Katalynn set down the very expensive crystal goblet that she was holding. The glass was a memento of one of her very first raids, and she didn’t want to break it in anger. The cup had come from some rich idiot who wandered into her territory when she was much younger.
She looked at the man who had brought her this upsetting news.
“Who is spreading rumors that the Anazi family is moving into my territory?” she asked calmly.
“We believe an Anazi man by the name of Dalton was responsible, Lagertha. While most of what the man spouted were likely lies and rumors designed to stir up the unaffiliated pirates, we believe there may be some truth to his words.”
Katalynn narrowed her eyes and stood from her dining table. Having taken after her father and not her mother in stature, she towered nearly a foot over the man. She wondered what line of the family he was from, perhaps someone on her mother’s side. Katalynn would inquire later if the mood struck her. “What truth?” she demanded.
Unlike some of the other pirate families, she didn’t beat or harm her underlings unnecessarily to bring them in line. Her people followed her because they respected her strength. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t kill them if they did something to harm her though. She wasn’t a pirate lord because she had a kind heart, she was a pirate lord because she was ruthless to her enemies. And if this rumor held any truth, it seemed like one of those enemies was encroaching on her territory.
“We questioned a few of the unaffiliated pirate groups and learned that Arkonis Anazi was recruiting on some of the smaller outposts. Likely trying to avoid being discovered by our people while he was lurking in the area. We believe the part of the rumor about a big score was accurate. If he was forced to recruit local crews, that might mean his fleet wasn’t large enough to handle the job on its own, or he was hiring them as cannon fodder. One of the people we questioned spotted Dalton, the Anazi’s pet hound at that station, which is why we believe he was responsible for these rumors. Seems he’s looking for Arkonis as well.”
She cursed loudly. The Anazi family was overreaching. They may have had some minor success against the STO, but she wouldn’t stand by and let them violate her territory without retribution. Then again, if Dalton was on the young prince’s trail, maybe there was a falling out within the Anazi family. She had no love for those mindless brutes so anything that weakened them was good in her book. If she acted swiftly, she might just be able to take advantage of the situation.
“Call in all the Jarls. I want to teach the Anazi family a lesson about sticking to their own space. Nobody steals from my territory and gets away with it. Is the Valkyrie done yet?”
Before taking on the title of Lagertha, or the Shield Maiden for the family, she had seen the shifting tides within the pirate families. Once a loose collection of smaller families, the power was being consolidated amongst fewer and fewer groups. She didn’t know what the end goal was at the time, but it was quite clear now.
She had brought her concerns to her old man, but he was stubborn. He refused to change his ways because they had worked for him his entire life. With no other recourse, she had challenged him to open combat. She would never forget the proud look on his face when she dealt the final blow. His final words to her were, “Make them fear our name!” She would.
To do that, she kidnapped and captured as many scientists and engineers as she could get her hands on over the years. Then she set them to developing tech for her. With how compartmentalized STO society had become thanks to the mega-corporations, that was easier said than done. A chief engineer aboard a ship barely knew how to fix the items aboard that specific vessel, let alone another model.
If someone in the STO lost their job and wasn’t lucky enough to land on another ship with the same exact specification, they might be forced to start from scratch or spend years of savings buying learning modules in hopes of getting a berth on a new ship. While she didn’t mistreat her prisoners, she did force the people she captured to share their collective knowledge and then teach it to others. Her efforts had eventually borne fruit.
The Valkyrie was the crowning achievement of those efforts. A ship capable of going toe-to-toe with any two STO ships. It would have been labeled a heavy cruiser by STO standards if she cared to use them, which she didn’t.
The ship boasted twelve missile launchers, six Gauss cannons, one main laser, and eight rapid-fire defense turrets. It had taken over a decade of blood sweat and tears to get to this point. Every spare credit she earned was spent sourcing parts from shady STO corporations, the black market, or simply stealing them when neither of those first two was an option. If the ship performed as well as she expected, the cost would have been worth it many times over.
“The ship is complete, but they are still having power issues with the laser. All the other weapons systems are operating correctly though.”
She hissed in annoyance. “Did the engineers say why there were issues?” It was never a good idea to trust prisoners and slaves with work like this, but she had little option. Most of her people looked down on such work. The few clansmen and women who didn’t were overseeing the research and construction.
“The power converter in the reactor is having issues providing a clean stream of power directly to the weapon. They believe they can remedy the situation with a capacitor bank, but that will take time to implement.” It was always something with the Valkyrie. She had expected some setbacks when she had embarked on this journey of building an entire ship from scratch but there seemed to be more problems than there should be.
The issues were enough to make her suspicious. After this raid, she would look into the problem personally. She would hate to waste such talented people, but if they were trying to sabotage her ship, they had to go.
“It can wait until we return. Tell them to get it ready and alert my crew, it’s time to hunt for the little Anazi princeling and the target he was after.”
The man stuck one arm across his chest and bowed, “It will be done at once, Lagertha.”
Once the man left her room, she turned to look out her highrise window. The stronghold city of Asgard gleamed below. Only the main family members were allowed inside. The rest were relegated to the smaller domes on the planet. None were left to live in squalor like on other pirate worlds though. Her people took care of each other.
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Asgard was the culmination of work from generations of her family line. It had been established early on in the Great Expansion by a group of people who wanted to escape the bureaucracy of Earth. Her ancestors had gone far outside of explored space until they ended up here. She didn’t know why they chose such an uninhabitable rock to live on, but they had seen something worthwhile about the planet.
For years they were left alone, doing what settlers do and trying to build a life, but then the STO came and declared the system was under their jurisdiction. Her ancestors weren’t given a choice in the matter, nor did they have any means of stopping them back then. The STO claimed it was to ensure peace throughout human space. That was a load of shit. It was for control. They didn’t want anyone to grow large enough to compete with them.
Then the STO ran into the Shican and learned they weren’t the largest fish out here. The war with the Shican made the STO abandon this area of space, effectively cutting off Asgard for hundreds of years. That didn’t mean her people sat around waiting to be rescued. They suffered for a time but her people adapted and grew, leaning on the ways of their ancient Earth ancestors to see them through the hard times. She always laughed at that part when her father told her the story. The fact that Earth was what they were trying to escape, yet the old homeworld was also their salvation. Even as a kid, the irony wasn’t lost on her.
By the time her people finally made contact with the STO again, they had been reborn in the crucible of survival to come out the other side as proud warriors. The decades of having to defend what was theirs from pirate scavengers and even the Shican during those early times had shaved away any softness they had once had. They no longer saw fit to bend under the foolish rule of idiots. The STO didn’t like this change and labeled them pirates, and so pirates they became.
Her thoughts returned to the present as she looked beyond the dome and into the vast wasteland beyond. The world outside the city dome might be uninhabitable, but that didn’t matter. Her people were hearty, they didn’t need to terraform a world to call it their own. They could exist in places the soft core-worlders would balk at. Some of the other families looked down on them for how they lived, but their spartan way of life kept them strong. They would never forget what the STO had done to them and they would not allow it to happen again.
The harsh life they led meant the Char family didn’t have the largest population amongst the pirates but she preferred it that way. They didn’t need numbers when her people were the best. They were unmatched by the masses of pathetic wretches that came from the Anazi and Xin worlds, whose ships were more often than not run by slaves or fools. Sometimes both.
Once she dealt with the little brother, she was going to push through Anazi territory and bombard Haven from orbit to teach those upstarts a lesson that wouldn’t soon be forgotten. With Harlow’s fleets occupied with the STO, this would be the best opportunity to strike at the heart of their power. It wouldn’t kill them off, but it would set their plans back for many years to come.
She mulled over the thought of contacting the head of the Xin family to see if he wanted to join in on this attack but decided against it. Those bastards were just as likely to rat her out or turn on her as they were to help.
Something caught her eye and she glanced down toward the streets below. The usual hustle and bustle was gone as people hurried to their destination. She smiled at that. Word was already getting out that a fight was ahead of them. Valhalla awaited those who died in glorious battle, and no matter what happened, this raid would be glorious. Katalynn turned from the window and began her own preparations.
***
After completing his meeting with the survivors, Alexander focused on planning for Yulia’s party. He would be the first to admit that planning a party was not something he was good at. But he knew someone who was good at planning parties.
“Eva, could I ask you for a favor?” He found the woman speaking with a group of security people, so he waited for her to be done.
The woman had taken on a sort of Deputy role to Damien, and even that hard-headed idiot wasn’t stupid enough to push her away.
“What can I help you with, Alexander?”
“I need help planning Yulia’s birthday party.”
“Ah,” the woman smiled. “I would love to help, but I’ve been quite busy since we got back. I can give you some words of advice though. Invite everyone you can, especially all of the children. And just find a way to make it as fun for them as possible. It’s really that simple.”
“Hmm. I had hoped for a bit more, but thank you for the advice. I guess I’ll figure something out.”
She chuckled. “I’m sure whatever you do, Yulia will love it.”
Alexander walked away from that conversation less sure than he started. He picked his fragmented memories for children's parties. There weren’t many intact memories of fun or childhood, but he did find a few that had promise. No clowns though, he shivered mentally. Why anyone thought those things were fun was beyond him.
He put together some games, a few came from his memories, and some he just made up that he thought the kids might enjoy.
He even built a bouncy castle. Which was a lot harder than he thought it would be. He had known about the bouncy castle back when he built the playground, but it seemed like a bad investment of materials at the time. Kids tended to be rough on things and he didn’t want to be patching it up every week when it tore. But for a single day, that he could handle.
Invites were sent to all of the kids and their parents as Eva had suggested. He also sent invites to all the people he knew or worked with as well. Alexander even invited Dr. Lund, although, he wasn’t sure she would attend. He hadn’t seen the woman since he returned but she had left him with some more math equations that he didn’t fully understand. He would need to spend some more time brushing up on his mathematics.
With the party planned, and the people invited, that only left the present. He had spent days mulling over what to give the girl. His first thought was to give her the other pirate ship, and then he thought better about that. He feared it might remind her of her past and he didn’t want to do that. She also didn’t seem like the sort that would enjoy ordering people around as a Captain. Yulia was more of a daredevil, which Alexander wished wasn’t the case.
When he thought about that word, things like stuntmen, racecar drivers, and fighter pilots came to mind. Not that he thought it would be a good idea to give his daughter a racecar or a ship like that.
That left his options rather limited. He wanted to give her something she could use for a long time to come, that would mean a lot to her. Alexander looked over at one of his printers.
Yulia was doing well with his little engineering puzzles. Maybe it was time to push her to make her own items. He would need to restrict the printer to non-metallic items until she got a bit older but it might work. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea.
While it might be funny to hand the girl one of his industrial printers, he decided against that. A normal printer, like what he originally used back at Petrov Station would be perfect for the girl. It was also compact enough that it could be placed inside their home, so she could use it any time she wished.
With a plan in mind, Alexander began scaling down the design for his new printers to something a bit more manageable. If he was going to give her a printer, it might as well be the best damn printer he could produce. She would be the second person on Eden’s End with one of these improved printers.
While one of the newer printers was in his shop, he had still been tweaking the design and getting ready for the third printer iteration to finally start printing the parts to meet Lund’s requirements. He wanted to try and squeeze out a bit more efficiency before he started manufacturing replacements for the rest of his industrial machines so he wouldn’t have to replace everything two or three times over.
Instead of wasting more time trying to find every tiny little improvement, he sent the parts list to the upgraded printer the engineers had built while he was in space. It would take about a day to print that and another to assemble. Yulia’s printer would be the first thing built with that new printer, and then a few days after that would be her party. He couldn’t wait to see her reaction.