(INS Triumphant, in orbit of Edena VI, Provisional Capitol of Loyalist Faction of Terran Empire)
Empress Merida Vaughn, rightful Empress of the Terran Empire, was pacing back and forth across the deck of her flagship, the Triumphant. One of only four superdreadnoughts that followed her when the traitors that had been colluding with that bastard Travis had started turning on the Senate and the loyal members of the fleet. Somehow, they’d been able to escape out here to the rim, where they controlled a majority of the food production in the Empire. If they had been able to get Katcheka, that would have been even better, but the pursuit had been too hard and fast for her to risk the otherwise lightly defended system.
Unlike the brat, Travis, Merida was not simply a Princess. She had never been expected to take the throne, after all, so when she had applied for the Naval academy, her father supported her decision, though he made it quite clear that she could not expect him to use his influence to help her. Which was exactly what she wanted. She made it on her own, and had eventually risen to stand as Captain of the Triumphant, her ship.
When Travis’s assassins had attacked, a Nomad had helped her escape to the Senate building. That Nomad had joined her in the escape from Sol, and had been with the fleet ever since, as her retainer. It was the news that this retainer brought that troubled her so much. “And you’re sure of this, Lucio? I know you Nomads have methods of exchanging information that aren’t available to the rest of us, but my sister hasn’t been in contact in over a year now.” Indeed, other than that one communication they’d had just after the initial attacks, Merida hadn’t had any contact with her little sister, and only the assurances of Lucio and his contacts that she was still alive and free.
Lucio, an Italian man who, he said, was a fashion designer in the ‘other world’ where Nomads came from, smiled, and nodded to her. “Yes, my Empress. The Nomad she is with has earned himself something of a reputation in the Nomad community, you know, and so his activities are being watched. She is alive, and free, though I fear she may have fallen for the man. Well, I can certainly see why, if you’ve seen the pictures of him. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a rugged thing like that to be my model, and not one of those skinny waifs the agencies always try to use!”
Merida sighed. She was used to Lucio’s eccentricities by now. Not only had he saved her life when Travis’s men tried to kill her, but he was most certainly ‘safe’ to be around her in private like this, as far as her virtue was concerned, since he would probably prefer Travis’s bed to her own, if her brother weren’t such a twisted shit. She just hoped that Sheila hadn’t been forced to reduce herself to using her charms to buy her way across the galaxy.
Now, that Nomad who had rescued her sister from her own brush with Travis’s assassins had apparently been contacted by the Confederation government, of all things, to smuggle their ambassador out of Sol before her idiot brother thought to start a war. She had always privately enjoyed the discomfiture of the nobles when they had to respect the nonhuman delegates, since diplomatic immunity meant they couldn’t be enslaved for having the temerity to be nonhumans in Imperial space.
THAT would be a law she would change, once the civil war was over. Her father could never afford the political capitol necessary to reverse that law, with the nobles being as they were. But the highest nobles had either sided with Travis or remained silent. Should she win the war, there would be a lot of families that would be seeing new heads as the old ones were executed as traitors. That would keep them in line, for a while.
Anyways, Sheila would be here soon, with the mysterious nomad who had helped her. She didn’t know how it had happened, but it seemed they had arrived at Katcheka at about the same time as Captain Ivanova’s raiders had gotten there to try and sow confusion behind the enemy lines. According to Captain Ivanova, these ships were the ones who had been ravaging shipping behind the Usurper’s lines, and not the half-dozen terrorist or other groups that had been publicly blamed for the stealth attacks.
That was almost a week ago. Unfortunately, the ships weren’t equipped with transition drives. She understood the reasoning, of course. Transition drives were expensive, and the very antithesis of stealthy in some ways. Sure, you could move instantly a great distance, but the drive kicked out a burst of tachyons that was the equivalent of a signal flare to anyone who was capable of looking for it, which meant anyone with an in-system FTL comm. The radius of the flare was roughly equivalent to a quarter of the distance of the actual jump. That meant any group that transitioned anywhere near a system was basically announcing their presence.
So now she was on the Triumphant, watching the sensors as Agamemnon entered the system with her escort and the Nomad’s ships, dropping from hyperspace. The two heavy cruisers were easy to spot, and she saw the captured Chikada and Tomthumb, as well as a couple military transports. But where were the stealth ships Ivanova had mentioned in her report? Her thoughts got cut off as she saw six ships suddenly appear on sensors as they dropped stealth. Those ships were only one and a half million kilometers from her! If even just the corvettes were armed with the kinetic weapons that had been witnessed at Katcheka, they could have killed her before she was even aware of the danger. Five light seconds was basically knife range in terms of space combat.
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Merida caught her breath, straightened her uniform, which she insisted on wearing until she returned to Sol, and then said, “Send my compliments to Captains Ivanova and Reynolds, and get them to transmit all logs of the battle. Compare with our own logs. I want to know everything we can about those new ships. Allow the… Starlight Raven to dock at airlock three port side.” She paused, and then used her ‘royal’ voice, “And inform the Ambassador that he and his family are welcome to dine with us tonight, though we understand if they must press on to the Gate at Macross. Convey to them our pleasure that they were able to escape before our brother did something stupid that would draw our peoples into needless conflict.” Like enslaving the ambassador’s wife. THAT would have been a mistake of epic proportions.
The Ambassador responded quickly saying that while he thanked me for my hospitality, and would return soon, that he had to get back to Confederation space in order to confer with his government. Well, that was only sensible. The planetary FTL comms wouldn’t be completely secure outside your own territory, which is why diplomatic vessels existed. Any truly sensitive data was delivered by courier. Unless it was of immediate importance.
She watched the screens as one of the corvettes launched an assault shuttle heading for the civilian station in orbit of Edena VI. For the time being, I studied the scans we were getting of these new ships. Only the shuttles seemed close to a standard design, looking like a modified version of an Imperial assault shuttle, one of the older models. The corvettes were all wicked-looking things, but the design was alien to her. The freighter (and it did appear to be a light freighter) that pulled up to the airlock was clearly a smuggler, and as armed as a freighter could be without being simply rebuilt from the keel up as a warship.
She had the ensign at the airlock guide the three people who left the freighter to her ready room, where she was waiting with Lucio. She might be Empress of the Loyalist faction, but she was still Captain of the Triumphant. When the three entered, she watched them closely. One was a drone, clearly one of the more realistic versions, but she’d busted a lieutenant running a brothel using one of those aboard ship three years ago. The other was a man who held himself with confidence, dressed all in black like he was about to go on an operation. Or maybe he just liked the color?
The third, however, brought a smile to Merida’s lips as she opened her arms, and her sister embraced her. Sheila was seven years younger than she was, and they had always been fairly close, or fighting in that way siblings did. “Well, Sheila. I am happy to see that you still live. I was starting to think you were avoiding me.”
Sheila laughed, and said, “Well, after we talked, I tried to get to Alpha Centauri, and get help. Unfortunately, Admiral Nimitz was more loyal to the position of Emperor than the Emperor himself, and we had to leave quickly to keep from being caught. I’m sure you saw the news.”
“Yes, I did.” Merida looked over at the man in black. “And would this be the Nomad who rescued you?”
Sheila nodded, and said, formally, “Empress Merida Vaughn, I present to you Mirikon Mollen, Captain of the Starlight Raven and the owner of the Black Star Company. The ships we arrived on belong to him. And with him is the sentient AI known as Raven.”
THAT nugget got Merida’s attention, and she looked quickly to Lucio, who nodded slightly. He’d heard this much, at least. “Captain Mollen, I have heard quite a bit about you from my friend, Lucio De Lici. Like you, he is a Nomad, and he saved me from the assassins that fateful day almost a year ago. Now he serves as my retainer, since there is no way the Navy would accept him having a rank commensurate with his ability without moving through the ranks.”
I nodded to Lucio, and then turned back to Merida. “Thank you, Empress. I am sorry that we did not arrange this meeting sooner, but in the early days there was no knowledge of where you would end up making your stand, and flying across enemy lines to hope to find you seemed like a foolhardy task, especially if anyone managed to track us. The Raven was not quite so quiet in those days.”
“I was going to ask how you came across a fleet like this. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would have sworn the sensors were malfunctioning when you dropped your cloak just five light-seconds from my ship.”
I chuckled at Merida’s question, and said, “Ah, I got them one at a time. I ‘acquired’ the Raven on Luna as I was making my own escape from Imperial forces due to a disagreement about whether I would remain in one of their illegal medical testing facilities, and happened to run into the Princess on my way out. Jagloth was the real kicker. Shadowdancer was in the yards, almost finished when her owner went and got inducted into the Legion. I bought it cheap, and was pleased to find that there was a bit of unusual tech in her. When I got to Dimiya, a few things happened, I’m no longer allowed to gamble at the Grand Arena, and I own my own shipyard, so we began building and crewing with a bunch of cheap labor that had gone into debt because Jagloth threw a whole lot of plans in the drekker.”
“And this trip now?”
“Ah, well, a couple intel types from the Confederate Military wanted to meet me, and gave me a well-paying job to get their Ambassador out of Sol. They also gave me Letters of Marque, allowing me to play privateer with Imperial shipping in the Usurper areas.”
“Then why have you been perpetuating this façade of different terrorist groups doing the strikes?”
“Two reasons, Empress. First, because once someone figures out who’s hitting the Empire? They’re going to be pissed. And while I’ve got defenses in place, and the Confeds have given me a bit more cover, I’m not wanting to focus too much attention on my base for now. Even if they figure out that the various names I’ve given are fake, the Usurper’s people would still have to find out who I actually am, before they can move against me. So delaying that as long as possible is one reason.”
“And the other?”
“Because it is just plain fun.”