A Meeting of the Pirates
There was a stunned silence as they all stared at Astarte.
Her mother cleared her throat “we’re aware, that’s why we’re here. What we don’t know is who, when, where, or why” she said bluntly. Lucile was tall for a human women, tall like her daughter, and only a few centimeters taller than Astarte. But that was where any resemblance between the two of them ended, her mother had the fair skin and hair of her Norwegian ancestors, with the only traditional difference being her hazel eyes. Compared to Astarte’s distinctive almond shaped black eyes, pale olive colored skin, and long straight black hair, it was easier for most to assume they weren’t at all related. Her mother wore a patterned kimono of wolves and thorns with gray faux wolf pelt thrown over top. Aster had once wondered if the Lycanoids of the Lucifer thought the simulated pelt to be offensive, but for some strange reason they took pride in the honor wearing a wolf’s pelt supposedly brought. They saw it more like wearing a wig, or a weave, than the skinned hide of their brethren.
Her face could have been considered angelic or kind if it weren’t for the ten years she spent in prison. Those years had hardened any soft edges her face once had. The pale lines of scars crisscrossing her cheeks proudly displayed the sheer amount of beatings she had taken, the scars on her knuckles told of how often she dealt back those beatings. Her nose was broken in two places from when Aster had beaten her face in on Parox. Her eyes were razor sharp and raked over everyone and everything with the same wolfish glint that hinted at the woman’s rabid and wild nature. She had often been likened to a mad dog, and it was a very apt description of her personality.
Nowadays she was less likely to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. All her anger and aggression had been channeled into her ship and role as the leader of first fleet.
There was a soft chuckle from the woman on Lucile’s right “No need to be so blunt Lucile” Captain Bell calmly berated; her voice crisply accented with high Victorian English. “Besides, I do believe we need to brief Captain Astarte here about our mission in the Caladon war. There are some rather important things she needs to know.”
Bell, once named Elizabeth Finch, wore black robes that tried their best to imitate the black surcoats of proper royal navy officers. The naval historian turned pirate captain had been Aster’s closest friend while she studied naval history back on Mars, and had taught Aster how to better fit in with Martian aristocracy. When she had met the woman she was leading the growing trend of Victorian fashion revivalist, and had actually chosen to wear a corsets in her everyday life.
She was much shorter than Aster or Lucile, at 163 cm she was practically dwarfed in appearance by her fellow captains. Whatever she lacked in stature she made up for in attitude and bearing, dominating any room she walked into with her poise and posture. Every step denoting control and command. She had been born to be far more than just a professor of history, and had struggled to reign in her alluring aura within her mundane profession. Despite her love for of old-world warships she couldn’t help but feel trapped by the placid nature of her life. When she had pieced together who Astarte was, and what she was doing, Bell had spent the vast sum of her inheritance on creating the Beelzebub and had demanded to join the fleet.
Her mother waved off Bell’s suggestion “I’ve already informed her of everything she needs to know”
Aster scowled at her mother “’Shits bad’, is nowhere near enough information to explain what the hell happened.”
Bell gave her mother an exasperated look “Is that really all you sent her?”
“No-”
“It might as well be” Aster interjected, cutting off her mother “All I got was ‘shits bad, we’re coming back’”
“At least I was to the point” her mother objected “I asked how the fleet was doing, and you sent me a fuckin novel’s worth of information. There were eight pages devoted to the price of corn in Balter, followed by how well corn was selling on Kaydo.”
Modius snickered next to Aster, he knew her well enough to know that she had purposely crafted that message to infuriate her mother.
Bell shot Modius a reproachful look that silenced his amusement “Could we please have a proper briefing for once?” She pleaded to the rest of them. There was a grumbling assent. “Alright, then seeing as Captain Lucile’s message seems to be lacking in some key details I’ll take over and explain. Our arrival on the front line went as smoothly as could be hoped, we met up with a fleet of blockade runners and assisted them in several lucrative runs. But on the fourth run to the Bedona home world we were ambushed by a Union fleet.”
“A very large and well-equipped fleet” Lucile added sourly. “Five cruisers, thirty something destroyers, and even that new battleship they just rolled out. The Mighty Defender” her lips curled upwards at the battleship’s name. Common had been very useful in unifying the galaxy, but it was a language that felt bare bones, and things named in common sounded clunky to Terran ears.
A new battleship was news, for the nearly 185 standard years the Union had relied on the type 8 battleship to build their main fleets around. Standard Union doctrine dictated their fleets to be organized around the omni directional fire power of these kilometer sized warships. Creating a new class of battleship signaled that a great change in the rest of the Union fleet was soon to come.
“How did it fair?” Aster asked worriedly. If the Union changed up their tactics that would make their jobs much harder.
Lucile grinned viciously “went down like a bitch.”
Bell choked on her tea at her colleagues crass remarks, though Bell really should be used to it by now. When she finally got her coughing under control Bell added “rather than a change in form and ability, the type 9 is just a refinement of the type 8. Different shape, but still the same length and tonnage. Main armaments were swapped out for a weapon of equal power but faster cool down. And the shields are definitely stronger than the type 8, and are more capable of linking with other ships.”
“Stronger against conventional means” Her mother cut in “the Shield breaker still tore through it like wet paper.”
“Indeed, the new shields are still highly susceptible to technology employed in the shield breaker cannon. And it seems that the Union never assumed anything would ever get past the shields because the armor on the type 9 was flimsy compared to the type 8. I think this ship was meant to be a cheaper replacement for the type 8, and was supposed to seamlessly fit into the current fleet structure.” Bell summarized.
Aster’s nerves settled; she had been very worried that the new battleship would signal a change in Union naval doctrine. A naval doctrine that hadn’t changed much since first contact with Earth and the little skirmish over Ceres that been the final battle of Humanity’s space fleet. “And after the ship fell?”
Their faces darkened “After that the fleet split into squadrons around those cruisers and harried us on all sides.” Bell said grimly.
“They couldn’t really do much against us, but neither could we. It was a tense ten hours before they left, only sunk one cruiser and a handful of those destroyers before they pulled back” her mother added.
Aster rubbed her chin “Which brings us back to my fighter proposal. The SR73’s were the only effective tool humanity had during the battle of the belt, much more effective than the HMS London, or the Russian Sankt-Peterburg. They would be mobile enough to engage a scattered fleet without breaking our own formations, and may be able to harry enemy formations at a distance. The Stabby drones just aren’t capable of that sort of speed and maneuvering”
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Bell bristled a little at Aster’s jab at the HMS London, it was an ongoing argument between them. The entire UK and her commonwealth had worked hard to launch that ship piece by piece, and was the deadliest thing humanity had put into space if you didn’t count Obama and her fighter wings. But it met a fate disastrously similar to the Yamato and was sunk before it could actually enter the battle after being ambushed by the Union fleet coming out of warp right on top of her. The Russian Sankt-Peterburg fared much better and actually disabled a Union destroyer, and sunk a heavy cruiser with a ramming maneuver. She could have managed another ram if two other Union cruisers hadn’t focused their fire and brought her down.
Aster still argued that the UK should have aided in filling Obama’s fighter wings instead of trying to begin their own space fleet. Bell argued that London never had a chance to prove herself worthy of the billions of pounds it took to launch her, and could have turned the battle and aided Sankt-Peterburg.
Lucile was completely obviously to the old argument bulled on ahead “Which brings us back to the same issue as before, there is no space for us to launch these fighters. None of the Archdevil’s have the space or ability to launch a wing of fighters, nor do we have any ability to tend and maintain these fighters, nor can we easily land and recover them. We would have to build a whole new ship to do something like that, and last I checked we didn’t have the funding required to research and develop a carrier ship. Not to mention the attention building one would draw, we can get away with calling the Archdevils cargo ships, but a carrier is a whole other story.”
Aster smiled “On that note, did you know that the Union is pulling funding from the navel history museums on Phobos? The museum is considering shrinking their exhibits to make ends meet.”
Bell raised an eyebrow “Which exhibits?”
“Well the Obama for one” Aster said.
Everyone around the table exchanged furtive glances. Lucile cleared her throat “Are you proposing we buy the Obama?”
“The price they’re asking is more than its scrap value, but still a quarter of what it costs to launch an Archdevil cruiser.”
“And then what” Bell challenged “the things a fossil. Its engines aren’t even capable of FTL, not to mention a total lack of shield systems.”
“We trade out those systems on Astaroth all the time, and we based our own reactors off of Obama’s. And you’re missing the point, it would be a readymade ship, already airtight and built for human habitation. And the Americans built this ship with tanking Union pulse fire in mind. They launched orbital factories out to the asteroid belt specifically to make the heavy hull and ribbing they required. Pound for pound its not as tough as what Astaroth or Lucifer have, but its twice as thick. Mass would be an issue, but carriers aren’t supposed to be maneuverable”
They stopped to consider her proposal. Obama wasn’t like the other two ships humanity launched; those ships were modular and had to be assembled in orbit and their systems would not be easy to replace. Obama on the other hand was too large to launch modularly, the beam alone would have been a monumental feat of engineering to launch via chemical rocketry. Instead the US launched an orbital foundry and shipyard to the belt and had teams turn smaller asteroids into the metal alloy needed for the hull and ribbing. As a result they were able to build Obama sturdier than the ships launched by the UK and Russia. Not to mention they now had the infrastructure in place to build more and slowly expand humanity’s extraterrestrial industry.
The ships actual systems were then built on earth and launched separately for installation, which meant that they could be removed and replaced. Granted they needed to build them from the ground up, and would need to tear everything else out so that there weren’t any integration issues. But the new shipyards on Pandemonium was built for the specific task of taking captured ships and making them serviceable for the Hellworlder fleet.
“This will need to be addressed further at a separate meeting” Lucile concluded.
Aster smiled inwardly, she knew that she wouldn’t convince them today, she just wanted to put the idea in their heads. It would be a while before they had the spare cash to even buy the old ship.
“After we sunk the Type 9” Bell said, continuing on with her earlier briefing “the Union fleets began to harry and harass us on every run, no longer taking the initiative to push their advantage against the separatists fleets. At first we didn’t know why the Union instead chose to focus their efforts on us rather than their actual enemy, but we soon learned with each run that the racial tension on the Bedona side was growing at an alarming rate. There were Ketan’s campaigning in the streets demanding their own separate colony worlds, campaigns turned to terrorist attacks, and terrorist attacks turned into armed rebellion, all in the matter of months.”
That was disturbing to hear, the Ketan were a sub-race of the Bedona. Born from Bedona interbreeding with their non-sapient ancestors. Ketan were larger and stronger from the years of being treated as beasts of burden by the Bedona, and as a result of inbreeding they were also comparatively dumber than their Bedona counterparts. They were slaves until the Bedona industrial revolution brought them emancipation, and since then they have been considered undesirables, incapable of working in any skilled professions.
“Somehow the Bedona got their hands on Vaxis, lots of it” Lucile said grimly. “We had the misfortune of being in the Ketan quarter when the government gassed that whole block. Scared the fuck out of those gas mask wearing fuckers when we burst out of the cloud red eyed, and pissed off” she chuckled.
“Yes, they deemed us Ketan sympathizers and tried to arrest us” Bell added grimly, a dark smirk tugging at the edges of her face. “Unfortunately they didn’t seem very well equipped to handle pissed off Hellworld pirates, we tore their defense fleets apart with ease, established a makeshift front lines, and ‘acquired’ many commercial vessels to begin evacuating the citizens to some Union worlds. We did our best to destroy their Vaxis stockpiles before we left, but that seems to have only aggravated things. After the initial attacks those Ketans who remained began to attack the Bedona with anything they could get their hands on. When we left the capital there was a full-blown race war in progress. It was the same story on several other Bedona core worlds.”
“And the Union seemed disinclined to do anything about it, even after we tore the separatist fleets apart.” Lucile wolfish grin faded “We got suspicious and hit one of the Unions supply depots, it was packed with Vaxis. They were smuggling it to the Bedona government through other blockade runners. I’m convinced they had agents agitate the Ketan and then offered a ‘final solution’ to the Bedona.”
Aster’s mouth went dry “Why?”
Lucile and Bell exchanged looks “The Ketan make up a majority of Bedona’s workforce, farmers and miners, take them out and the Bedona economy will suffer, while making them also look bad in the process.” Bell said softly.
Aster frowned “I thought the subjugation of the separatists was being helmed by admiral Tharadun. For a Union admiral he seemed very respectable, genocide doesn’t seem to be his forte”
Lucile shook her head “Union high command pulled Tharadun out by the time we arrived. We don’t know who his replacement was, but whoever it was is one twisted bastard. Seeing entire crowds of Ketan choking on Vaxis is something I wont ever forget.”
Aster rubbed her chin “As bad as all of this sounds, there is a silver lining. The Union played their hand, it’s very likely they have similar agents in place back home we should send word back to commander Franklin and Saint Mary, have them identify the network and monitor them. We cant remove them just yet, but it would be good to know who they are.”
“Ours thoughts exactly” Bell agreed “We’ve already sent word to Terra”
Aster leveled her gaze on her mother “Please tell me it didn’t say ‘spies, look out’”
Lucile looked offended, and Bell just chuckled “Don’t worry, I drafted this message myself” Bell assured.
Lucile cleared her throat “If we’re done making fun of me, I would like to hear about how you lost your eye.” There was concern in her voice, just not the parental kind. It was a concern for a comrade and nothing else.
The mood in the room darkened. Aster locked eyes with each and every person in the room “64 Terran days ago Captain Ah’ared committed an act of unwarranted aggression when he plotted and executed a sneak attack against the Hellworlder fleet on Femeri. A team was dispatched to kill me with a grenade, while another force attempted to capture the Astaroth. We are now at war with the Aunviry Marauders. We tracked them escaping through the sector gate, and sources have informed me that they are on their way to the Great Pirate capital”
“How many did you lose” Modius said from her side, speaking for the first time in the meeting.
“68, most of those were from the initial sneak attack”
Everyone around the table cringed. Lucile stared daggers into her daughter’s one remaining eye “We will have no choice but to fight our battle in court. The Aunviry have powerful allies.”
“Then we will need to befriend their enemies” Aster countered coolly.
“It will still be an uphill fight.” Lucile countered back.
“They only attacked us because he thought we were weak, if we don’t prove ourselves now then the others will start sizing us up. other factions have already begun to stick their heads into the Orion sector.”
“This could work in our favor” Bell interjected, cutting off what would have been a mother daughter argument. “If we play our cards right we could flip the council against the Aunviry and Kazlum, from there we could hit their bases and troves, or demand simple recompense.”
“If we do this, its all or nothing” Lucile growled, her fighting instincts now kicking into gear. “No holding back, we will have to show everyone our talons.”
“Indeed” Bell agreed “And we will need to be ready for all-out war. How has the Asmodeus been fairing.” She turned to her former subordinate who had been mostly silent this meeting.
“Excellently, in a raid on the Kruhur station she performed above and beyond across the board in every metric” he said with the characteristic lilt of accented English, a vaguely Irish sounding accent all the Torweni had. Modius for his part didn’t argue with their push for war, and looked very pleased to announce his ship’s exceptional performance.
He had been an odd addition to the Hellworlder fleet, his people only recently contacted and very new to the galactic stage. Back then Astarte had sent out an agent to probe the Torweni and maybe request a private meeting, and was surprised when Modius and his older brother had answered. They had listened to Astarte patiently, and had stared at Earth with silent and stony faces. Humans and Torweni are remarkably similar in appearance and thought, and when they had looked upon earth’s ruin they saw Torwen’s future under Union rule and had agreed to an informal alliance. Not long after Aster had met with the leaders of Torwen and patiently hammered out a secret agreement between their peoples, and by the end of it Modius and a group of hand-picked soldiers had joined the Hellworlder fleet. Things were still somewhat uneasy between them, their alliance only extended to Torwen’s military, and the rest of the world could still choose to side with the Union. But it was a start.
“Fine then” Lucile said, drawing Astarte’s mind back to the meeting “We’re all in agreement, we are now at war with the Aunviry marauders. We will leave for the capital in one day, ready your ships.” She stood, and so did everyone else. They had a lot of work to do.