Victoria reluctantly turned away from the wardroom liquor cabinet to face her assembled senior officers. Carillo, Calhoun, Wong, Avery, Prescott, and Doc Whipple. She could count on one hand the number of times the seven of them had assembled in the wheelhouse, and truth be told she was surprised they all managed to fit at the same time. Poor Huian Wong looked crushed between the muscled arm of Red Calhoun and the tree-stump build of Davis Prescott.
Six officers, six tumblers, and one for herself. The magnets in the base snapped to the tabletop as she set them down and filled each with a small measure. Having explained the Maeyar request, the occupants of the wardroom displayed anything from unease to illness. Though that might be due to the lingering stink of the Vautan. She could hear the atmosphere cyclers running full-blast through the bulkhead behind her head.
"Don’t everyone speak up at once," she said.
Avery was the first to reach for his glass, sighing as he looked at the geometric pattern etched into the shatterproof clear polymer. "This crew followed you to the Malagath Frontier, Vick. You know we’d follow you into hell."
"Huh uh. You think I jammed you in here like a pack of sardines for a bunch of ‘Aye Ma’ams’? You’re Union Earth Privateer officers, not by luck or by accident, and before too long some of you will be sitting in my seat."
Victoria sat with a thump, as if to drive the point home. "This isn’t some salvage run or unknowingly pulling a prince from the fire. This is declaring sides in an interstellar war. We came out here to lay low after we dragged the Dirregaunt through Taru and Pilum Forel. Too many eyes are on the Condor, and not just State and Colony’s."
"It’s not some random xeno bugger either," said Red. "I think he’d have done the same for us that you did for him, and that’s not something you can say for most of the buggers out here. I don’t think we owe it to him, but I figure he’s one we want to owe us."
"I’m against it," said Huian Wong flatly. Victoria’s navigation officer was the daughter of the Secretary of State and Colony. The girl showed iron guts for being a politician’s daughter. Honesty was what Victoria had asked for, and honesty was something Huian had in ready supply.
"We don’t have the right to speak for the Union Earth and decide which side of this war should win. That’s an S&C directive, not a Privateer one. Plus, the Maeyar are vying to be vassals of the Malagath. Not knowing the nature of this invasion could mean a Dirregaunt or Kossovoldt proxy war is underway."
Assuming their itty bitty Condor was able to affect the outcome. A pretty big assumption. The Big Three angle was one Victoria hadn’t considered.
"The right, maybe not. But the authority?" said Doc Whipple. "A privateer captain has almost unilateral authority beyond human space. Besides, we get a message to S&C and they’ll fuss and bicker until the Maeyar are long gone. Vick is right, we need a decision now and only a privateer captain has the weight to swing."
Carillo shrugged. "Authority is granted to those who have the judgment to use it, as well as the judgment not to. No one in this room doubts your judgment, Vick. No other captain could have led us through the things you have. If you judge this intervention necessary, then I am behind you."
"Can we afford not to?" asked Avery. "No doubt this mission carries risk, but the potential for a formal defense alliance is clear. That means tech, trade, intel, protection, maybe even cohabitation. Opportunities like that don’t come cheap. Or frequently. The Maeyar are hundreds of years ahead of us, if they shared surplus defense equipment that was two hundred years old it would still put almost anything in our fleet to shame."
One officer had yet to speak. Victoria looked at her new chief engineer, idly rolling his tumbler between sausage fingers and watching the amber liquid slosh within. Davis Prescott was the only officer at the table who did not yet call himself a Vulture, having stepped in to fill a hole in the roster left by the death of Yuri Denisov, a good friend to many of the faces in the room. Such an action was not easily forgiven by some, despite his playing no hand in Yuri’s death.
"Davis?"
He looked up at her, small eyes deep beneath a heavy brow. His wide jaw offered a slight frown, canted as though only half his face held issue with her proposal. "I been over every inch of this vessel, Captain. She is many things. Strong, fast, and quiet as death in the night. But she ain’t a warship, and saving for the Major’s men, your crew ain’t soldiers. You put this ship on the front line, one of those two is like to break. Now I don’t know you like these folks do. Maybe that’s why I can’t bring myself to agree with your chosen course. But I will abide."
Victoria nodded. Five for, two against and with good reason. In all honesty, she had debated sending an FTL databurst to Earth to brief them on the situation. But Doc Whipple was right, they wouldn’t receive an answer in time. It would take weeks just to determine who had the authority to declare war on the Maeyar’s enemies on behalf of humanity. And the last time she’d deferred to the UE, they ordered her to hand the Malagath First Prince over to the Dirregaunt. An illegal order, as it turned out, all record of which was expunged. This was a Union Earth Privateer matter, the Vultures would be the ones putting their lives on the line.
"You’re right, Davis. This isn’t a warship, but none of our warships can play on the same field as the bastards out here. Not even close. We can, and the Orion Spur needs to see humanity as more than scavengers and cab drivers, or as soon as Earth or Ithaca or any of the other colonies get found, humanity is going to be scoured out of the galaxy because there’s not a single xeno we know of that we could beat fleet to fleet."
Victoria glanced to her Navigator. "Huian, no disrespect to your mother, but State and Colony will talk themselves in goddamn circles while we wait to learn what happens at Pedres. The fact of the matter is that a xeno fleet officer sought us out. The Condor, by name. He came to us because he believes that we can make a difference in his fight. Whether or not we can I don’t know. But this is why we were sent outside the ‘protection’ of the colonies. This is why Privateers have the backing of Union Earth. Not just so we can haul back junk for the eggheads to tinker with. Is that why any of you shipped yourselves a dozen horizon jumps from UE space?"
Resolution looked back at her from the faces of her officers. A body did not end up on a Privateer ship by accident. Whatever their reasons for being here, they did not extend only to picking the bones of dead xenos for trinkets. Victoria took a deep breath. "Let’s give the Maeyar a call."
Sothcide looked at the command deck of the Twin Sister. Half a hundred Maeyar bustled about as Ersis dropped away in the main optical screen. His flight helmet was tucked beneath his arm, dress uniform packed away after his meeting with Human Victoria. The sleek bulk of Twin Sister’s escorts lifted beside the carrier as well as the other four ships in the battlegroup, and the Condor, smallest of their entourage save for the fighter craft in his bay. His wife’s bay, in truth, and the woman stood not far from him, fins wavering gently with the air circulation as she monitored reports from the system divisions across the vessel. As he watched her read the same report three times he approached.
"You are distracted, Jalith. What troubles my reason for being?"
She did not turn. "More vessels have entered Pedres, they continue to muster beyond Juna, and three more listening posts have been located and destroyed. At last count we identified almost a thousand vessels, all arriving from the vector of Gavisar."
Sothcide gently lowered her screen, bringing Jalith’s attention to him. "Gavisar has never sought to expand. Not after . . ."
"They have never needed to," said Jalith, quickly cutting him off. "Not with a homeworld the size of a gas giant."
"Why now? And how did they amass a fleet of such size?"
"Questions that I hope your human captain is able to answer. Why the light of my morning puts such stock in the abilities of this primitive vessel I am eager to see," said Jalith.
"Are they in position?" she asked her contact tracker.
"Yes Matron, it’s just . . . well, surely it’s nothing."
Sothcide looked up to the tracking board. "Yes?"
"We are seeing a similar profile on the other side of the battlegroup, for moments at a time. I had thought at first they were out of alignment."
Sothcide shrugged. "Probably a glitch in the active radiation sensors. Reflection from the atmosphere of the planet. Who knows what kind of strange signatures Human Victoria’s vessel gives off. Primitives really, these humans. Perform a service check on the array, we cannot afford errors when we arrive at Pedres. Contact the Condor and give them the necessary information on the Twin Sister’s darkspace shroud so that she’s close enough to enter the space tear with us."
"Aye, Wing Officer."
The Twin Sister had the tonnage and the reactor power to pull smaller ships with it into leaps between stars, or even in a ring of warped space to cheat the speed of light in more conventional ways. Ersis was too far for most of their battlegroup to make the jump to Pedres in a single bound, but riding on the back of the Twin Sister made it possible. The humans were unused to traveling by such a means, and required an explanation for the process. Spending time aboard the Condor had gifted Sothcide with a modicum of insight in the value such common knowledge might hold to the humans, and suspected that within the next few years he would see them employing the strategy to leave even messier holes in reality than they already did. More power added to a recording of poor poetry simply resulted in louder poor poetry. In the interim, the fighter wing needed inspecting. A sortie awaited his pilots on the other side. Jalith returned to her half-minded scan, thoughts on the distant star and the threat looming over the planet of her birth. So Sothcide descended to the deck alone, helmet a familiar weight beneath his slender arm.