(Pillar 4, Dock 2, Madrigal Base, Madrigal System)
Stepping off the Death’s Shadow with my team, I looked around, and saw two pirates step up to meet me. The files Raven had been able to access said that one of them (the tall, heavyset guy that was armed to the teeth and looked annoyed as hell) was the head enforcer for the station. The other guy (who looked like he was a stiff breeze from being blown away and was jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs) was the chief system tech for the station. I stretched out mindread to the two of them, and was happy to see that they had not actually met ‘Shaxidor’ before. That made my life easier.
“Cap’n Shaxidor? Miles Branchaven, Chief Enforcer. Hope you don’t mind me saying that this is a shit move and only reason I’m going along with it is because Admin Mathers is convinced you’ve got some information that’ll have the pirates go fucking nuts, and draw heat on us. Mind telling me what it is?”
I looked the burly man over, and said, “Chief, I’ll be heading up to the Admin center with my team to brief Mathers, but I’m going to tell you and… who are you again?” I turned to look at the tech, questioningly.
The tech gulped, and said, “I’m Bretris Hartra, System Engineer. I keep the computers and stuff like that running.”
I nodded. “Good. Now, I’ll be telling you two early, since I don’t want this shit getting out and causing trouble. Big fence on Tietera has good info that the Confeds have called in Black Star to clean up the area, like they did in the core. Might already be in the sector by now, looking for pirates.”
Branchaven frowned, but didn’t seem to quite understand what I’d meant by that. Hartra, on the other hand, cursed, loud enough to be heard. When Branchaven turned to look at him, the techie said, “I heard it on the nets. The Pirate Queen made the mistake of trying to take on Black Star, so he went to Booty Bay and took the whole place. Blew up all the ships, so that they weren’t even good as salvage, enslaved most everyone except for Temptation and others, who they killed slow.”
Branchaven growled. “So Black Star will be coming here eventually?”
I shook my head. “Maybe. But Maddy is a tough nut to crack. We don’t let any of the little rats scared of the big bad mercs go off running and getting themselves caught, then they’ll have to map out the safe paths themselves, and we can hurt ‘em good. Maybe they’ll get the info from some of the pirates that are already out of port, but no sense giving them extra targets to find. We make it look too tough to take us out to make it worth the effort, then the Black Stars will decide they aren’t getting paid enough for this, and head back where they came from. We just gotta wait them out.”
Branchaven nodded slowly. “That won’t be a popular decision, you know. The newbs from the core are still pissing themselves at night any time they start thinking about Black Star. They’ll be up for running the moment that news hits the net.”
“Yeah, that’s what me and the boys thought, which is why we pitched a lockdown idea to Mathers. Your guys are only enough for a bit of busting heads to keep things clean in the bar fights, right? Not enough to bust up a riot of the little fish start getting scared and stupid. Half of them are already stupid, but adding scared to the mix won’t help any.”
I took a breath, and said, “So, I got people, and I got the kick-ass gear we ‘found’ on a transport running the border. You got, what, ten guys? Fifteen?”
“Twelve, plus me. Why, what you thinking?”
“Right. So we’ll have my people back yours up. Look real intimidating, right? There’s twenty pillars on this station. I figure put one of yours with each squad of mine, and they’ll patrol the pillars, making sure things stay quiet. My techies say they can break the computers the other ships are using, they just haven’t done it before because that’d be attacking people in the Maddy. But if the System techie asked us to help make sure they can’t override lockdowns and the like, that’s not a problem, now is it?”
Branchaven looked to Hartra, who nodded. “I’m good, but I can’t beat the whole fleet all trying different things all at once. Even just shutting the net down would just leave them able to do things to isolated systems without me being able to check and stop them.”
I continued on. “That only works with the pillars, though. The majority of the pirates are in the hub. So we need to keep the sheep from doing anything stupid. I’ll get some of my people to guard the important spots, like the reactor, the drone bays, and main control. Branchaven, you wanna sit with the one on main control? That’ll make Mathers happy, I’m sure.”
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Branchaven frowned, and then nodded slightly, before looking over to the techie. “Hartra, you see any problems?”
The tech shrugged, and said, “Well, if their techs are like they claim, then we can work on locking out the individual ships, so they can’t disengage the safeties installed to keep ships from ripping away from the dock or blasting the base. Anyone starts causing trouble in the hub, we can have a fake atmo leak, seal everything up tight as a preacher’s daughter’s virgin honeypot. Then you and the Cap’n’s teams can go clear out the troublemakers.”
I looked at the tech. “They really start causing trouble, can you pump out the air?”
“Make it a ‘real’ atmo leak? Yeah, probably. The systems are old all over, but the maintenance guys are always on top of the atmo systems. I’ve helped them debug the computers a couple times when they were doing maintenance and had to install a new part that was… nonstandard in origin.”
I read that last bit as them taking parts from a captured ship’s life support systems to help repair and upgrade their systems. Not a bad way to go about it, if you had a tech who could work through the code to keep the different pieces from fucking things up. This guy was someone I was going to want to have on my team, when Madrigal became a Black Star property.
I nodded, and pointed to Raven. “Crow, go with Hartra here, and set up in the main office, start logging in and get it set up for the others when they get here.”
Raven nodded, a smile no doubt hidden behind her mask. “Sure thing, Cap’n.” She turned to the tech, and said, “Lead the way. We’ll get set up in a flash.”
I looked over to Branchaven. “I’ll have my people start spreading out as soon as your guys get here. Think they can point out the newbie ships first? Those are the guys most likely to freak when the news hits after the Captain meeting. Be good to have an eye on thing before things get that far, yeah?”
Branchaven nodded, before setting a few commands in his communicator. “All right, the guys will be around soon to take your people to the trouble spots, and drop the guys you are gonna have guard the reactor off. The drone bay and controls are next to Hartra’s techie cave.”
“Good. Nice to be working with someone who knows their shit. You ever consider working someplace other than the Maddy? I might be able to use someone like you.”
“Thought about it, but my sister an’ her kids work at one of the bars here. I’d need a good place for them if I left this gig for something else. Least working here I get to see the kids all the time, y’know?”
I smirked, and said, “Well, who knows. When this whole thing blows over, I’ll maybe get back to ya. Like I said, I value havin’ someone who knows their shit on hand.”
(Pillar 20, Dock 12, Madrigal Base, Madrigal System)
Whurfin Redpike walked with his pulse rifle resting over one shoulder, like he always did when he was walking the halls of the Maddy, looking for trouble. Only this time, the Gauz male had four of the pirates off the Death’s Shadow in some seriously badass armor. Too bad for him that the stuff apparently came from the Empire, and those racist bastards weren’t keen on making their shit fit ‘stubby little space dwarves’. Fucking pricks. If he could afford it, he really wanted to get his hands on the mech-suits that the military types in the Consortium could get. Made for Gauz, by Gauz. Those mech-suits were top notch, and could take as much of a beating as they gave out. Hell, some of the high end ones were even modded to do space combat!
“So, you’re saying that they went and put all the new pukes from the core on this one pillar?”
Whurfin looked over to the armored guy that spoke. “Well, this one, and 19. 18 sometimes has guys who work both sides of the border with the Alliance staying there. The newbs from the core, they were all spooked. Boss talked with Mathers, and after the fifth time with those crybabies whining about how the Black Stars whooped their asses all over the place, they got moved over here. Hell, even the ones that came our way after Jagloth got trashed didn’t whine so much.”
The armored guys turned to look at Whurfin. The one that spoke said in a very calm voice that Whurfin didn’t trust in the slightest. “Jagloth? You did check them, right, make sure they were still them, and not that Legion fucker?”
“Nah, we’re pirates, but that doesn’t mean we’re idiots. These were folk coming from the outer stations mostly, or smugglers and the like who got turned back by the Navy when they tried to get to the planet. That techie, Hart-something? He pulled up this kick-ass way to scan people for nanites. No one new was allowed to dock before they’d been scanned. Don’t care what kind of nanites they were. You had nanites, you went out the airlock, simple as that.”
“Good. That shit ain’t anything to play around with.”
(Tech Suport Room, Madrigal Base, Madrigal System)
“So, um, what is it like being the tech on a ship like the Death’s Shadow? I mean, you have to have some bitchin’ stories, right? You ever get to try and take over someone’s computers in battle and turn off the guns like you see in the movies?”
Hartra was nervous, and not just because he didn’t like guns. Working with pirates, you didn’t see too many women that weren’t either slaves or hardened killers. He wasn’t a virgin (one of the station whores had taken care of that for him years ago), but you don’t see too many female techies on a pirate base. Or rather, he hadn’t seen one, ever, until this Crow showed up.
Crow chuckled, as she looked around his ‘office’ and support center, and said, “Sure, I got stories. But some of them, I’d be needing to kill you, to keep the story from getting out. Too much riding on people thinking they hadn’t been screwed. If they knew what I’d done to their systems, they’d go upgrading things and taking out the back doors I put in. Then I’d have to go and do it again. Lot of extra work, you know?”
Hartra nodded, and said, “So, um, Crow, you want to go watch some movies when we’re done getting ready for things here? I have some good ones from Earth, back in the day. I can get some dinner sent up for us.”
Crow shook her head, and said, “Focus, Hartra. We need to get this set up for when we bring the other techs in to seriously fight the attempts the idiots will make. You can unlock these consoles to allow new users to access the system, right?”
“Ah, yeah, sure. And you can call me Bretris, if you like. Or Bret. I go by Bret a lot, too. Just let me put the admin key in, and I’ll have it ready for you to start doing the setup.”
“That’s great, Hartra. I’ll get to work right now.”
Raven: Captain, I’m in. The idiot is too busy trying to flirt to realize that I stole his admin key. Breaking the systems now to gain control.
M.Mollen: Good work, Raven. Try to keep the idiot unaware as long as possible. If we can keep everything quiet until the Captain meeting, we’ll be set up to take everything over at once.