Location: CS Blue Jay (Old Blue), Alamo, Lone Star System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

The kid in the pilot’s seat kept glancing at the holo-tank. The rest of the small bridge crew pretended to ignore it, but it was hard to not laugh. When they said kid, they meant kid. The kid was fresh out of school, on his first tour aboard a ship, and was only allowed to fly the two-hundred-meter-long Blue Jay because she was fat and slow.

“She ain’t gonna bite, Howard,” the captain finally had enough and put the kid out of his misery.

The captain was on old salt. He’d been in the fleet, and got out decades before the current clusterfuck took hold of the Commonwealth. He didn’t much care for the politics of the starfaring powers. He only cared that they kept the space lanes free of pirates, and now with portaling, things were getting that much easier for merchants everywhere. You would get from point A to point B without getting hassled, and only had to worry about the outer portions of systems. Pirates hanging in the asteroid belts was becoming an issue. If you varied up your approach vectors enough, everything was peachy.

That was all good, but the real money was in surveying. With the Commonwealth suddenly losing a bunch of systems, they paid top dollar for crews to go out and look over the skipped systems. The vast majority of which had never been looked at before. People meant where the money went. Money went where the space lanes lead, and now that all those lanes were changing due to the unrest, it was a regular gold rush.

now it was the captain’s turn for his eyes to get pulled to the holo-tank.

Old Blue wasn’t going out alone; not this close to the contested border. Normally, they’d get one of the nifty gunships; but not this time. A legit destroyer was following along in the survey ship’s wake. She was actually the smaller of the two ships, despite having more crew and enough fire power to tear the bigger ship apart.

Mostly Old Blue was a built to carry supplies. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, but out in the black it was ten-tenths. Whoever was there, it was theirs, and only if they could hold it. Thus, the destroyer that would sit on station for months if it was worth it. Everyone won if it was worth it, especially the captain.

he looked at the readout the ship’s brand-spankin’ new AI had told him was their protalling location.

A probe had been launched by the corporation that owned Old Blue and that probe was relaying the portaling location they could jump to. It also sent back data, but there was only so much you could tell from the ass-end of the system. The company wasn’t about to lose a million-dollar drone to go in and check it out when the fleet would help underwrite their liability by sending along a warship with much more expendable humans.

The captain would have been upset if he was new to the business, but he’d been mucking about in space for going on eighty years. Profits, losses, and risk management drove every order that made it down to him.

“Blue Jay, Alamo Traffic Control; you’re clear to proceed along vector seven-seven, lane two; maintain one thousand kilometers spacing. Good luck.”

“Tha . . .” traffic control cut the channel on the kid, which made him blush.

“You heard ‘em, Howard; seven-seven, lane two, and don’t brown nose the cargo hauler in front of us.”

“Aye, sir,” the kid read back what he was going to do; which was what the book said to do, but the captain didn’t need to hear it again. He’d let the kid do everything according to the book, just to prove he knew how to do it, and then he’d tell him the unwritten rules of spacers.

As Howard focused on their heading, the captain opened a channel to the destroyer. CWS Red Tide wasn’t one of the new builds they were cranking out of the yards. It was retrofitted with all the new do-dads, but she hadn’t been built from the keel up with the new tactics in mind. Still, she was better than pissing into the wind and hoping it didn’t spray back in your face. There was a reason surveyors got paid a pretty penny nowadays. It was dangerous work, and the laws of supply and demand applied. The captain was getting paid five times what a regular merchant captain would make.

It took about three hours to get through the traffic to the portaling point. Space, even in a system, was big, and portaling locations needed to be a certain distance from a gravity well. That put it way the hell out there.

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“Ready to enter the portal captain,” Howard locked up his station and handed control to the captain.

You needed to be certified to bring up the new engines and thread the needle from normal space to the alternate dimension, or whatever the hell the space was that a ship portaled through. The captain smoothy took them into the portal, and the AI handled the rest. The destroyer should have entered a few minutes behind them, and the total trip to system no-name was a little under two hours; shorter than the traffic jam they’d just been sitting in.

The captain left the kid in charge. Nothing would happen until they emerged, and the kid needed the hours for his various qualifications. The captain would catch a short nap and come back when they were ready to see what the balls of dirt in this forgotten corner of the galaxy had to offer.

***

Benjamin Gold

Location: CCIWS Stakeholder’s Views, Portaling Gold Technologies Corporate Territory,

Ben sat back in the command chair and tried not to look bored. He might not want to be here, but he was still in charge of these people. In the end, their lives depended on him. Today, more than yesterday, there was more potential for lives to be lost because of lack of communication.

Jacobi had sent word just before he left on this peacekeeping tour that negotiations were breaking down. That was two weeks ago. Even with interstellar communication the way it was, it could take two weeks for word of a skirmish in the Rim to get to Aurum or the other corporate core worlds. It didn’t help the Confederations fleet was a clusterfuck. The ships were good, modern, and technologically advanced; but they had less of them. Even some of the senior officers were good men who served either the Commonwealth or corporate security fleets. The problem was that there were too many chefs in the kitchen. His father wanted things done one way, but people on the ruling Board of Directors thought differently. The actual military men and women wanted to do things their way, and that left people like Ben throwing up their hands and saying fuck it.

He still didn’t like the new Confederation. He still thought what they’d done was treason, but he had a wife and a family who lived there. The crew of his ship had family and loved ones under the Confed banner. There were a lot of people who just wanted to live their lives. Those were the people Ben was here to protect, and that why he took command of Stakeholder’s Views. He didn’t get a choice in naming the new destroyer, because he would have told whoever did that, they were a moron.

Like all good thing’s navy, the ship got a nickname. Stakeholder became Steak, which became A1, for the centuries old sauce people poured on their meat. So, Ben was the skipper of A1, and despite all his reservations, he was proud of what his crew had accomplished in their few months together.

“Engineering, how we looking?” Ben asked his Chief down in the bowels of the ship.

“Purring like a kitten, sir,” we’ve got another few minutes before we drop out of here, and then I’ll let you know.” Like all new ships, the crew was learning A1’s quirks.

“Comms?”

“We haven’t had any communication from the survey ship since we portaled,” the ensign there looked young enough to be Ben’s daughter, and greener than a leprechaun on St. Patty’s Day.

“Tactical?”

“If we see trouble, we’ll be ready,” stated a hard-faced woman who marched around her section like an officer on review.

“Good job, everyone,” he made sure the crew knew he appreciated everything.

If all went well, they’d spend a few days providing overwatch for the surveyors establishing a base camp on a planet some telescope said had the potential to be strategically important. At that point, they’d be relieved by something with a little more punch, and then they’d spend a few weeks traveling back to Aurum, and checking in randomly to make sure pirates weren’t setting up shop anywhere near the space lanes. It was all pretty straightforward.

“Dropping back into regular space in three . . . two . . . one . . .” the pilot took the destroyer out of the portal so smoothly Ben wouldn’t have known it had happened unless he’d announced it.

There was a minute when the lights flickered and the turnover from the portaling engines to the regular engines failed to occur.

Ben started to get up, but there was a jolt and the ship was in motion. He sat back down, about to radio down to engineering, but blips on the holo-tank caught his attention.

“Two contacts bearing three-two-zero, seventeen-million kilometers, and moving on a least time vector towards the planet,” the tactical officer loudly announced. “CIC should have profiles in a second.”

“One of the good things about getting a large chunk of Commonwealth ships to come over to the Confederation was that all their databases came over intact. That meant engine and drive profiles, EW data, accurate knowledge of payloads, rates of fire, and everything else to how many shitters were on every ship. It was an intelligence coup for the Confed’s; which made situation like this much less of a guessing game for warship skippers.

It took more than a few seconds, but the AI finally identified Blue Jay and Red Tide. One was a survey ship not that different from the Confed ship that had arrived ahead of A1, but Red Tide was another destroyer.

“Get me everything on Red Tide, and when you do, get me the skipper,” that turned a few heads, but he stared them all down.

He wasn’t about to start a war under a misunderstanding. the Confed survey ship was parked in orbit above a rocky-looking world nearly a hundred million kilometers from both warships. The law said that whoever had boots on the ground owned the world until a patent was filed on Earth and dispersed to all governments. The problem was, that place was ash now; and nobody was talking.

Ben tried not to led the dread in his gut show as the range finder gradually counted down the time until they were in weapons range.