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Agatha at navigation turned, "If we can get a little closer, I might be able to feel them.
Max stared, "Seriously?"
"I had noticed, I could feel many more animals when we were on Jericho with four bodies, than with two." Agatha nodded, "Animals have emotions, too."
Max looked at Agatha, "Okay... Take her in really slowly."
Agatha turned back to her station as she closed her eyes and concentrated. The corvette gently moved forward on thrusters alone as seconds turned to minutes. Agatha pulled back suddenly and began tapping on her input a few times.
"Just one rather anxious person."
Max nodded in understanding, "Okay... This is what we're going to do."
Sergeant Major Irasmus Boggs was waiting, not his favorite thing to do. All the paperwork he had to do wasn't going to do itself, but he had found that sending ALL the data to TFNI was rewarding instead of drips and drabs over years.
A red light flashed on the screen, the proximity alert. Boggs stood up, sighed and checked the heavy pistol at the small of his back. "This could really end poorly," Boggs muttered to himself, "damn shame for everyone really. Okay old man try to be courteous, she might not blow your head off." Boggs walked out of his office and through the pressurized doors to the roughhewn docking bay of the ancient place.
The charcoal grey corvette was still maneuvering slowly around, coming to rest forty meters from the pressurized doors.
Not quite cutting off Boggs' view of the stealth shuttle he arrived in.
A few moments passed before the large cargo door opened with the whine of well-oiled and maintained hydraulics.
Anders slowly walked down the cargo ramp, not with arrogance, but certainly with a great deal of caution. She eyed Goat then glanced at the stealth shuttle which was exactly like the ones she had used on a regular basis for five years.
"Anders." Boggs nodded, "I wasn't sure you would show."
Max nodded, "I wasn't sure you would be here... alone."
Boggs narrowed his eyes, "I said I would be, is that a start on the right foot, Anders?
The earwig Max was wearing quietly crackled, "He has a heavy pistol at the small of his back."
Max nodded to Boggs, "Were you going to make sure I was alone before you shot me?"
Boggs blinked.
Joon stepped onto the ramp with her chunky trainers.
"Oh hell, Anders... you brought your wife?" Boggs face reddened in frustration.
"Correction... She is my medical officer." Max let that settle in a bit.
"I need someone to keep my crew healthy."
Boggs' eyes nearly fell out of his head as he felt two gun barrels, one under each of his scapula. He was Instantly relieved of his heavy pistol, and he just stared at Max.
Boggs just nodded his head, "You definitely have learned to hunt, Anders."
"Put this old dog down, I've needed it for a long time."
Max squinted at Boggs, "What the hell are you talking about Sar-major, now we can start negotiating."
Boggs blinked, "That was just a bargaining ploy?"
"Of course," Max smiled, "I already played my perfect record card, I had to do something."
Boggs actually laughed.
"Alright, Anders, can we at least agree on some basics?"
Max looked curious, "What might those be?"
"How many Charlie Alpha Tango did actually survive?" Boggs asked, looking a little left at slightly blurry outline.
Max grew sober, "I didn't lie, I'm the only member of my unit left."
"Then... who the hell...?" Boggs didn't finish.
"My crew... Girls?" Max watched Goat carefully, as the two Agatha disengaged the nanoweave, stepping away in timed, sideways and synchronized steps to flank Max.
Boggs' eyebrows rose high as the hoods came off to reveal identical pretty faces with identical serious looks.
"These are Agatha and Una, my very dedicated crew." Max continued, "We are a package deal."
Boggs adjusted to the situation and nodded, "I think I understand, not sure how you got them trained, but I can see you've made your own team."
Boggs pursed his lips, seemingly oblivious of the fact that he was still under threat. "I think I can sell this team, but we need to do some paperwork first."
Max glanced at Joon, and she just shrugged.
"Can we at least go back to my office; I think I could use a drink." Boggs began turning around and walking slowly to the doors.
"Hey... wai.." Max began, but Goat just yelled, "Move it, Anders, we've got shit to do."
The four women followed Goat: one Agatha hung back to cover the rear as the other sprinted forward to cover Goat as he headed to his office.
"He really is a crotchety old goat," Joon muttered.
"I heard that," Boggs yelled from up the hall as he turned into his office. The door was left standing open with an Agatha faithfully covering him while he poured two fingers from a bottle.
"Anyone else?" Boggs raised an eyebrow.
Joon smiled, "Yes please." She turned into his office and sat in a green leather short backed armchair.
Max followed Joon in, both Agathas were outside the doorway watching the hall while covering Boggs. In Max's ear Agatha related Boggs wasn't nervous or upset, rather he felt excited, happy even. Boggs offered Joon a glass of whiskey, she accepted and gave a slow inhale as she took a tentative sip. Boggs sat on the corner of his desk, sipping his whiskey.
"I'm going to try and sell this team to Admiral Garbert-Smythe as a solution for the Minor Empires problem."
Max tilted her head and looked at Boggs.
"Alright, here is the rub." Sergeant Major Irasmus Boggs then started to outline the huge policy shift from the new Fleet Admiral.
Goat began: "Now while there are no Ashanath, Trankaran, or Maliri desks at TFNI any longer and Naval Intelligence agents are being cut like tall grass with only the Kintark, Brimorian, Enshunu, and Drakkar desks left: there was only one problem...there is a desk that doesn't exist. And it should: Minor Empires. Instead, TFNI personnel were given the choice of transferring to TFIS, moving to a similar division, or retirement."
"With the surplus of analysts and data-miners," Goat continued, "TFNI needed another direction to look in a "use-it or lose-it" situation. They may be on the other side of the Trankarans, but they definitely affect T-Fed trade and influence our politics and we only have guesses as to what is motivating them."
"Hell, we're currently relying exclusively on independent intelligence assets... merchants mostly, trading in rumors," he scoffed. "There is almost no current hard data on any of them; just academic studies from a hundred years ago. We need reliable, credible, factual, data along the lines of political charting, military assessments, customs, social hierarchy and the like and TFNI has none of its own people in place."
Joon watched Irasmus Boggs explain everything as his body language grew more and more animated; he was relaxed and enjoying himself, and it wasn't the whiskey.
Joon smirked at him.
Max glanced at her wife, and by her smirk, knew Joon figured something out.
Joon raised her hand to interrupt, "Sar-major," She started.
Boggs interrupted her, "Please, call me Ira."
She smirked harder, "Ira... I was under the impression you were Int Ops, but you're not, are you?"
Boggs' eyes grew huge.
Joon didn't relent gazing at him with grass-green eyes, "No, I think, you've been Naval Intelligence for years, haven't you?"
Boggs just stared at Joon, "My god, you're as sharp as..."
"Penelope?" Joon finished his sentence, "I have a feeling you've really let you're guard down over the past few days, but it does show you're really enjoying life without the stress."
Boggs' staring eyes teared a bit, but then he slowly went back over to the whiskey bottle, "Top-up?"
"I'm fine... Uncle." Joon watched him closely.
Boggs slowly turned, took a huge cleansing breath and told them his story.
He was approached by Sutton's people just after his wife Penelope had passed. Fortunately, he had already been recruited by the TFNI division by Admiral Pierce a year previous and he had been groomed for just this kind of opportunity. So of course he went along, right into the belly of the beast. Sutton was a corrupt, inhumane, thoroughly manipulative Fleet Admiral, not very different from the standard, unfortunately.
Boggs quietly leaked intel to TFNI for decades. Then Galon Prime happened and Buckingham played the game hard: Boggs was told to help him... and he did.
"So, you knew exactly who I was when I was vetted for Int Ops." Max affirmed.
"I did... but worse, so did they." Boggs looked at Max, "I couldn't warn you off they would have become suspicious of me."
"You were a very talented prospect," Boggs assessed, "luckily you also had no apparent psychoses. Weber wanted personnel who had a stunted or limited humanity on his personal projects: Oxbow being the more professional teams." Irasmus sighed. "We did hear rumors of course."
"Then overnight the rules changed, projects long dead and buried were back in the queue. Whispers began about the Lion and how he was making a lot of people nervous." Boggs shook his head. I didn't understand it myself. He was a marine; one of us." Boggs stared at the wall, "Then Weber claimed that John Blake was an alien threat."
"It all went to hell after that: Buckingham was killed, and Weber sent out the sanitize order and everyone left or was killed; everyone disappearing into the shadows. So, I contacted the only person who had my TFNI dossier: Admiral Garbert-Smythe inherited it from his predecessor Admiral Pierce. I told him my status and put all Oxbow Int Ops data on a silver platter for him. "
"Then you came back. Well, I thought you were Yance: he was an ambitious twit." Boggs finished his whiskey. "Weber had thrown that mission at him and he jumped into it immediately, I didn't even get a look at it."
Max grimaced.
"That bad eh?" Boggs nodded, "Honestly, there were no 'good' ones."
"So, I informed Garbert-Smythe I had an intact Int Ops operative, that I could vouch for."
"But he just went on about the Minor Empires problem."
"So, do you want to gather Intelligence for the Terran Federation?"
"No assassinations, no abductions, just gather data and send it home."
Max pursed her lips in thought, then looked at Joon.
Joon looked at Boggs and demanded, "Full TFNI rank and benefits for the crew."
Max blinked.
Joon continued, "The ship will be ours, in our name, and you pay for upgrades and maintenance.
Boggs briefly held a grumpy face and then nodded with a smirk. "Let's get some paperwork sorted, like your ownership of a decommissioned TFN corvette."
Fifteen minutes passed with furious tapping and DNA prints, crafting ownership papers that, for the positions they were now going to be holding, were legitimate. Boggs looked up from the coms desk at Max, "I'm going to need a name for the ship registry."
Joon immediately answered instead, "The Deirdre."
Max blinked at her, smiled, and nodded.
Joon nodded back, "Best name I can think of, she was an amazing woman."
All of their files were added to the TFNI database, including DNA and cover IDs.
Agatha and Una were given profiles and the last name of O'Neira, despite the information being identical other than names.
The crew of Deirdre were now listed as Agents, though Max still carried rank in the TFMC.
"Max..." Boggs said her given name for the first time, "Do you have any possessions from your previous unit?
Max nodded, "We do."
"Can I get you to move them onto my shuttle?" Boggs briefly looked just like he used to, miserable.
"It would be my honor." Max said.
Agatha handed the sidearm she had taken earlier back to Boggs as he passed by her on his way out of the office. He stopped and took it, putting it back at the small of his back, then thanked her; she nodded. Reading his emotions was like a great saga of tragedy that only held triumph in the last chapter.
Agatha whispered in Max's and Joon's earwigs, "I really like Boggs."
It took thirty minutes of work to get four cryopods and thirteen go bags sequestered aboard Boggs' shuttle. Boggs looked up into Max's soft-brown eyes, "They did the job we asked them to do."
Max nodded, "For most of us, that's all we can do: sometimes we find ways of doing more."
Max saluted the body of her old commander.
Yance's go bag was sitting on his cryopod: it held everything he had brought with him, including his sidearm.
"Sar-major." Max looked at Boggs. "Can I pick up a few things from my bay?"
"Anders..." Boggs gave her a smirk and a wink, "You can have anything and everything you want from this base."
Max's eyebrows rose in surprise.
"Go to Olympus when you're done, tell them you have an appointment with Admiral Garbert-Smythe." With that, Boggs closed the hatch on his stealth shuttle and was departing within minutes.
Max watched Boggs leave Oxbow and she glanced at her service com watch, noting the time as she said softly to herself: "Copy that, Sar-major, copy that."
0o0
Oxbow was only a small section of the old mining colony and, following TFN doctrine, it had vast stores of all manner of equipment and resources used by a division.
Max gave Joon and Agatha a tour.
Max grabbed a grav sled and started pushing it down the cold sterile corridors, her first stop was at the armory and after tapping her ID pass codes and providing her DNA scan she found she was still able to access it. There was more TFN ordnance and munitions in this armory than she could possibly fit in her ship.
Max thought to herself "My ship... The Deirdre."
Max smiled.
Joon was walking by row after row of ammunition and weapons as her eyes slowly grew larger and larger. Agatha was still fully geared in her own arsenal; but she also was very impressed with the hardware on display.
"Max?" Agatha asked, "Should all of me come help with... um, shopping?"
"I'd like to have one of you on The Deirdre at all times if possible." Max answered.
Joon smiled at Max with her referring to their corvette with its new moniker. Agatha stopped at five large cases neatly stacked by a score of ammunition canisters.
Joon saw her stop and looked at the cases, "What's a XLR120, Max?"
Max walked over, "That's a heavy sniper rifle, almost field artillery."
Joon opened the case to look at it, "Oh shit, that's bad ass."
Max lifted it out of the case and Agatha held her XR75 assault rifle next to it for comparison. With a bull-pup configuration very similar to the XR75, the XLR120 was heavier, much longer, and boasted a higher caliber: it also had an advanced optics package.
"How many do we want?" Joon beamed.
Max blinked, "Uh, I thought we were going to be collecting data?"
Joon shrugged, "Never know what we're going to need, it's good to be prepared!"
"As many as you want then, my love." Max smiled.
Joon directed Agatha to help her put three of the cases on the grav sled, along with twelve ammunition canisters.
The tour continued with a stop by dry stores. The warehouse sized area was awash with shelving and crates.
"All the TFN apparel and BDU's available." Max nodded, "I plan on stocking up."
With three Agatha now in attendance, Max and Joon found crates holding their sizes. Joon even picked up a black body sleeve that would fit her. Agatha moved a large crate onto the grav sled, then proceeded to fill it. Easily spending two hours in Oxbow's dry stores, the crate was very close to completely full as Agatha was also stocking up.
The tour continued and they passed a pass code and DNA locked room.
Joon squinted, "Um, what's in here Max?"
Max looked at the door, "I'm not sure, I don't think I've ever been in there." She used her ID and thumb to open it.
The inside lights came up as they entered, and it showed yet another room covered in shelving with a myriad of cases and small crates.
Going over to the first crate she saw, Max opened it. It held a strange little robotic remote device. "I'm not sure what this is." Max stated honestly, looking closer at it. It had repulsers and what she assumed was some kind of sensor array.
Joon gasped, "This room is full of spy tech!"
When Max looked at what Joon was referring to, she held up a small case full of tiny dots spread out in sequence on the soft lining. Agatha split up and began looking at every case in turn. "I think Joon is correct, everything here is some manner of surveillance equipment.
Joon's eyes danced at Max.
"Please, help yourself, sweetheart." Max giggled at the look of excitement in Joon's reaction. Agatha had to fetch another grav sled for just the gathered equipment from that room. Joon found a case full of stylish eye visors, she picked one up and began looking closely at it.
Joon put one on, tapping the side with a finger, "Oh... we are taking all of these with us."
"Agatha!" Joon beckoned her girlfriend over; she was holding another visor.
Agatha looked curious, "Eye protection?"
Joon smirked, "In this room, it's the least this thing is for." Joon handed it to Agatha.
Agatha put them on and tapped the right side gently. "Oh my!"
Max helped Agatha stack dozens of cases and small crates onto the second grav sled.
Joon handed Max a visor and Max wordlessly put it on.
"Tap the right side." Joon smiled at Max.
So, she did... Max had to stop and absorb the menu now on display in front of her.
"Is this?" Max started.
"Visual input interface... among a number of other things." Joon smiled at her towering wife.
"This is not Terran tech, is it?" Max looked at Joon.
Joon shook her head, "I don't think so. In fact, I bet there is a lot of alien tech in these cases."
Max nodded, then smirked as they finished going over everything in the "Spy tech" room.
"So... does anyone want to see the range?" Max, of course, already knew the answer.
"Yes!" was the resounding and unanimous reply.
Oxbow base was fortunate to have the room for a truly extensive shooting range.
Max powered up the perfectly level, three-kilometer tunnel's bright lighting system which immediately showed twenty lanes and holocams recessed at each target at different ranges. Her crew reacted with "Oooo's and aaah's." Max then carried a XLR120 case and one of the ammo canisters down to the last lane. The four members of her crew represented watched with rapt attention as Max set up and explained every aspect of the impressive weapon. Max then squeezed off five shots at the 500m range the holovid showed the target and a slow-motion playback of the five rounds which just widened the same hole.
"Your turn, Ags." Max got up and stood next to Joon: then watched her girlfriend handle the heavy sniper rifle as she sat herself on one of the observer benches and leaned back with Joon who was now sitting next to her.
Max delighted to see the visor conveying technical data from everything around her. "These things are better than my helmet HUD, well done, my love." pointing at her visor and smiling at Joon.
Joon beamed, "We did good, huh?"
Max smiled and sagely nodded her head, "Oh yea."
Joon glanced at Max, biting her lower lip provocatively.
Max gave her a look of promise.
Max and Joon turned their attention back to Agatha... and watched her drop rounds in on target at two kilometers with such accuracy that the holes interlaced. Max watched with interest, knowing she couldn't do that. Agatha didn't make any attempts beyond that... because there weren't any targets set further away.
"Do you think you've gotten it down?" Max smiled at Agatha.
Agatha beamed, "Oh yes, it's a really accurate weapon."
"Can anyone think of anything else we might want or need?" Max asked her family.
Agatha nodded, "Perhaps we can stock up on nanoweave, in case what we have becomes damaged?"
Joon turned to Max, " Items that would help us in a public setting."
