our assailants around the corner. I heard a grunt and one of the streams of bullets dried up. “I should have known that we wouldn’t get a nice break to just enjoy being together.”
The anger on her face, not really intended for me anyways, softened.
“Next time,” she said with a grin, “why don’t we just plan a trip together? I’m pretty sure we have enough combat hours to qualify for a good heap of extra leave.”
“You’d know, XO!” I said.
A plasma ball melted through part of the bulkhead I was crouched behind and I leapt away from the molten metal with a yelp.
“Who gave them plasma weapons all of a sudden?” I shouted. “Oh, I am done with this.”
I closed my eyes and drew in a deep, calming breath. Locke’s lessons echoed in my mind. “It’s called Focus, Dmitri. The first step is right there in the name.”
The rattle of gunfire and the yells and jeers coming from our pirate friends faded into a low bass rumble. I stood up, my motions feeling slow and exaggerated, like I was trying to move through a thick gel. I breathed out and opened my eyes. The lights in the hallway felt a little bit brighter, the grip of my gun felt a little rougher. I turned and stepped fully out of cover.
Our opponents weren’t even in cover and they seemed to be laughing uproariously. I couldn’t tell what the cause of their laughter was, seeing as how my perception of time had slowed way down. I felt myself grin and brought up my gun. I drew a careful bead on the first guy, pulled the trigger, held my arm perfectly still, and waited.
I had the disconcerting realization that I could see some of the pirate’s eyes slowly tracking my way. I finally saw the round leave the barrel of my gun and moved it to the next guy in line and repeated the process. More eyes were moving my way, along with a gun barrel now. I shifted my position along with where I was aiming this time.
There were only six of the pirates blocking our immediate way out, down from twelve at the start of all this, so it wasn’t long before I was crouched down next to Saya. I took another deep breath and let my Focus slip. There was a roar of noise and the sound of six bodies hitting the floor and my gun arm felt sore. Saya blinked at my sudden appearance in front of her.
“Gah!” she yelled. “I hate it when you do that weird shit.”
I waggled my eyebrows at her.
“Come on, you know you love me,” I said. She tried her best to glare at me, but I could see the smile growing. “Besides,” I added, “I cleared the door.”
She brought her hand up and cupped the side of my face.
“I knew there was a reason I kept you around,” she said. Then she lightly smacked my cheek. “Come on Yen,” she said. “Don’t keep your XO waiting.”
I held out a hand to help her up.
“Aye aye, ma’am!”
...
I’ll give it to LeMarque, for a wannabe crime lord, he has excellent taste. The core of the station had undergone a fairly massive remodel since the holos we had been shown in our briefing were taken. Instead of the fairly normal, ill-maintained, and kind of trashy interior of your typical pirate haven, Clew Bay was clean, luxurious if a touch gaudy, and above all, empty.
“It’s nice to see that self-preservation is just as strong an impulse as ever,” I murmured to Saya as we carefully walked through the station’s main promenade.
Saya shot me a grin.
“I’m just glad we were able to find the control panel to silence the decompression alarms,” she said.
I paused at a mural that stretched along one long, curved bulkhead.
“Ok,” I said, “this is just getting weird.”
Saya stopped.
“What’s getting weird?” she asked, stepping up next to me. “The mural?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “amongst other things.” I waved a hand around the promenade. “This place feels way too nice to be some basic pirate haven.” I pointed at the mural. “And this thing feels entirely out of place in a station inhabited just by criminals, or smugglers, or whatever. This feels like, I dunno, a civic works program from Surya.”
Saya cocked her head and gave the mural another look.
“No…” she started, “This doesn’t feel like a Surya thing. The lines are all wrong, too much neo-cubism, and the colors are way too muted for the art scene there.”
I gave her a long, confused look.
“What?!” she asked.
“How in the Mother’s name do you know all that art stuff?” I asked her, incredulous.
She glared and elbowed me in the ribs.
“I had a life before I met you, Dmitri,” she grumbled. “I grew up on Surya, remember?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I knew that. I didn’t know that you were an art critic.”
“I’m not!” she said. “I just…” she trailed off.
“Have a magnificent eye for color and detail,” came a foppish voice from behind us.
We both whirled, guns drawn. Behind us, leaning far too casually on the other side of the promenade, was a man in a flowing green cape, a white suit, and an almost comically large white hat with a golden feather in its brim. He slowly held up his hands.
“Easy now,” he said. “I’m under no illusion that I could take you two.”
He took a small step forward and dipped into a bow, one raised hand dipping off to his side in a flourish and the other sweeping his hat from his head.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, rising from the bow. “I am Adrian LeMarque, and I’m going to be king of the pirates!”
Saya and I looked at each other and burst into laughter. LeMarque looked offended.
“Individuals as skilled as the two of you clearly are must know that there exists something of a power vacuum at the moment, and all it would take to fill it-“
I put up a hand, forestalling anymore words from him.
“I’m, I’m sorry LeMarque,” I said through bursts of laughter. “We, uh, we’re…”
I broke down into laughter again.
“What my Captain here is trying to say,” Saya said, wiping away tears with her free hand, “Is that we weren’t sent here to stop you, or shut you down.”
“Kinda the opposite, really,” I said, holstering my pistol.
LeMarque looked confused.
“Just who, exactly, are you two?” He asked, resettling his hat on his head at a jaunty angle.
Saya and I exchanged a different glance. She shrugged.
“Well, I’m Dmitri Yen, captain of the TRS Moskva,” I said, “and this is my Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Saya Frost.”
LeMarque had gone rigid and I held up a hand.
“Relax, we’re not with any of the assholes that pulled the coup off. In point of fact, we’ve been a wrench in their gears ever since they kicked that off. I know it’s hard for any Freelancer to think this about us Terrans, but we’re with the good guys.”
“And, maybe more relevantly,” Saya said, “we’re here doing a favor for President McKenzie.”
LeMarque relaxed at that and strode over to us.
“And what exactly,” he said, “kind of favor warrants you decompressing part of my station and killing a heap of my security staff?”
I shrugged.
“Well, for starters, we didn’t decompress anything. We just convinced your station systems that we did.”
“And secondly,” Saya added, “we didn’t intend any of this to turn into a shoot out, but one of your security staff,” she made air quotes around security staff, “made unwanted advances on my boyfriend here and didn’t take no for an answer.”
She looked up at me and grinned the wolffish grin that I had first fallen in love with.
“We took exception to that,” she finished.
I smiled at her and turned back to the wannabe pirate king.
“If you check the security footage, you’ll notice they shot first,” I said. “But that’s neither here nor there. We acknowledge that we’ve made things difficult here for you, and we want to make it right.”
LeMarque leaned back at that, clearly surprised.
“Wait wait wait,” he started, waving a hand between us. “You two are in command of a super dreadnaught, you apparently have the confidence of old man McKenzie, and instead of making demands that you know I would have to accept, you admit that you messed up and you want to fix it?” He looked genuinely baffled. “What’s the angle you’re playing here?”
I stifled another laugh as his foppish accent faded into a more recognizable Gaelian accent.
“No angle,” Saya said. “Dmitri is telling you the truth. We’re here to scope out what the station is like with you in charge, and if it seems like an improvement, then we were authorized to relay a message from President McKenzie.”
LeMarque glared at us both in turn and crossed his arms over his chest.
“So what’s the message?” He demanded.
I held up a hand.
“Not so fast,” I said. “We relay the message at our discretion and I have two very important questions for you first.”
LeMarque threw up his hands.
“I thought you two said you owed me!” He cried.
“Easy, pirate king,” Saya said. “We’ll square that debt once we get our initial review wrapped up.”
God I love it when she just rolls with the bullshit I spin out.
“Fine,” LeMarque groused. “What are your two questions?”
I screwed my face up into a serious look as I nodded.
“Right,” I said. “First question: you seem to be running a tight ship here. Your people seem genuinely happy, you’ve cleaned things up, both figuratively and literally. So why the hell do you let your security staff run around trying to shake people down and generally abuse their positions?”
LeMarque grimaced but his fop accent slid back in place.
“Ah,” he said, “that. Well, it turns out that there were a not insignificant number of preexisting contracts that the station had made before I took over, and I haven’t been able to terminate them yet.”
Saya scoffed.
“We did,” she said.
LeMarque gave her a look.
“That was not the kind of termination I had in mind,” he said.
Saya shrugged.
“And the bodies weren’t what I was referring to either,” she said, “though they will help. No, what I meant was that two Terran spies slipped on to your station, hacked at least one primary safety system, and then made these contractors look absolutely foolish in a running gun fight. We were outnumbered 6-to-1 at the start and we walked away without a scratch. That’s a massive enough failure to void any security contract.”
LeMarque gave her a more contemplative look.
“I’m going to go out on a limb,” he mused, “and guess that you weren’t planning on letting me have that advice for free?”
“We’ll get to it,” Saya said and gestured at me. “Dmitri has one last question for you first.”
I nodded and jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the mural.
“Why the public works stuff? And not just the mural. The whole interior has been cleaned up and redone. Why?”
LeMarque grinned, maybe the first genuine reaction he had given us yet, and he suddenly felt much closer to our age than he had initially.
“Pirate stations have this reputation, you know?” He asked. “They’re always supposed to be these dingy, poorly cleaned, and badly maintained places. The kind of stations where no one is ever surprised if they kill all of their inhabitants because of poor maintenance.”
Saya and I both nodded at that.
“That’s honestly what we were expecting here,” she said.
“Right!” He exclaimed. “Basically floating trash heaps! But, what if you could change that image? Old Cobalt Morgan and his kid made a great start with the Aurum over around Tortuga, but I always wondered, ‘what if someone did that on a wider scale?’ And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if you did it right, with the right backing, you could rise to the top of the heap pretty quick.”
“With the right backing, huh?” I said.
Saya and I grinned at each other. I turned back to LeMarque and gave him a cocky smile.
“Ok, we’re ready to relay a message and settle up our debt, but first, let me tell you what it’ll cost. If you’re good with that, we’ll proceed.”
...
Three hours later we were rocketing away from Clew Bay Station in our new ship, LeMarque’s laughter still ringing in our ears.
“McKenzie should be pleased with the outcome,” I said.
From the pilot’s seat Saya nodded as she worked the controls.
“One more ally for the fight and a little bit more stability on the wild end of Freelance space.” She turned and looked at me. “Our new little getaway ship here needs a new name.”
“What?” I said, feigning shock. “You don’t like the name Wanton Wench?” I ducked as the mug that had been sitting on the console rocketed towards my head. “Joke! Joke! It was a joke!”
“It better have been,” she grumbled.
“I already have a new name in mind, actually,” I said, sitting back up.
“If it has wench anywhere in the name, you’re gonna walk home.”
I laughed.
“Don’t worry, it doesn’t.”
“So what is it then?”
“Dardanelles.”
“Oh, good choice,” she said, a smile stretching across her face. “Hellespont, Gallipoli, the road to Constantinople. Nice.”
The ship gave a little kick and we dove into subspace, being flung across space at many times C. Saya pushed her seat back on its tracks and stretched. I stood up and offered her a hand.
“Want to take a tour of our new ship?”
Saya grinned, grabbed my hand, and pulled herself up and against me.
“Absolutely! Wanna start in the cabin?”
...
Much later, I stretched and gave a contented yawn. Saya was curled up beside me under the rumpled sheets.
“So, just based on our very brief tour,” she murmured softly, “I think I like this particular resort you picked out.”
I planted a kiss on her forehead.
“Well, I’ll admit, it turned out much nicer than I expected.”
“My Dad’s gonna flip when he hears that we used one of his tricks.”
I leaned off the bed and rooted around in the pile of clothes for a second until my hands closed on a small box. I took a deep breath.
“Wanna give him something else to flip about?” I asked and held out the ring.
From Matt:
I love my Moskva kids so damn much, and I wanted a chance to show two of them off. This short story is set after the Fall, and probably after the Battle of Earth, though it could also happen while the Moskva is being refit in the CNK Breaker Yards. Dmitri has received some training in Focus by this point, at least enough that he can speed himself up and has more or less mastered his Velyki weapon.
I'm sure we'll see these kids again.