The Long Shot Pt. 06

"Is this true?" Tulon whispered to Yetna.

Yetna shrugged. "I...I've seen breachloaders demonstrated. And there's no reason why they wouldn't make them as soon as possible."

"So, they fire faster and further," Queen Ruthara said, quietly. "They can anchor out of our shores and reduce the fortification to rubble? How long will that take?"

"A week, at most," Tulon said, with casual assurance. "If cannons can fire at a target for long enough, that target will fall. Can we strangle them?"

"Fisherfolk can't be trusted to not take Imperial coin," one of the other men said. "They're poor enough that they don't care where the coin comes from, they'll take it and give over fish to them at night, while they're shelling us by day."

"We could intercept those ships..." General Kars grumbled.

"And thus cut our own throat?" The man who had brought up the fisherfolk said, sounding bitter. "Without their catch, the city starves, we can't make enough food with our harbor fisheries."

"Divers at night?" Tulon said. "We can swim from the damn harbor!"

"First Rates have the best anti-diver gear," Yetna said, quietly. "Catchnets, watch on watch harpoon crew, swivel guns on the decks, depth charges."

"What the bloody hell is a depth charge!?" Tulon snapped.

"A grenado that's got an internal fuse. They light the fuse, cap it, then drop it." She mimed dropping. "Sinks, the fuse goes off, and boom. It'll turn a diver's lung to chopped meat from the shockwave."

Tulon threw up her hands. "Where are you getting these things!?" She snapped at Yetna. Yetna glared back.

"The Empress says she invents them!" she said. "Like the Stasi and-"

"Stasi?"

The voice that cut across the room brought silence and immedaite, quiet awe. Yetna's eyes widened as she saw the sleek, muscular, white, black and red shape of CNS The Widening Gyre walk into the room, flanked by a gorgeous looking serving maid wearing so little that Yetna immediately pegged her actual duty. Keep the walking woman-man happy. Of course...considering the strange beauty of the Starship, Yetna had to admit, she might envy that teal serving maid. He had the muscular chest of a woman, but he lacked breasts. And that...maleness between his legs, looking oddly exotic in a soft, unengorged form...she shook her head, trying to focus on his face as he walked towards her and Tulon.

Tulon had tensed up as if a crocodile had reared its head up and she was doing river-swimming.

"Did you say Stasi? As in...is that a word that means something in your language?" Gyre asked, quite insistently.

"Uh, no, it's a new word. The Empress said it was revealed to her by the Goddess herself," Yetna said, her voice nervous. Shy. The feeling of Gyre getting close to Yetna made her...tremble. She remembered what this...this man had done to her ship with a single point of his finger, a single thought. It was magic. It was terrible, powerful magic.

"Because my...because that word, sounds, to me like it means secret police," Gyre said, then tried again. "That is, uh, covert guardsmen." He glanced at the Queen, frowning slightly. "It's a word from one of my people's languages."

"It what?" Queen Ruthara said, her eyes widening, sitting up.

"It's German," Gyre said. His eyes actually looked as if he was reading something in the air that floated invisibly above Yetna's head. "Ministerium für Staatsicherheit."

"That's a mouthful," General Kars muttered.

"You have no idea," Gyre said, smiling. Then his eyes flicked over to Tulon and his smile vanished. Yetna, looking between the two of them, realized that Tulon was barely keeping herself from leaping at the strange male. It didn't take a genius for Yetna to realize precisely what had happened. She put her hand on Tulon's shoulder, reflexively, jerking her back slightly as Queen Ruthara stood.

"Explain, then, why this word is used by the Empire!" she said. "You have come from the sky -- and she has come seeking you."

"I don't know the exact reasons, I don't know the exact way that it happened...but I have a theory," Gyre said.

Queen Ruthara swept her hand, her wrinkled face growing more set. "Then explain it to us now. With the Empire at our doorstep, the only way forward is to swim through clear water."

Gyre sighed. He muttered in his language -- the words unintelligible to Yetna. She felt Tulon's shoulders tensing, and she stepped a bit closer. Her voice hissed in her ear. "Don't be an idiot, Tulon." Tulon snapped her head back, glaring at her. This at least kept her from leaping at Gyre, giving the strange man a chance to begin talking.

"There is a city at the bottom of your ocean," he said, quietly. "One built by someone -- I don't know who. But you say that this Empress has invented many new technologies, almost immediately? That she's using names like Stasi?" He shook his head. "Are the Stasi goons that push people around who disagree with your Empress? That lock up dissenters?" At Yetna's mute nod, he continued. "Then the only answer that seems likely to me is...you're a colony world. Your species did not evolve on this planet -- you came here, thousands of years before, and your civilization collapsed. You lost your technology, your knowledge. Your cities were drowned. And now, the Empress has found an ancient cache of knowledge and is using it to conquer the world."

Queen Ruthana blinked.

"Well, of course, we all know the legends," she said. "Are you going to tell us anything new?"

***

Hornet Abernathy had never, in her whole life, had a year as amazing as the past week. After finding the VR pods and figuring out the simstim programs, they had fallen into a rhythm of hard, hard work -- and she loved it. She and her fellow Prospects, would wake up, have breakfast, discuss the news and the previous day's training simulations. This usually involved talking about what went well, scrawling in the dirt with sticks, using their AR and comnets to project out images, animated discussions, and lots of increasingly playful ribbing...and then talking about what went wrong, using much the same tools.

...sometimes that had less friendly ribbing.

Each time they slid into the pods to check the simulation lists, Hornet found new sims to try out.

There were interception at nearlight, where relativistic effects reared their ugly head, and they had to adjust their thinking on the fly as effect and cause twisted and distorted like taffy.

There were squadron battles, where they flew alongside other starships that were drawn straight from famous history and distorted slightly -- altered so that they did not quite fit any actual battle.

There were set piece engagements. Those were the most visually spectacular and the most difficult to finish without getting slagged, nuked, ripped to pieces by kinetic projectors or conic guns...but Hornet knew that she wouldn't forget the sight of war-rockets, immolating as they were transfixed by continent slagging x-beams, or the vision of worlds burning as their defensive fleets were shattered in low orbit.

There were evacuation sims...

Megastructure encounter sims...

Fighter-duel sims...

Rogue Starship sims...

First Contact sims...

Sims, sims, sims, all of them terrifyingly realistic -- some so in-depth and run at such high computational speed that they seemed to stretch on and on and on for weeks and weeks, and yet they would emerge mere hours later. They were endlessly fascinating, endlessly revealing, and...curiously similar in one respect. A singular facet that no one seemed willing to talk about -- that they all spoke around, obliquely.

Hornet felt like she was going crazy thinking about it. She wanted to grab Hugh by his big fluffy ears as they sat around the campfire for the evening, where they were all unwinding from the day's simulations. The rule was no one talked about the sims during the evening. Evening was for resting. Resting and nothing else.

"So, I was thinking-" Heinlein started.

"Why is it always me!?" Hornet burst out.

Heinlein, Hugh, K'iren and Rotting Carcass all looked at her.

"Honest Admission: I admit, that was something I have been considering," Rotting Carcass said. "But while in the simulations, it is never something that comes up in my thinking. And afterwards, we are so focused upon discussing activities and actions that we have done -- there is little time to discuss the context for those actions."

K'iren frowned. "Isn't it obvious?" She snorted. "I thought you guys knew? I knew."

"It's pretty clear we didn't know," Hugh said, quietly, leaning forward and bumping his nose against K'iren's side. She pawed at his face, shoving his head away, then snarled at him.

"Hey, don't slobber all over me you big furry dick," she said, laughing. "And I figured you guys didn't want to talk about it cause it's weird and creepy and kinda...shitty but, like, not shitty in a way we can do anything about it." She shook her head. "Hornet's the only starship because she's the only one that passed the evaluation."

"What?" Hornet asked, her eyes widening.

"The Pantheon's been poking and prodding our brains since we got here," K'iren said. "More so, now that we're running sims. They can tell which of us can actually be fitted in a ship."

A distant rumble of thunder split the air.

Hornet blushed. "Sorry!"

K'iren regarded her with eyes reflecting the fire that crackled and sparked between them. Then she showed her teeth in a grin. Hornet hoped to God that it was a playful, friendly grin, but she was honestly still not entirely sure how one to one Terran/Trisk facial expressions were. "If you had told me that you'd be the ship and I'd be crew when I got here, I'd have ripped your throat out. But honestly?" She shook her head. "I've...been enjoying the sims more since I got to be a tactical officer. I'm good at it." She lifted her head a bit, her expression smug as hell. "And most of the time when you get slagged in combat, it's cause you're not listening to me."

Hornet blushed even more, while Heinlein put his hand on her shoulder. "You're a good ship in the sims," he said, gently. "And a dame I'd follow into battle at the drop of a hat out of the sims."

"What!?" Hornet asked, shocked to her core.

Heinlein winked at her. "Any battle you run into has to be worth fighting."

Hugh snorted, and K'iren laughed as Rotting Carcass sprayed spores into the air.

"Hey!" Hornet stood up, then grabbed his wrist, grinning and then shifting back behind him, tucking his arm back against him as she locked him -- her muscles remembering the close combat simulation that they had done two days before. Heinlein laughed, then yelped as she pinned him. "I can fight when I need to." She said, her voice warm in his ear. Hornet's grin was playful -- right up until her muscle memory and her own brain rammed into one another, like a train running down the wrong track. She blushed, hard, and was about to let him go when the thunder rumbled again -- and it penetrated into her and everyone else's awareness how strange that was on Found.

Heinlein slipped from her grip, giving her a wink that made her blush even more, and Hornet stammered a too loud: "W-Wh-What is that?"

"It's Sting!" Hugh said, pointing with his nose.

He was right. Now that Hornet was looking up at the heavens, she could see the shape of the sky blue starship soaring down through the heavens. The thunder rumbled again -- then Sting was there, landing before the fire pit with a whump of feet against mossy ground. She stood, brushed her hands along her hair, then grinned. "Congratulations," she said, spreading her hands as the fire glinted off her hull, highlighting the kill markers that swept along her arm, the brightness of her nipples against the small sweep of her breasts. "You figured it out."

"That's why training a ship is so secret!" Hornet said. "The Pantheon doesn't want people to know their abilities to fuck with our brains is so...advanced."

"Fuck with our brains?" Sting asked, arching an eyebrow. "Kind of an inexact, unscientific term for it. But it does communicate the basic idea well." She smiled, slightly. "They were doing more than just scanning your brains-"

"Were they forking us?" Heinlein asked, his voice growing a bit tight.

"No," Sting said, lifting her hands, hurriedly. "The Pantheon could, don't get me wrong, but they won't." She stepped closer, then put her hand on Hornet's shoulder, squeezing her gently. "You talked with them, and you know why. If you just think about it a bit."

Hornet thought back on that dream she had had, before they had found the stims. "Because the ones that don't care about us left," she said, softly. "The only members of the Pantheon that are still around are the ones that care about the Concord enough that forking us would be...it'd be like kicking a puppy." She put her hand on Sting's hand, squeezing her gently. "But they could have direct access to our nerves with the VR pods."

"Getting a crew and a starship prepped takes some pretty delicate neuro-engineering," Sting said. "The structures are so fragile that conscious thought and focusing on them can actually destroy them -- the wrong nerves firing, the wrong hormones burbling, the wrong flare of emotion, and the whole system breaks down before we even have you set up. That's why rogue states have such a hard time making ships. They can build the bodies, but getting the minds ready for them takes...a bit more."

Hornet nodded.

"What now?" K'iren asked.

"Well, firstly, you all come with me," Sting said, gesturing behind her. With perfect, almost theatric timing, a grav-pod slammed from the sky like a lightning bolt. The egg shaped contraption was one of the simplest forms of orbital vehicles -- literally just an oval that could be shot from a cannon at the ground at incredible speeds. The only reason that it didn't leave a crater or flatten everyone around it was because of the a-grav field that snapped on moments before impact -- not that it didn't make a gust of wind explode outwards and whip Hornet's hair back past her shoulders.

"Get in," Sting said. "I'll fly you to orbit."

The pod opened and Hornet stepped up to the door, then looked back at the other Prospectives...at...

At her future crew.

The shift from simulations -- what she had just seen as a way to train and practice until the real training began -- to this was so...sudden, so jarring. It was like the world had been ripped away from her and she was tumbling through space. Giddy excitement roared through her, not the fear she expected. Hornet grinned. "Come on, everyone."

The pod was cramped, but had enough room for the lot of them, if Hugh didn't mind needing to curl up in the center of the room. Seats were deployed from the circular walls, and had lashes that they could use to strap themselves down. Rotting Carcass deployed a curved shell that locked his body down when he flattened himself to the wall -- causing his mold to slowly slurp and glop down the side of the petri dish to froth against the shell. It was really gross, but Hornet by now was pretty used to him.

Heinlein shook his head. "So, everyone. On a scale from one to ten, how terrified are you all?"

"One," Hornet said, beaming at him.

"Four, definitely," Hugh said from the floor as the pod started to lift into the air, shuddering slightly -- it was in Sting's hands.

"Two," K'iren said.

"Bashfully: Ten." Rotting Carcass said.

"Really?" Hornet asked.

"Explaining Through Clenched Teeth: It is one thing to be aware that you may be digitized and loaded onto a computer and another entirely to realize that, soon, you will be leaving behind the rotting flesh for a computer." Rotting Carcass paused for a moment. "However, there are no people I'd rather be forced to leave my flesh with than you."

Hornet blushed. She hadn't expected to...ever like Rotting Carcass. But she found herself smiling, while her free hand petted Hugh's head and the shuddering around the pod faded...faded...stopped. They were in orbit now, sweeping through airless space towards the headquarters of the Starship Corps.

"Same, Carcass. Same."

TO BE CONTINUED