“There appears to be a situation,” Lilly chimed to me while I had a spoon in some canned rations that made spam look like fine dining.
I had spent the last few days floating through the void, the feeling of incorrectness not receding with the time I had spent in relative isolation. Even when I would chat with Lilly from time to time, I was a bit soft, and she gave me my space. Even with her rougher manners, a mirror of my own, she cared, and that mattered to me a whole hell of a lot.
So her sudden words didn’t register for a moment. My sleepy, caffeine-free mind was not picking up what she was putting down.
It certainly didn’t help that I still didn’t feel like myself. Or, more accurately, my ‘self,’ and to fix that, I would need to get all of my soul shards activated in order for my ‘self’ to feel whole, which had led me to be a bit sulky for quite some time.
“What’s wrong this time? Is the ship leaking? Come on, don’t leave me hanging like this.”
I had to ask. The big crunch had, in fact, damaged my ship enough that we needed to slow down lest we summon the great raddling of two days hence, where the ship almost jettisoned the remains of the orbital fuel tank out of the back of my boat from the constrain strain of engines accelerating the Junkers poor crumpled frame.
That, in theory, could be done without lethal depressurization, but considering the tank was bent sideways, its leaving would have necessitated the back of the craft leaving with it, internal pressure included.
That stunt lost us quite a few days. I would need to limp the Junker back to Luna for repair, and then I could continue on my way. And I sure as shit would because I had a goal I needed to see through.
Just the one and it made me seethe in incompetent rage whenever I thought about the smug look I would knock off the collector's face. For sweet vengeance, I would make him rue the day he fucked with me, even if it was the last thing I did.
“The ship has not suddenly become more of a death trap than it was before. It is more… Well, I dddon’t know how to tell you this, but Luna has been blockaded.”
I blinked at the wall with a spoon full of food adjacent to nutrient goop in my mouth, and then dropped it, the food floating in the air without the magnetic gravity equivalent I had. Before it clunked into anything, I was halfway to the cockpit.
Stomping up the stairs and practically hurtling myself into the chair, I started taking in the situation, squinting to take in the hard-to-make-out shape amongst the stations and domes.
“I can’t quite see it right. There's too much stuff; what am I looking at?”
“There are currently five major ships in orbit above Luna, each fanned out above the central hub where Luna is housed. Radio chatter I’m picking up is telling me that the moon is currently undergoing… Well, to take a term out of your vocabulary, gunboat diplomacy.”
“But that makes no fu- No sense! There’s no way Luna is going to fold over five ships. Where are the stations? Why aren’t they holding it? And there’s no way a fucking Archangel is just going to roll over and die.”
“She wouldn’t,” Lilly said simply, “They would just kill everyone else. The orbiting stations are currently displaying an allegiance to the blockade. They’re… Well… They’re talking about surrendering to empire forces currently.”
I took that in for a good moment and then, remembering the Collector's talk on the emperor.
I pressed my palms into my forehead as I resisted the urge to have a fucking conniption before I slapped both of my cheeks, took a deep breath, and asked, “Lilly. In your professional opinion, how bad is this going to set us back when it comes to fixing the Junker?”
“Well…” Lilly started with the energy she usually held for an overcomplicated explanation, “That depends. It's entirely possible that you can go down and leave unmolested… Though I somehow doubt it. Landing should be fine, assuming you can get down there without being blown out of the sky, but leaving will be much harder...”
“Gotcha… Why do I hear more? What's the rest of it, then? Come on then, don’t leave me hanging here,” I told her.
“Shi- shoot. Shoot. Force of habit. It’s just the ships. Four plus-sized battlecruisers, one fleet command, and several more normal cruisers. They’re using communications to update one another; it's not just going to be a slip-on-down easy peasy.”
I listened to that, and was a bit confused as to what she meant.
“So what? They named after… It was dogs?” I said, more of a question than the statement I was going for, “That’s not that bad. We can just slip down through a window of smaller ships, responding that we require an emergency dry dock, and we can get past the empire's ships, it’s not that hard. It would be bad business if the empire refused to let pilots land, especially when they were not the blockaded party. Half the system would love to snub empire traders.”
“You’re a member of the empire’s army,” she told me, “they’re going to want your credentials and a bunch of stuff you don’t have and-”
I got it. She was misunderstanding the situation.
“Wrong empire. There, the empire of Raphael. The whole planet got united about 50 years ago. We don’t have to let the name bother us anymore. There’s no way they’re the empire you’re thinking about.”
“Oh,” she said solemnly, then in annoyance, “For unauthorized use of empire and the authority it implies, I’m placing a bounty of 10000 points on the emperor. By law, there are no other empires within the light of Sol. Once I get my talk with Luna, I’ll ask her to use the COMM web and add it to the list… And ask for COMM web access… And ask why she hasn’t responded to me yet… and-”
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
“Calm down, Lilly. I’m sure there's a reason why she hasn’t taken a call from you. And as for the bounty, as much as I would love 10000 points, I’m going to have to put that on hold. I don’t think I could do it.”
She snorted and didn’t answer, but I had the strange feeling that that was expected. I didn’t always have to answer, and she didn’t always answer me if I said anything supremely stupid.
We sat there for a few minutes, and then we got a distant ping that clicked the radio, asking for attention.
“They’re asking for information, what should I tell them,” she asked.
“Don’t give them our ship, change up the number. The last thing I want is our ship winding up on a piece of paper the collector gets his hands on. I’m a fan of irony, but I want to keep it dramatic, keep him in the dark.”
“That’s all well and good then…” She told me, humming a little, “So just switch it up a bit… and there we go. I even sent it another voice, so they can’t tell it was you.”
“Nice, how long till we get there, I could work it out, but you’re faster than I am,” I told her, the size of the moon growing by the second.
“Not long now, we were entering the atmosphere, for lack of a better term. I would give it ten minutes to planetfall and maybe twelve to fifteen before you go to make a landing. The port authority chatter is a bit closer, but I’ll be seeking permission to land shortly.”
“You can hear them from out here? Normally, if you can hear them, they can hear you.”
“I’m boosting the signal on our end, but if you don’t have the technology, they probably can't do it on theirs. I could try and send the boosted signal from our end… but I don’t think your setup can do that without burning out the equipment. The antennas would be fine, but I don’t want to destroy your stuff, you know?”
I nodded as I saw a few smaller ships, backlit by the silver surface of the moon. Dark ships, most ships were darkish, but these ones were dark, even backlit.
“Black ships are a bad sign,” I told her, deciding to quickly go down and get my suit on.
“I mean, black is often ominous but not a bad thing,” she told me, not understanding what I was talking about.
“Black ships are a bad omen,” I told her resolutely.
I had been right about the throne, and I was not willing to compromise on my gut instincts anymore. The throne wasn’t haunted, but it was an unnatural place filled with unnatural things. And while I had survived it, I didn’t want to fall into a hole like that again.
“That’s just baseless superstition. Black is not bad, a black cat isn’t a sign of bad luck, and a black ship isn’t even a superstition I know of.”
“It is a superstition, and it has a precedent,” I told her pointedly as I headed back up to the cockpit to get my helmet. “It's been a superstition since the last war when black ships and boats were used to ventilate civilian ships, and it's been used by pirates and clandestine folks since. It’s hard to see from afar, even if you can pick them up using scanning equipment and know that there are ships there; its hard to aim at them, and hell, there are some paints I know of that make the ship invisible to scanning equipment.”
“At least that makes some sense, even if it’s superstition. But what's Scanning equipment? You’re talking nonsense again.”
“it uses the radio equipment and tells you where stuff its,” I told her smugly, finally knowing something that she didn’t.
“You mean a radar? You have radar, and it's not mandatory? You fly without it? Are you crazy?”
“Don’t be like that, it’s expensive,” I told her nonchalantly. Then, she stopped and groaned that she had known it.
I made it back, sat down in the chair, and pulled my helmet out before strapping it on. The suit hissed and clicked as it started to scrub the air, and I belted myself into the seat.
Wearing a helmet was one of those things that threw people off if they had no experience with one, and to be fair, it had been a while since I had last used mine. It messed with my senses, and the pressure of the padding made it feel like something was holding my head. My hair took up an ungodly amount of room, and it was uncomfortable, to say the least.
I took my position as the moon started looming large in the view, the cityscape in the great domes visible.
There was a light, and I had to turn to figure out that it was the radio going off from a ping.
“What’s that about?” I asked.
“There, telling you to seek docking with one of the stations and instructing you not to pass the blockade.”
I huffed, the fucking idiots.
“Please kindly remind them that as a signatory to the Desmos accord, unaligned ships are not to be disturbed or harassed by combatants or belligerents and that unaligned ships can legally pass blockades to seek drydock facilities in cases like emergency landings. Please also inform them that they are signatories to those accords,” I told her.
“They say they acknowledge the accord,” Lilly said as I approached the growing ships, “and that they do not protect ships during times of war and that if you pass the line, they’ll consider you a smuggler.”
They were starting to piss me off, and so I snapped out, “That isn’t true. The accords don’t make a difference between times of peace or war.”
“Well, the mook on radios over there doesn’t seem to know or care. Their radio chatter suggests they're going to fire if you try and cross. Are you going to go to a station?”
“Fuck it,” I said, and I punched the accelerator into the flank and got ready to evade.
They couldn’t chase me down, they would end up getting blown out of the sky, and I never did like the empire.
My continued approach apparently crossed the blockade line, and the ships fired tiny light blips on black hulls, and I moved, pulling ‘down’ and to the side in a kind of corkscrew. There was no sound in space, no bang of kinetics fire or scream of a projectile, but they weren’t moving and small as far as a proper ship was concerned. As I came upon them, I could see they were more of a Corvette, and while they had quite a few guns, most weren’t tracking me.
“They’re currently shouting to stop,” Lilly told me, a hint of amusement in her voice.
“Unkindly tell them to fuck off and die like the empire scum they are, and inform them I will be reporting the breach of the accords with the mercenary guild on Luna,” I told her.
There was a moment as she presumably relayed the information before she chuckled.
I passed them by and continued to randomly zig and zag. I couldn’t see behind me, the ship was fucky like that, but I saw bolts of metal pass me by as I made my way down to the stretching horizon.
“What are the names of the ships anyway? The big ones. If they're going to be a bitch about it, maybe I’ll take a petty vengeance against them later,” I asked Lilly.
“Do you think they're going to be petty about it? You seemed so sure that they would be fine with us landing on Luna!”
“I didn’t think the war was declared; blockades happen all the time, you dufus. Get the port authority on the line so we don’t get cushioned between air defences and the gunboats behind us.”
“Aye, Aye, captain, my captain,” she said in a mocking tone, “The ships last I checked were the Sheperd, the Tsarta, the Samoyed, the Retriever and the Borzoi.”
I listened to the names, but the sound of one familiar ship made me almost want to laugh.
I had thought my target had run off, that the time it took for me to get back and get the Junker fixed would have cost me precious time.
But the Collector and his ship were right there in orbit, and he had no way of knowing that I still lived and no way to tell that I wanted my sword back.
All I had to do was bide my time and plan.