Theft
Karega stepped in seconds after the Kunan’ai minster left her office, he closed the door just as Astarte leaned back in her chair and groaned.
“Did it go that bad?” he asked.
Astarte glanced over to her second in command “It went perfectly.”
“Then was that a groan of success? Because it really didn’t sound like one, it sounded like a groan of defeat.” Karega said with a wry smile.
Aster scowled, “It was a groan of exhaustion. That was meeting number one out of twenty, in a week already packed with meetings. I can’t wait until the Astaroth’s repairs are done; how much longer will they take?”
Astarte’s ship, her beloved Astaroth, had been put through the ringer when an old enemy tracked her down with a fleet of Kruhur/Draxori for backup. Ah’ared was easy enough to handle, even with a disabled Astaroth and a whole platoon of Kruhur soldiers he was still incapable of being more than an inconvenience. But after crippling the Astaroth with sabotage, and bringing a whole fleet of Kruhur down on them he almost got his revenge in the end. They were able to just barely scrape by, but not without tanking several devastating hits. They only survived with the help of luckily placed Union fleet and the timely aid from their sister ship the Lucifer.
Now the Astaroth was sitting in Temple Drive Yards, and was receiving major repairs and a long overdue overhaul. The ship was only eight years old now, but it was already outdated for their current fleet structure and tactics. When the Astaroth launched she had a hundred different roles to fill, she had to punch well above her weight class, lurk like a predator in the endless night, act as a staging platform for ground combat operations, haul enough cargo to pass as a cargo ship, and act as the face for the growing Hellworlder fleet. This multirole generalization had been necessary during their early days, but now it was time to pick one role and stick to it. They classified the Astaroth as a Battlecruiser, and it was time to start acting like it.
Karega sat in the chair opposite of hers “they’ve just finished the difficult part of building a nuclear pumped x-ray cannon into the bow, so maybe another month or two.”
Astarte groaned, her days had been nothing but endless meetings and paperwork since she got to Temple city. With the Astaroth out of commission she was thoroughly grounded, and all the boring stuff about running a colony that she had been putting off had filled her days with endless drudgery. Pandemonium was essentially a collective dictatorship at this point, a necessary unpleasantry in maintaining order on the young colony. Astarte had been raised in Africa and knew very well that healthy democracies took time and stability to establish, it had taken decades for the newly formed nations of Africa to stabilize and thrive, with some places remaining unstable until the Union took over. She couldn’t rush the process along just to take some of the paperwork off her plate. Even if it was a lot of paperwork she really, really, didn’t want to do.
“Is there any way to speed it along?” she asked hopefully.
Karega gave her a flat look, “No. We prioritized the hull work, which means that the rest of the ship’s internal systems are still a mess. Electrical damage, flooding, burst coolant pipes, fried shield/warp emitters-“
“I know, I know” Astarte interrupted, “I just can’t wait to get back under way.”
He gave her a sympathetic look “I can understand the sentiment, but the job takes as long as it takes. Besides its not like we’ll be much use, most of the piracy in the Orion sector is being handled by the Tempters and Fiends, the Astaroth would be overkill right now.”
Astarte nodded. In the early days of the fleet the Astaroth and Lucifer did the bulk of the actual piracy, along with some modified Gerlu Drive Yard lightcraft-86’s acting as the base design for what would later become the Tempter frigates. After the battle for Grayland and the launch of the Beelzebub their strategy had slowly shifted to letting the smaller ships do the normal piracy while the Archdevils did the more lucrative jobs with some side smuggling.
“I like overkill though, how else do you get a job done” Aster grumbled unhappily.
Karega frowned “Let me rephrase it then. It would a tremendous waste of resources.”
Aster scowled as a piercing headache began to form. She had been getting headaches a lot lately, likely from all the paper work and meetings. Sitting with her eyes closed helped relieve the pain and she would have to tell Kar to open up an hour in her schedule for one.
“Priority reports?” she asked as she noticed the folders he was holding.
“Yeah, just came in, thought I’d give them to you now before your too braindead to read.”
She guffawed, “I’m not that bad.”
“I don’t know, you’ve been moaning more than usual, and not in a good way.” He teased. Karega wasn’t her oldest friend, but he was her closest. They had met under less than ideal circumstances, she and her mother, Lucile, had kidnapped him, and they had still found common ground to form a lasting friendship. He was one of very few she felt that she could really confide in. If Karega had even the slightest interest in women then she could see herself actually settling down.
“Maybe that’s what I need,” Astarte wondered out loud. “might help me recharge.”
Karega gave her knowing look “Maybe, you do your best work when you have something to look forward to, but that’s beside the point.” He leaned across the table and laid the manila files down.
Terrans had been in the digital era for a long time now, and data pads and pdf files were far more efficient than pen and paper. But they were also less secure. Data could be accessed remotely, changed without being noticed, and copied a million times over before anyone could stop it. There were ways to make it secure, but there were also ways around that security. A simple manila file, kept in a secure safe, on a completely unknown world, was far safer than any digital storage. It was also much cheaper.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Astarte picked up the top one and read through it, it was a printed internal report from her friend at Martian Drive yards, Victoria Duke. It stated that the beam of the Èriu had been laid down and that construction of the new cruiser class ship was in full swing. This ship was of particular interest to Astarte and her fleet since the Èriu was the spiritual copy to everything the Archdevil class cruisers were and belonged to Domnall Clancy, the King of the Pirates. Last year a powerful pirate named Kazlum had tried to use a blood feud between his faction and the Hellworlders to usurp the throne and take over the pirate Confederacy. Instead Domanll, who had been laying plans for decades, used the Hellworlders to take down Kazlum and his fleet while he quietly murdered the old king and took his place.
Astarte hadn’t challenged his ascension at the time because she had no plans to rule the Confederacy for herself and didn’t want to lose any more people challenging Domnall. Since then Domnall had filled the remaining council seats with loyalists, issued some major reforms, and went on a crusade against the various companies who had benefited from the Confederacy’s slave trade. Some had seen this last move as a very short sighted plan, who would the Confederacy trade with if they eliminated all their buyers? But others like Astarte had recognized this as only Domnall’s opening move, this made the loyalists more devout and drove the people on the side lines away from the Confederacy.
Astarte still wasn’t sure what Domnall had planned, she had struck up a tentative working relationship with him but that didn’t mean that she or any of her fellow captains trusted him. After seeing the whole fleet of ships Domnall ordered from MDY Astarte had felt her hackles rise in suspicion. Her mother, Lucile, captain of the Lucifer, had felt the same and had recently done something very brash and shortsighted to screw over Domnall.
Domnall had staged a grand hunt in the Wrethren sector, and the Hellworlders had sent First fleet to join in. During the chaos of the a whole pirate fleet descending on the criminal underworld of Wrethren Lucile had seen an opportunity in all the havoc. While that sectors defense fleet had been busy dealing with all the pirates she had staged an attack on a major ship builder for the Union Navy. They hacked into the central archive for the full plans for hundreds of Union ships, snagged the secret files on hundreds of military grade technology, and had stollen billions of credits worth in military hardware. Military Hardware that would soon find itself being reverse engineered and made standard on Hellworlder ships. First fleet then set explosives throughout the whole base and left it a smoldering crater.
The move had finally drawn the full attention of the Union Navy. They began to swarm into Wrethren, catching many of the pirates off guard and falling into a full blown war that the intergalactic news was now calling the twelfth Pirate Incursion war. All while First fleet quietly slipped away into the void, taking the long way back to Pandemonium.
Astarte had been pissed and delighted at Lucille’s reckless attack. On the one hand she had just pissed off two major players in the Milky way galaxy, and was lucky she got out of the crossfire in time. The move had raised Union awareness of piracy and put the Hellworlder fleet in a dangerous position while also pissing off the new king of the Pirates. On the other hand she had also drawn the Union into a war with Domnall, their two biggest threats fighting each other. All while also getting away with a fortunes worth of military hardware that would help close the technological gap between the Hellworlders and the Union.
Her eyes scanned the file and she nodded to herself “Well it seems your suspicions about the Èriu were right, the ship appears to be a clone of the Archdevil class cruisers, but its lacking all the advanced hardware that gives us an edge. One on one the Astaroth would win every round.” Building a ship with equal armor, weapons, and power generation, didn’t make it the equal to the Archdevil cruisers. They had spent a long time refining their auxiliary systems. Their E-war, stealth, and jamming, was leagues above Union warships, and their targeting systems and missiles were at least on par with the Milky ways greatest military. Domnall lacked something money couldn’t buy, a proper weapons development program. Such programs took years to get running and required the best and brightest in their fields.
Karega nodded “Yeah, and look here,” he said while pointing to the bow on the blue prints, “this beam is integral to the ship’s stability, but it also prevents the later installation of a shield breaker cannon. Just this one flaw will keep us on top.”
Aster nodded, they had been really lucky that the designers had left room in the ships bows for the installation of an embedded cannon. “Yeah, but look here, the Èriu lacks an aft pulse cannon. Instead its got a big flat section in the back. Is Domnall building a carrier cruiser?”
The idea sounded ridiculous to Astarte, but the plans clearly included a short flattop with four internal elevators. Less like an old-world aircraft carrier ship and more like a helicopter carrier, a smaller aircraft carrier made specifically for VTOL aircraft.
“I think so” Karega agreed. “It seems ridiculous, but I think we’re too used to thinking like naval sailors. Aircraft need runways, but spacecraft don’t. Deployed properly a ship like this presents an interesting new paradigm to space combat, hell the Astaroth is already halfway to being like the Èriu.”
Aster thought about what he said, with the construction of the Hellhawks and the Astaroth’s major rehaul she had two of the old cargo bays converted into facilities that could one day launch a small wing of fighters to extend their operational range. However, what the Astaroth sported was a rapid launch system and a finicky recovery system. The Èriu looked to also have a means for easy mid combat recovery, so long as they didn’t do any drastic maneuvers during recovery.
“Yeah, your right, but a ship like this will require different strike fighters than what we’re going for. That means he has to have a factory building these for him, the question is where?”
Karega looked contemplative “I can have Jersey look around, see if the King has any off the books aerodromes.”
“Good” Astarte said with a nod. Domnall wasn’t an enemy, yet. But after what Lucile did in Wrethren she wanted to have a few targets she could point her guns at just in case Domnall decided to deal with a potential threat to his kingdom.
With that matter settled Astarte opened up the next file. It was an encrypted message from Mars, it had been transmitted when the pair of interspatial rings connected for their weekly check in and resupply. The two rings were currently the fastest means of transporting personnel, material, and info between Pandemonium and Mars. They were ancient artifacts recovered during an exploration mission deep into the unexplored regions of Orion. The mission only recovered the two linked rings and several yottabytes of archived data from a long dead civilization. It was still unclear whether that civilization was the same that built Pandemonium since the archaeological site had been obliterated. She had given one ring to Olympus Mons university since they were the only Terrans Astarte trusted with the ability to study and hopefully replicate the technology used to make them.
To get any valuable data out of the rings without deconstructing them they had to regularly activate them to study the forces at play connecting two distant points of space. Seeing that they were already going to regularly use the rings Aster saw an opportunity to cut down on resupply runs with her freighter companies and just route them through OMU. This had ruffled the feathers of the physics director, Director Brown, but if she restricted access on her end then Astarte would just reclaim what was hers by any means necessary. And seeing that Astarte had a whole army of marines on her end of the gateway Director Brown could take her ruffled feathers and shove it.
The message was from the Prime Ministers office. Minister Leblanc was the leader of the Sol system, and was supposedly the leader of the Pro-Union faction in the Martian Parliament. In actuality he had turned traitor to his own party after uncovering a Union plot to slowly destroy Earth and blame it on the Terrans nature as Deathworlders. He had sought an alliance with Astarte after uncovering her fleet’s existence. She had been suspicious at first but now their fates were so thoroughly entangled that if one of them fell then both of them would fall.
They were working together to shift the balance of power into the Revitalists party’s favor, and to do that they had spent a fortune on expensive, custom built, terraforming equipment. Disguising its true purpose as a means of further terraforming the hostile atmosphere on Venus to obscure suspicion. If the Revitalists could present a solid alternative to Earth’s destruction then their party’s popularity would soar immensely. They were already riding the wave of a populist surge, and it was only the crooked involvement of Union voter suppression that had held them back from taking power. The Terraforming equipment was exactly what they needed to push through the draconian measures and seize power peacefully.
The Revitalists didn’t just run on a platform of restoring Earth’s climate, they also ran on the platform of extending government representation to more Terran worlds than just Mars. Earth, Luna, Venus, Ceres, Titan, and Triton all hosted significant populations of Terrans who had no say in how their species were represented or governed. The Revitalists were incredibly popular on unrepresented worlds, but since they had no political power they had to rely on off world pressure to bolster their party.
The ascension of the Revitalists was essential to Astarte’s plans of withdrawing Humanity and all the Uplifted species from the Union and forming a United Terran Domain. And this report from Leblanc just threw a wrench into those plans “What the fuck does he mean it was stolen by pirates!”