Petty Officer 3rd class Roisin Gabrielle Reynard-
The graduation from the three-month course was beyond anticlimactic. We didn’t march in review or even change out of our light-duty uniforms, we were simply called into our classrooms to discuss the results of our final written and final simulation exams. I was handed a new third-class eagle and my orders to report to a very odd ship at the Calintare shipyards, a quick handshake with the whole class, and then the school was simply...done.
There had been a few of us who’d been challenged, but not one of the inductees had been ‘sent back to the lines’ which was rather unusual for the class. We’d worked together closely, trying to help each other where we could, and I exchanged codes to keep in touch with those I’d worked most closely with, Learine, Taxon, and Kaxis, so we wouldn’t lose touch.
Then, we simply changed into low-order dress uniforms, which I’d had to have refitted yet again, and headed to the local node to move to our next commands.
The warrant officer, whom I’d learned was named Charlie David Wasserman, had been sent on detached duty almost two weeks earlier. On the one hand, that was disappointing, I’d missed his cool, reasonably friendly, supportive, and yet demanding presence, as well as his delicious aura, but on the other hand… well… I’d already grown an inch taller than the tallest goblin, and the changes I was going through were getting difficult to hide. I had a sneaking suspicion that Learine, at least, already knew the truth, at least part of it, but he kept mum and pretended he didn’t notice.
I couldn’t help but notice, however, that his handshake when we parted had been considerably warmer than I expected, and a small, intimate smile that didn’t exist when he had shaken hands with the rest of the pilots. “Seriously,” he’d said, “keep in touch… I cannot wait to find out what will happen when you come into your own.”
Honestly, I liked the guy, but that smile made me a little uncomfortable. I mean, sure, charlottes, or elves as they were typically referred to off-Korse, were known for being almost supernaturally beautiful, but that knowing look didn’t warm me at all, it made me wary of someone I’d previously considered almost a friend.
It probably didn’t help that I’d shot up almost 6 inches in the 5 months since I’d first been kidnapped and that my body was starting to make some changes that took a lot of time in the refresher, a little carefully applied darkening powder, and a set of carefully-wrapped compression bandages to hide. And it was only going to get worse. Maenad’s protective concealment at adolescence wasn’t intended to make them look masculine as adults, only the fact that goblins looked almost asexual except for secondary sexual characteristics on their females had protected me this long.
The Crow was not a regular fleet vessel, which was why I decided that arrival was a good time to come out of the closet and pretend that my records had simply been mistaken. I couldn’t get any sort of combat history, since private vessels could, and often did, keep that sort of thing on the down-low from public searches. It was classified as a light Drone carrier, which was pretty cool as my abilities were far better used on dealing with small fleet actions than rifts. To be honest, I’d never even been in a rift personally before, aside from the telepresence simulations, and the idea of having nothing but a light suit between me and whatever messed-up chaos-spawned horrors inhabited a rift was terrifying.
Public records had a photograph of the Crow from almost 50 years earlier. It had been a rift reward from a grand rift excursion made by the current captain’s grandmother, who was still alive and healthy and was part of the UPF admiralty. The ship had been transferred to her daughter, as a private flag, when she’d gotten promoted a decade later, and had been refitted for elite transit for 30 years. A heavily defended transport specializing in discreet personal deliveries and large enough to be used for quiet diplomatic exchanges had done well, and at least kept the crews paid and the ship updated, not an easy task for a tier 7 magitech vessel in a tier 6 galaxy.
Recently, the ship had been transferred, yet again, to the third captain of the line, who had detached from regular UPF duties as a reservist and returned the ship to a configuration as a light assault carrier, refitted for mostly drone work. The most recent news had been before it had gotten sent to dockyard for a maintenance refit, a year earlier. With the assistance of a planetary defense force, it had been instrumental in stopping a creeper… a type of swarm chaos beast that liked to dig into inhabited planets and immediately start spawning millions of winged, imp-like humanoids that tended to swamp planetary defenses with sheer numbers.
Creepers were sneaky, thus the name. They were filled with eggs, and when they dropped through a gravity well, they immediately buried themselves. The eggs hatched, the little monsters inside eating their way out and killing the mother, thus, once they landed, there was no real core creature to destroy.
They would immediately proceed to eat any life they came into contact with… they absorbed the essence to grow as much as the actual organics, and thus DNA, protein types, and toxins… those were no obstacles to the creatures. Once they destroyed all the life on the surface, they would start eating each other, until a few of them grew large enough to launch themselves from the surface, use their innate spacefold capability, and restart the cycle elsewhere. They didn’t require a chaos lord’s control and were an utter plague, and due to that spacefold capacity, they could often get close to a gravity well long before they were detected.
The worst part was that, if they were attacked before they made ground fall, and were damaged severely, they still ruptured, suiciding to release their horde of little vampires to destroy their attackers even if they wouldn’t survive. That was what I watched happening in the release video… a ruptured creeper getting mopped up by a swarm of drones and even fighters from the planet’s surface. It was fascinating and sickening at the same time, as many of the personal fighters were consumed, each of them containing a human pilot, and the swarm ignored the drones that were slaughtering them… no life, no interest.
It also made me realize exactly WHY being a drone pilot was so dangerous in the real world. Unlike in the simulations, some spawn didn’t just fight your drones, a lot of them would swarm the pod itself, somehow detecting the pilot inside and utterly ignoring the drones, not even caring if they were slaughtered in droves to get at the living flesh. I was reasonably confident, but I was pretty sure that if I had been in that fight without knowing about the creeper swarm’s behavior in advance, I would have been dead a thousand times over.
I instantly resolved to learn as much as I possibly could about void beasts. I hadn’t been able to study chaozoology much while I was in J-school, too many constant calls on our attention, but now? My life could depend on some obscure, minor factoid I remembered about a particular spawn’s behavior.
And then I was there. The ship was out of drydock, getting reprovisioned, so I hadn’t gotten a chance to see what it looked like since the refit, all I saw was a pressure fitting inside the station with a black-armored guard in full kit guarding it.
Newer drop pods for drone pilots were usually clustered outside the skin of the ship, like large U-shaped bands or blisters on the hull, but that was tech 6. I had no idea what magitech 7 pods would be like, or even if the ship, despite being 7, still used tier 6 pods for convenience, training, and rearming reasons. I knew intellectually that there was a gulf of information between the different techs, and I was looking forward to learning it, like someone who’d grown up with sailing ships suddenly learning how a steam boiler riverboat worked.
The soldier on duty was female… she was wearing light battle armor, appropriate for a station, rather than a heavy mechanized unit, and it was shaped, apparently, to mimic the lush body within the hardened plates. Her faceplate was silvered within the helmet, and she was carrying a P-9 heater rifle, its loading coil plugged directly into the back of the suit’s arm, presumably using the suit’s battery. Heater rifles were popular within stations, as their beams quickly accumulated on smaller targets like, say, an invader, but tended to spread across larger targets that could better disperse the heat such as the inner wall of a station. A safe, and deadly defense.
I was wearing my duty cap, and this time I hadn’t tried to alter my appearance to look more male, or at least neuter, and I wondered if wandering here alone had been a good idea. No one had braced me, but the guard’s armament implied that perhaps the yards were not a hazard-free military base. I had to hope that this was just standard procedure for a higher-tier contractor vessel, or I might have just taken my life in my hands without even knowing it… I shivered.
I got the feeling that the guard was inspecting me as I approached, although she didn’t bring up her weapon, instead, she simply said, “Halt! Who goes there?” when I was about 15 feet away.
This was old hat by now, so I replied “Third class petty officer Roisin Gabrielle Reynard.” It was weird to use my middle name, which was clearly female when I had cleared it out of my conscript UI band… Two days before, we had all received new UI bands for our upcoming duties, which had better node access for drone bandwidth. it had been quite interesting seeing the old one removed… I’d re-enabled all of its traps and hidden the little code mods I had made to keep it quiet. The new version didn’t have any of the nasty little secrets of the old one, and much less stringent local security, and reprogramming it had been a breeze, but I had reprogrammed its remote security to be much more picky. I didn’t want my command to get hacked remotely while I was running a squadron, especially if it was against other humans, like slavers.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that people’s affinities are housed in their bands. Admittedly, it makes accessing them a lot easier, as well as controlling their upgrades, accessing their advancement, monitoring your essence flows, and watching cat videos from the ‘net.
But if you take away their UIs, their affinity is still right there, waiting to be used. A sorcerer might lose access to some of the more complicated spells that they don’t have memorized that are stored in the band, or a tech, like me, might have to take a lot longer modifying code by feel rather than just beaming pre-compiled code via tightband, but no, taking someone’s UI doesn’t cripple them, it just costs them an easy connection to whatever system works to help connect people with their advancement.
In my case, I was used to visualizing the inside of a system, and barely even needed my UI to track essence flows… one of the more dangerous advantages of forces affinity. I could FEEL the way essence moved through my body, and while I was not trained enough to absorb essence intentionally yet, I knew full well that I would be able to do it when the time came and I opened up my meridians.
She was scanning my packet, and soon, another sailor, dressed in a nonstandard black female-cut uniform sporting a midshipman’s insignia on her shoulder, opened up the lock and peered out.
“Petty officer umm… Reynard?” she asked, looking slightly surprised.
I nodded, “Yes, Ma’am.”
“We are going to have to run a security sweep on you and your UI. The packet said, male. Are you certain you are in the right place?”
I nodded, “Yes Ma’am. My orders from J-school were quite clear. I am to report to the UPFFS Crow on this date and report to Executive Officer Commander Jennifer Taero for assignment. It’s entirely possible that a mistake was made somewhere, since my breed’s immature form doesn’t look significantly female, and no one ever asked me.”
She looked at me closely, and I was a little bit jealous. She was tall, blonde, and very female, towering over me. I would get taller, very soon… even now I was feeling aches from my body indicative of rapid growth, but she must have been near six feet, and I still had several months to go before I was even fully grown, and probably a foot shorter than her.
“I take charge of this appointee. Please ask the master at arms to meet me at the quarterdeck for a full security sweep on the new crewmember. This is an irregularity, and you know how she feels about irregularities of any kind.”
The Crow was part of the fleet, as a detached vessel, but that part of the fleet was a branch referred to as the Valkyries. Predominantly civilian and detached or reserve military, it was technically under admiralty command, but in practice, most of their ships were considered more-or-less independent civilians that had engagement support. They didn’t requisition from fleet supplies, paying for them like any civilian vessels, and while they were permitted military arms and armaments, they were expected to support them from their own resources and pay for any specialty reloads
The Valkyries were… odd. The UNP had, basically, four divisions. The army, of which the bulk of enlisted was made up of convicts, conscripts, and the absolute bottom recruits from worlds like mine, or genemods that were wildly unpopular or considered scum, like kobolds, orcs, furries, or duergar. The officer corps for the army was made up entirely of recruits who were also considered the bottom of the barrel but were smart enough to get through OCS or the academy. The army troopers were used for rift raids, breaking hellworlds, and the occasional planetary war.
The Navy was made up of a small number of conscripts and the enlisted that had exceptional technical, navigational, or fleet handling affinities and could get out of the army. The bulk of their service, however, was recruited, and the Navy officers were considered the elite, often coming from good or wealthy families, and almost always made up of base humans or ‘favorable’ genemods, like charlottes or weebs. The Navy, also referred to as ‘fleet’, was more-or-less the dominant service that ran the rest, delivering soldiers in big bulk transports, running the ‘battle line’ ships that fought chaos beast incursions or wars, and even stationing ships at hulks and rifts.
The Guard was entirely voluntary. They were stationed on ships to try to prevent mutinies, keep conscripts under control, and ensure the captains followed UPF policy and command. They were recruited almost exclusively from planetary police forces, federal agents, and political appointees. No one liked the guard, but they ruled the fleet with an iron fist and were often considerably more advanced than the strongest crewman.
And then there were the Valkyries.
Due to long-standing galactic custom, females were excluded from the draft and were strongly discouraged from joining any of the branches. The fleet was almost entirely male. In a lot of cases, especially among the genemods, that was entirely due to physical differences that made certain gene-modded females entirely unsuitable, such as among the morans.
According to ‘the rules’, bounty hunters could not conscript females under any circumstances… but bounty hunters were famous for dodging the rules, as they did in my case, and selling the ‘unused stock’ to the slaver worlds.
But some genemods, like the amazonians, the females WERE the warriors of their subspecies. It didn’t help that occasional rift rewards included warships of various tech levels. The person who received the reward owned the ship, and the fleet couldn’t have unregistered warships flying around loose. Males who received warship rewards were quickly brought into the fleet, but the female captains who inherited or won warships were sent to the Valkyries if they didn’t decide to take up life as private corporate security or pirate.
Those females who DID make their way through enlistment or the academy would never see command of a regular fleet ship. The customs against it were simply too strong, so they also tended to gravitate towards the Valkyries. So you wound up with a fleet of unusual fighting ships, owned privately but under the nominal command of the fleet, crewed by a female majority. The Crow was one such ship. A vessel that was over half staffed by females, even the guards were women and were NOT pulled from the ranks of the Guard.
The ship also had a troop contingent, which, as usual, was mostly, but not entirely male. They were far more for rift-clearing rather than ground assault, and as such were between bronze and steel-ranked, specializing in finding and clearing rifts for crew use in advancement. The reality was, that while I was pretty good at running and exploiting a drone fleet, if I had advancement to a higher category, I would have far deeper energy pools, faster reactions, more endurance, and might someday be able to actually do the things that I had accidentally exploited the software to accomplish in the Kobayashi training sims.
Although, again, that was a long way off. There was NO WAY that a tin-ranked drone pilot could have actually defeated a titan in real life. The ‘pressure’ of its aura and killing intent were missing, and that pressure alone would have killed me long before I could have exploited an oh-so-convenient Sargasso Hulk and found a dozen nearly functional plasma drives to turn a giant lump of metal into a relativistic torpedo.
The following was a whirlwind of security screenings, questions about how I came to be at the Crow, and quick comms with the XO about my status. The master-at-arms was quick and efficient, however, and since I had changed significantly from my entry photo but was still recognizably me, if a lot more female of a me than the first greasy coverall-clad child that I was, the explanation of my changes was finally accepted, although they paid a lot closer attention to my putative affinities than I would have liked.
Ironically, when I mentioned the ‘growing pains’ of rapid growth for my breed before I even went to report to the XO, I was sent to see the doctor for analgesics. The kinds that worked best at this stage of my life were well-known to me and had been drilled into me by my mother, if a bit unusual, but she was able to get ahold of something that fit the bill for the next few months until I stabilized.
That didn’t mean I had to like it, though. I was ungainly and unbalanced. YOU try gaining almost a foot of height inside six months and starting to grow breasts and hips while your balance, weight distribution, and even method of walking had to shift in the same period. Not for the first time since I was born, I cursed the engineer who designed our genemod.
Finally, the middie that had dropped me off at medical and escorted me through the ship dropped me off in officer’s country at the XO’s office so I could officially join the ship’s company.