Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades (10 page)

“We’ll prove this
can be done without a vacsuit right now,” Commander Anderson said,
pointing to a square metal hut by the starting line. To Alice’s
amazement, Oz, Minh-Chu, Ayan along with a few other commanders
stepped out onto the starting line. Before Alice could come to
believe what she was seeing, the group of seven ran for the course.
They tackled it as a team, helping each other when they had to. Ayan
was only a few centimetres taller than Alice, so that was who she
watched. She needed help with a couple of obstacles that were more
easily conquered by the taller members of the course challengers, but
got ahead of people in the tube maze, was the first to the bottom on
the descending wall, and helped guide lines on the repelling
challenge. Ayan was in better shape than Alice expected, but she
surprised everyone when she missed a step on the balance beam and
fell into an electrically charged net.

The periodic shocks
were enough to inflict incredible discomfort, something Alice would
discover for herself later, but the pulses were not so intense that
they immobilized people completely. Minh-Chu waited for Ayan at the
other side, and cheered her on as she got on all fours and climbed
while getting jolted. Commander Worsch, from the Sunspire, almost
fell on top of Ayan as he lost his balance on the beam. He was almost
twice Ayan’s size, but was equally affected by the shocks. It took
them several minutes to climb the net and continue the course.

At the end, all the
senior officers who participated finished, and stood in front of the
trainees exhausted but all smiles. Ayan seemed especially pleased
with herself.

“Now it’s your
turn,” Commander Anderson said. “Complete this and you’ll
continue on to the next phase of training. Good luck.”

Alice breezed through
most of the physical ranger training, and enjoyed the team building
more than anything, even though she soon discovered she had a lot to
learn. It was the intelligence assessment, tactical study, and
problem solving part of the training that really challenged her.
Alice could get through it, but the real problem was sitting still
for hours in the middle of her day while she interacted with all the
mental training material. Whereas many recruits wanted to tap out and
walk off during physical challenges, she found herself gripped by the
temptation to wash out in the midst of processing intelligence data.
She knew she could always return to the Warlord, and help finish work
on the ship, but it was a fleeting urge.

Passing the
intelligence and problem solving portions of her training was a point
of pride. It also prepared her for the real world, giving her the
tools to assess a situation before she rushed in, and the patience to
review intelligence data so she knew what was going on.

As she moved between
giant trees and jungle foliage, Alice was grateful for the miserable
week of jungle training all rangers had to undergo. Even with the
help of her mapping systems and constant feedback on where she ought
to be going, Alice was constantly on the verge of becoming lost. It
was situations like that that brought her physical and mental
training together.

A fierce roar called
her attention from her map to her immediate surroundings. She looked
up in time to see a jungle cat lunging down from above. Its head was
as wide as her shoulders and it was furious, batting her into a thick
bramble tangle.

Her vacsuit protected
her. Alice was more startled than injured. She drew her sidearm and
struggled to turn towards her attacker. The thick undergrowth she was
tangled with had her partially restrained. All the strength
augmentation in the universe wouldn’t help her if she was off
balance. As she struggled to reorient herself, the big cat clawed her
out of her bondage, flinging her into the middle of the small
clearing.

Her sidearm was left
behind, and she couldn’t help but be momentarily stunned as the cat
leapt atop her, pinning her with a giant paw. Its massive jaws
descended and it savagely tried to bite her head off, a pursuit that
failed thanks to her light armour, but it was terrifying nonetheless.
It took several seconds of gnawing for her to remember that she had a
stun field that was made for crowd suppression and self defence. With
a thought, she activated it, and the massive jungle cat twitched,
grunted, then fell limp atop her.

It took several moments
for her to work her way free from beneath the beast while taking care
not to injure it. “Okay, that stays out of the report,” she
muttered as she found her sidearm and shoved it into her holster.

Small mewling sounds
caught her attention, and she quickly discovered what the cat was
defending, or trying to feed. A quick look around revealed that the
foliage was flattened mostly around the hollow trunk of an old fallen
tree. Claw marks on the nearest standing trunks indicated that she
was looking at a type of cat that typically moved up into the lower
branches and waited for prey to pass underneath. Her display listed
several instances of pickers getting jumped by the cats, each saved
by their vacsuit. Alice scanned her attacker and nodded to herself.
“You’ll be up and about in about nine minutes.”

Her map told her she
had to head past the fallen log, and she couldn’t help but stop and
peek inside before moving on. Three kittens about Alice’s size with
similar grey and black fur paid her little attention, but the fourth
seemed intrigued. It sat up on its hind-paws and looked directly at
her, its nose sniffing the air between them. Alice suppressed the
urge to reach out and pet the fur ball. “This isn’t the kind of
exploration I expected when I joined the Rangers.”

The kitten looked
towards its mother and bounced past Alice. The big matron cat huffed
a little as her offspring nudged its way towards her underside. Alice
took it as a sign that her command and control system might have the
estimate on how long the cat would take to get back on her feet
wrong. “Time to move on,” Alice said to herself, pressing deeper
into the jungle.

Predators

The Lemta-So System had
been a hub of trade and passenger transportation for so long that
Minh-Chu couldn’t get through the history document proffered by the
major ports. As he sat quietly waiting with Samurai Wing in a
man-made debris belt, he couldn’t help but take another look at the
document as yet another version downloaded.

For every colony and
station, there was a founder and a flag. There seemed to be an
unannounced competition between every settlement to present their
stories in the most dramatic fashion possible. Every time he scanned
areas that were settled, the communications systems in that area
spammed him with the Lemta-So history documents along with the normal
collection of advertisements. He assumed they’d be returning to the
system, so he decided the historical documents would be good for the
trip back to Rega-Gain. As for the advertisements, he kept the ones
that were flagged by other users for being funny. It was a habit he’d
picked up from Ashley.

The list of privately
owned ports and space stations was overwhelming. He checked on the
Warlord using long-range scanners. The ship was still holding in an
outer orbit around one of the older, larger stations in the system
over a million kilometres away. To any casual observer, it looked
like the crew was holding in a pattern, getting the ship ready for
docking.

All seven Samurai
Squadron pilots were in on the operation. Four Uriel fighters and
three Ramiel craft drifted in sync with the debris belt. It wasn’t
happenstance that there was a junk belt between Orrot and Mormont,
two of the major settled worlds in the Lemta-So System. It was one of
many used to enforce a reasonable interplanetary speed on craft
travelling within its boundaries. The Ceri Belt was not heavily
policed, and Minh-Chu doubted his group would be bothered by the
laughable customs patrol; Samurai Squadron was too heavily armed for
any of them to risk a challenge.

“Just wondering, why
this ship? Just a cursory scan of the area is revealing a target-rich
environment, and most of these vessels aren’t disguising their
affiliations,” asked Singe, one of the newest additions to Samurai
Squadron. She was a fighter pilot for the British Alliance who
retired a month before after twenty years of service. To Minh-Chu’s
astonishment, she was on his doorstep a week later, offering her
services to his fighter wing. Her service record rendered him
speechless; she had already served as a wing commander for six years
in the British Alliance.

“It was the captain’s
choice,” Minh-Chu replied. She was right, there were half a dozen
ships contracted by Regent Galactic or Order of Eden, and many other
ships heading towards their territories. The shipping business was
booming, and Lemta-So was a major collection point for manufacturers
and raw material providers to gather and sell their wares. All those
producers wanted to remain neutral, as it wasn’t unusual for such
companies to try to sell to both sides at the beginning of a war.

Minh-Chu didn’t feel
comfortable withholding all the details about their target from his
second in command. “We got some good inside information on our
target though, and there are a few containers that read high on the
biological chart, even through radiation and scan shielding.”

“So, he’s on a
mission of liberation,” Singe replied. “Or at least needs to find
out what’s in those containers to be sure they’re not carrying
unwilling passengers.”

“Exactly,” Minh-Chu
said. “The crewman we pulled the info out of didn’t have the
details on those transportation cars. They’re sealed to everyone
but the commanding officers.”

“Another sign that
there are probably slaves within,” Singe said. “I’m all for
freeing folk, and I know half the Warlord’s permanent crew are
liberated people, but I’m wondering what keeps the captain’s nose
pointed to helping them.”

Minh-Chu thought for a
moment. It was something no one had asked him before. With all of
Samurai Squadron listening in, he wanted to give the right answer for
his friend and captain.

“Ronin?” probed
Singe after waiting nearly a minute for a response. “Have I
wandered into a dangerous topic?”

“No, there’s just a
lot of history,” Minh-Chu replied. For the last two months, he’d
worked with Jake on compiling the story of Vindyne, Freeground,
Regent Galactic, the Order Of Eden, and that of all of his friends,
starting with their departure from Freeground so they could hand the
completed document over to the British Alliance. The walk down memory
lane had been a long and revealing one. “If I were to explain why
he’s driven to free people in as few words as possible, I’d say
it probably starts with the fact that Jake is, or at least was,
property of Regent Galactic. He’s been property of at least two
corporations we know of, so if anyone knows what it’s like to be in
chains, it would be him.”

“That makes sense,”
Singe replied. “Where would I find the long version of that story?
It’s not in the personnel files.”

“It will be soon,”
Minh-Chu said. Jacob Valent’s history would be one of the few
personal stories that would become widely public in the next week. In
order to assist in the British Alliance’s defence of Jacob Valent
against charges of attempted genocide filed with the Galactic Courts
a year before by Regent Galactic and the Order of Eden, they would be
releasing Jonas Valent’s and Jacob Valance’s entire history in
every district the Galactic Courts claimed to have jurisdiction over.
Almost all the survivors of the Holocaust Virus, over a quarter of a
trillion humans, would have access to that information, starting with
the core worlds and the Rega Gain System. The defence was part of the
complicated deal Minh-Chu and Jake made with the British Alliance
without consulting the people of Haven Shore. They were working to
build something that could act separately. Whereas Haven Shore was a
peaceful settlement under the concerted protection of the Carthans,
British Alliance, and the Triton, the Warlord and Samurai Squadron
would lead the charge in war. Taking the little cargo hauler called
the Torano would be the first offensive, a test against easy prey.

“Oh, there’s one
more thing about this shipment that makes it pretty hard to pass up.
Cash. One of the crewmen Stephanie met a month ago from the Star
Shifter said that this was one of the transports moving money
collected from Order of Eden pledges.”

“If we take this haul
in, I don’t think people will continue to question our
information-gathering campaign,” Singe said. “But the shipwrights
on the Warlord are going to be pissed.”

“I know, but they’re
off on the next stop anyway,” Minh-Chu repliled. The Shipwrights
were on loan from the British Alliance, and the Warlord was allowed
to leave port with them aboard on the condition that they returned to
Rega Gain on schedule and that they wouldn’t initiate combat
operations. “Captain Valent couldn’t pass this up,” Minh-Chu
explained, “and I think he’s been restless the last couple
months, ever since he captured Captain Terka on Modun for our British
friends.”

“He captured
someone?” Singe asked.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot
you didn’t know about that. A little side operation. We got word
that the captain of the Resplendent was going to be visiting an old
friend on Modun and Jake negotiated a bounty with the British
Alliance. You remember when Stephanie was in command for three days?”

“That’s when he
snuck off and got ‘im,” Singe said. “As broody as the man is,
he still impresses, I’ll give him that.”

“Just don’t ask for
details,” Minh-Chu said, aware that the bounty brought back some
old demons for his friend, the captain.

“Time for final prep.
Verify your settings, sync your autopilots and control interfaces,”
Singe reminded the small fighter wing as Minh-Chu was just starting
to think it was about time he did so. “Mission counter is under
sixty seconds, we should start seeing fireworks soon.”