Eirik made it to the security office to find Lasse reading through a massive pile of reports on the repairs and rearmament of the station. "Have you seen Freja?" He asked without waiting for his brother to acknowledge him.
"She went with Krisnu back to their farm. She figured the fresh air and calm surroundings would do her good, considering her condition." Lasse replied without taking his eyes off of the papers. So he didn't see Eirik move across the room until a hand landed on his shoulder and he stared into Eirik's deep blue eyes.
"Thank you, brother! Thank you for protecting my woman and future child!" Eirik said with a voice that quivered with emotion. Only now did he realize how worried he had been, beneath the rage.
"You would have done the same, and more, for me," Lasse said with a smile. He knew it to be true and leaned forward to touch his forehead to Eirik's for a moment. "So, what are you going to do now??" He asked afterward.
"There is still the war with the Kloxna..." Eirik wearily. He was tired, all the way through his very soul, but he had a long way to go for peace to be a reality.
"The Terran and Kloxna empires have reached a stalemate. Terra will grind them down eventually, with help from us. But if I were you, I would draw up the defensive lines and settle in. Trench warfare in the void. Expand the other way and let time erode the foundation of your enemies. Focus on your empire and family. As your brother AND as your primary consultant in matters of state, I say that it would be the best course of action."
Eirik nodded slowly, a sparkle glinting in his eyes "Are there any plots of land with a forest attached, near Krisnu and her farm?" he asked.
"Funny you should ask," Lasse grinned and pulled out a deed of ownership from his desk drawer.
Eirik left as quickly as he had come, heading for the prison on his ship. Once there, he went to Sif's cell. The guard mumbled to him that she was in a foul mood, but Eirik brushed him off.
He barely made it into view before the first insult was hurled in his direction, "You pathetic worm of a guard! Get me the captain, or I swear by every religion in the galaxy I will take my revenge on your family!" The angry outburst stopped as suddenly as it had begun and he looked at Sif for the first time in many days. She was struggling to find the right facial expression, trying to appear coy and attractive, but he had seen the mask of anger beneath.
"Where have you been? I missed you!" She tried, but Eirik lifted a hand in the air, stopping her attempt at sweet-talking. After a moment of silence, he spoke. "Dalle is dead. I sat by his dying body for more than 3 days, watching him die a slow and unworthy death. I had the power to send him to Valhalla, but I chose not to, out of fear of having my afterlife spoiled by the stench of his presence. And as I have cut a negative thing out of my life, so shall I cut a positive thing out of my life to ensure that the balance is kept and ill fortune does not fall on me or my family.
I plan to return to Freja, build a farm near the heart of my empire, raise my child, and grow strong roots for both myself and, my people. This will be the last time we speak. Once I leave for the planet, my men will transport you back to Terra to stand trial for your numerous crimes. Consider yourself my ticket to free goodwill with the Terran government. You have been a fun distraction, but we will never meet again. Take care of yourself, Sif. In a different life... Well, who knows..."
Eirik turned on his heel and walked away before Sif had time to process what he had told her. He still heard her shrieks as he closed the door and headed to the bridge. His command staff was ready to perform their work and he looked over the bridge for a moment. Something was off. Eirik knew what it was, but he had refused to acknowledge it. Until now.
"I can feel your hesitation. Something has changed. Speak up!" He said calmly.
"What happened on that planet?" Jesper called out. Of course, Jesper. The man didn't have any inhibitions and Eirik loved his honesty. He would tell you if he thought of you as an idiot, careless of your opinion, on his opinion.
"I killed Dalle. The bastard is dead and it is time to look to the future!" Eirik answered, dancing around the question.
"Why did it take more than 3 days, Eirik?" Knud spoke up. "I didn't see any blood on you when you came back, but your clothes were dirty. What happened?"
"We beat him to a pulp and I waited by his broken body until he died of dehydration. Got some closure, denied him mercy." Eirik said in the same calm voice. The bridge fell completely silent after that, even the computers seemed to be making less noise.
"Eirik... That is... Horrendous!" Jeanette managed with horror painted on her face.
"I know, and I would do it again! I never claimed to be a good man! I may be righteous, but I am not good! Not everyone can be reasoned with. Some beings seek conflict for the sake of conflict! I am not like that, but I will happily stomp whoever brings it to me, into a bloody pulp!" Eirik burst out in a sudden need to defend his actions. He breathed deeply and continued speaking. "But that is not what is important. What is important, is that I plan to visit Freja at Krisnu's farm, and then take possession of the land roughly 50 kilometers away. I plan to settle with my family and lead my empire."
"What does that mean for us?" Las'Tai asked confused. This was the last thing she had expected. They were still at war!
"I have plans for all of you. It is time to step out from my command and assume your own, hopefully within my empire. But we can talk more about that later. Set the course and take me to Krisnu's farm. I have a woman I need to propose to."
'___________________
Freja was sitting outside with Krisnu, watching the large Kloxna family finish the chores for the day. The youngest had completed their hunt for pests and come up empty, much to their dismay. They were always hungry and they were surprisingly effective at hunting the Terran vermin. As a result, every harvest was plentiful as the spoilage was non-existent. Their chores completed, they now swarmed around Krisnu, begging for dinner to be served as soon as possible. Back on the Kloxna homeworld, Krisnu would have discouraged such behavior, admonishing the children for not being happy with whatever the family had managed to scrape together.
Here, she could feed them until the bellies were threatening to burst and they fell asleep, not out of fatigue. but because they were too full to do anything else. This gave her spare time in the evening which she used to work on her knitting skills. She had taken a liking to Terran wool sweaters, their ability to stay warm even when wet was an invaluable quality in a cold-blooded species. Freja, for her part, was content with relaxing and talking with Krisnu. She had been more worried about the station than she had let on, her knowledge as an assassin telling her how close the pirates had been to breaking through the defenses when Eirik arrived.
He had left as quickly as he had arrived, no doubt to finish off the threat, but she wished he would return soon. He couldn't live on the run in the near future, and neither could she. It was time to settle down.
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Eirik guided the ship into the atmosphere of the planet with a steady hand. He found it easier to focus his thoughts on the task at hand, now that he had at long last taken his revenge. But he also felt empty. It had been such a big part of his life, such a core part of his personality, and now it was over with. He needed a new project to sink his heart and soul into, and he had chosen his family and empire. He would work from home as much as possible for the first years, working to establish his new home.
The property he had chosen was both picturesque and potentially prosperous if managed the right way. A large forest connecting with open plains where the grass was standing tall, billowing in the breeze like waves in the ocean. Farming would be too time-consuming, but maybe beekeeping? the amazing little creatures mostly kept to themselves, only demanding a wooden shell built in the right proportions and some wiring inside for their wax and honey, and preferably a plethora of flowers in the surrounding area. Putting them at the edge of the woods would be the best, giving them the free choice between shade or open field.
He would have to take a shuttle back and forth every day to commit to his function as the de facto leader of Libertalia, but that was a small price to pay if it meant his child could grow up, far away from the seats of power and the sense of entitlement it tended to instill in people that were brought up within its sphere of influence. He would rather suffer the boredom of a daily commute than let his bloodline be corrupted from childhood.
He guided the ship down to the outskirts of Krisnu's farm, where a designated landing spot had been marked and was in the process of being built up, their need to move products and goods exceeding that of regular shuttle traffic, making a permanent landing spot a necessity. She had grumbled a bit at the thought of giving up half an acre of land but when she was told she only had to deal with a single ship's captain every day instead of dozens of shuttle pilots, she had most graciously agreed.
Her grown children had each bought land of their own and were working with the same fervor as their mother. The contracts with Eirik's government that made them eligible to host indentured prison workers helped quite a bit in their rapid success, and they treated them well as a result. The quarters that were built for them were sturdy and warm, their clothes of good quality, and the food was plentiful. The hosts had nothing to do with the small allowance that each prisoner was given every week, to discourage favoritism. Eirik's treasury handled that and they worked like a well-oiled machine.
The allowance was far from enough to grant access to anything spectacular, but it gave the prisoners the freedom to go out and have a few drinks or nurse a smoking habit. The smart ones, like Jimmie, started saving up for their eventual release. Jimmie was planning to buy land and settle down, his time spent working on the farms owned by Krisnu had humbled him. It had also shown him what could be achieved through hard work, provided the opportunity was given. It had not gone unnoticed in his local community that he had stopped drinking and instead spent his evenings whittling small wooden figures that he sold for a few credits.
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Several people had remarked that he could make more than a few credits on the figures, but he refused every time, stating that he made them for them to be enjoyed, not profited from, and the children from the town he lived in all had a few of the animal designs at home to play with. He had found a hill where he sat when he whittled and watched the town below. There was still a difference between them. They were free...
He found Eirik's punishment to be a clever one. Not only did he profit from Jimmie, but he was also turning his thinking around to something more in tune with what he wanted for his society. It was all quite insidious in Jimmie's opinion, but he respected the underhanded approach to reforming criminals. He was looking forward to rubbing his success as an honest man in Eirik's face. He knew the man would laugh at him, having achieved exactly what he wanted, but that didn't matter. He just wanted to rub his success in Eirik's face.
After Eirik had landed and proper greetings had been seen to, he pulled Freja aside and told her everything. Dalle, the revenge, Sif, the cheating, everything. To say Freja was angry, would be a grave understatement, and it was not without a significant fight and several demands that she agreed to stay with him, the foremost being that he never saw Sif again. An easy promise, as she was destined for Terra's prisons.
It took several hours and a trip to the land he now owned, but in the end, he managed to win over Freja with the vision he tried painting of them living as a family, here, secluded from the universe at large and him working from home or flying into town to fix bigger problems.
And so it came to be, that Eirik slowly build up a routine, a home, and a life on the main farming planet of his empire, and keeping with the Latin naming he was using, he dubbed it, Canistrum, which roughly translates to "basket", signifying its importance as the literal bread basket of his people.
Knud was given a laboratory on a small moon orbiting Canistrum and a set of ethical guidelines to stick to. within those confines, he was free to use his yearly budget as he saw fit and the man had been positively cackling with delight as he boarded the ship that would take him to his new office to dive into a pool of potential medical researchers they could headhunt for employment.
The same was done for Signe and her engineering crew with strict orders to focus at least half of their budget toward some sort of combat advantage, be it offensive or defensive. Weapons' research and superiority would be the thing that kept them alive and left alone.
Jesper was given overall command of the armed ground forces, with orders to start working on a way they could use the PESSA suits as mobile artillery platforms. Their mobility would make them terrifying in this role as they could move around and shift arcs of fire as needed. It would also enable them to function in an anti-air role if they were equipped with the right weapons.
David was given command of the void defenses and ships of the empire, a job that suited his quiet and meticulous nature and allowed him to do almost all of his work remotely. He withdrew to the city where he spent most of his time working on new tactics for void combat and maximizing the efficiency of the use of their ships.
Las'Tai and Trasti joined David as the field hands of the operation. Where ever David needed eyes and a detailed report, they could be found in their respective ships. Trasti's was sparsely armed, heavily armored, and mostly equipped with sensors, scanners, radars, and whatever else one could imagine for a ship designed to absorb and filter information.
Las'Tai's ship was the solar opposite, extremely heavily armed, even by Terran standards, with barely any shields and only the bare minimum of armor. The few times they had encountered trouble, she used Trasti as a mobile shielding platform while firing every weapon at the potential enemy that had a clear line of sight.
Jeanette joined Tina in running the logistics of Libertalia, her education in analytics finally being put to proper use in following the trends on the galactic trade market, giving their diplomatic core some much-needed information to work with while hammering out new trade agreements.
And then there was Tai'Tanu. She knew that getting to Eirik as long as he was inside the borders of his empire would be impossible unless she committed the vast majority of the Kloxna armed forces to the attack, opening up several key systems for a Terran attack. So she would have to bide her time. But she was getting older and she doubted she would meet her end on the battlefield at this rate. She was nearing her mid-thirties and had entered the winter of her life. She had the peace of mind of having reconciled as much as possible with Las'Tai and she knew, deep down, that her daughter was in the right here.
But tradition dictated otherwise, and changing it would mean giving up her lavish lifestyle and facing the oppressed masses as an equal. It would be a very short life and she did not want to die in the streets, under the claws of an angry mob. Instead, she had taken to training one of her younger daughters to take over as the military leader of her bloodline, making her the effective leader, if not by name, then by having their armed forces under her command.
Kyr'Tai, as her young daughter was named, was barely old enough to be called an adult, at a mere 8 years old, but she had a size and ferociousness that Tai'Tanu recognized from herself. More than once had she intervened when Kyr'Tai asserted her dominance over her sisters, the young Kloxna coming dangerously close to permanently injuring her siblings. With the help of rigorous, specialized training and smuggled Terran steroids, her daughter was now a tightly knit bundle of muscles and barely controlled rage, her maw always slightly open and dripping with saliva, her breath labored as if she was barely holding herself in check.
Tai'Tanu had heard the myths of Kloxna warriors imbued with such rage that they barely functioned outside of mindless, raging combat, and now she had a daughter that had been blessed with this semi-divine trait. It was hard work, shaping the mind of such a force of nature, and she still struggled, but Tai'Tanu felt confident she had managed to plant the tools needed to see her finest daughter through life, both combat and political intrigue. She would be able to cower most of the high caste with her presence alone, but Sai'Lonis's bloodline was different. They were not powerful among the high caste, but they demanded immense respect for their exploits for the empire.
Stalwart defenders of the Kloxna people for countless generations, and still doing it to this day, they had carved a name out of nothing but loyalty and fighting ability, and they had been the constant voice of peace in this war. They argued that this war would not see the Kloxna as victorious, even if they defeated the Terrans and Libertalia. The cost would be too high in lives and materiel.
And she had a point. They would need to radically change the way they waged war if they were to emerge victorious in the end. But Kyr'Tai was different. She had no care for the old traditions, one of Tai'Tanu's great sorrows, but that also meant she had no morals in battle. She saw victory in combat as the only thing that mattered, no matter the road she had to take to get there. She had been talking constantly about using the Plyxii as mercenaries, ever since she learned of the last war with Terra, and the loss they suffered.
She had rightfully stated that many splinter groups within the Plyxii empire would be more than happy to take to the battlefield against Terra, their old hatred still burning hot. They were a proud people and the peace Terra had forced after eliminating their entire leadership structure in a single sabotage act was a great shame on them as a people.
Kyr'Tai also had issues seeing the lower cast as, well, lower. She didn't care much for keeping them living in squalor, and to Tai'Tanu's surprise, her lenient ways had Kloxna from all over the empire trying to get in under her daughter's leadership. She was as quick to forgive and forget, as she was easy to anger.
Finally, she had spent considerable amounts of credits to secure experts on the way Terrans were fighting, to teach and train select troops, that would in turn train their own combat units. Another year and they would have strike teams trained as well as any Terran foot soldier and they could start taking back the momentum they had been deprived.
The Terran empire did what it did best during wartime. It dug in and started churning the gears of war. Rusty as they might be, it had not taken long for them to get back into the swing of things and they were able to keep up constant raids on Kloxna transports, in large part thanks to the efforts of Libertalia and the escort assignment given to Eirik's ships, freeing up a significant portion of the Terran fleet. It also kept Eirik's ships fairly safe as they could operate more efficiently when they did not have to cross-communicate everything with allied ships involved in the fighting.
And as it is known to do, time passed. Eirik build a proper house for his family and himself, hidden in a clearing inside the forest on his land. A sizeable number of beehives came to mark the general area where he lived, as he hired, and built houses for, several workers that tended to his bees while he tended to his job as emperor and spent time with his family. The child was born without complications, a strong and healthy baby boy which they agreed to name Olaf, a strong, nordic name.
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5 years passed in relative calm, considering the open state of war, another child was added to Eirik's and Freja's family, another son they named Thorsten. The borders of Libertalia kept growing, always away from the frontline. it became a haven for refugees, on the run from the war and Eirik welcomed them with open arms as long as they were willing to work. He could always colonize more planets that the other empires deemed too costly to be worth the effort. But their thinking was short-term. Eirik knew that in time, these planets would grow to become rich in their own ways, be it mineral extraction, farming, or exotic animals in strictly controlled hunting reserves.
Tai'Tanu had not yet passed but was only alive because Kyr'Tai revered her as a living deity, having promised the most painful death she could imagine upon anyone causing her harm. Kyr'Tai herself had grown stronger, larger, and more menacing than her mother had ever been and her anger had grown with the rest of her. It was, however, tempered by Tai'Tanu's teachings and had been turned from that of a savage, mindless brute, to that of a calculating killer. She was enamored by anything relating to military tactics and she absorbed anything new relating to combat like a sponge.
And now, she was worried. Tai'Tanu had demanded of her that she bring her to Eirik's territory, for one last meeting with a worthy foe, as she put it. Kyr'Tai would never understand how her mother could respect a sworn enemy, nor did she try to. She was eager to see the soldier that had managed to escape her mother's constrictive grasp every time he had been held at claw-point. But she worried about her mother. She barely had the strength to leave her bed for meals and she was riddled with sickness, but she seemed set on making this meeting happen, and Kyr'Tai could never deny her mother.
She stared at the planet ahead of her, the 3 ships containing her, her mother, their escort, and her mother's medical experts and equipment being escorted by almost a dozen ships, each of them able to cause serious harm to the 3 ships before going down. She had no idea how her mother had convinced the serious looking Terran that had contacted them on the vidscreen the moment they had crossed the designated border into Libertalian territory, as her mother had taken the call alone, but they had been granted free passage on the condition the subjected themselves to the directions of the escort.
From orbit, it looked like a nice enough place to live. She would enjoy coming back here and taking it into her possession, once they were ready to start the offensive again. For now, she had to content herself with observing and learning as much about her foe as possible. She had not seen any orbital defense stations around any other planets than those bordering other territories, but judging from their fleet, they did not need to defend the inner planets of their empire. She tore her gaze away from the window and moved over to her mother's cushioned seat where she kneeled before speaking.
"We have arrived mother. We can make landfall whenever you wish, the escort ships have given us landing coordinates for a single ship. But do you think this is wise? Landing at the nest of your enemy?" As she spoke, Tai'Tanu slowly rise to a proper sitting position, and she answered with an old and shaking voice, "He will not betray the peace of this meeting. I made the mistake of questioning his honor once, but he has been proven my better in that regard. Take me down there!" Her voice denied any argument before it began and Kyr'Tai bowed her head in submission before she gave the order to land the ship at the designated coordinates.