Kohahu knew that her Aquitaine rank was more honorary than not. At the same time, it fit her into their system, so that they could deal with her as a person, rather than an Ambassador or Important Personage. It let her be like Nam Nagarkar. And it let her see things that no outsider would ever truly understand.
Phil Kosnett was an avalanche, however polite and friendly he presented to most viewers. Social, political, intellectual. The death and destruction of the Balhee Cluster as it had been two years ago, hopefully only from a social perspective, thus to be replaced by something better.
Aditi and Dalou were on their way. Ewin had, perhaps, stopped backsliding.
Gloran would be an issue.
But Phil had asked her a question. An open-ended one, at that. Like her father might have on the dojo floor, when it was just them and whatever silent bodyguards gargoyled around the edges of the room.
Nothing simple there. Phil Kosnett was not a simple man, for all he took a direct and easy-to-understand approach to many things.
It was the natives of the Balhee Cluster who had to make things complicated. Herself included.
Hopefully, the act of joining the RAN squadron as an observer, then actually enlisting enough to become one of them for a time, would put her on a radically different path than she might have otherwise.
“No Gloran personage can admit to fear,” Kohahu replied to Phil’s initial question, falling back on something her father liked to repeat. “That is the backbone of their entire society.”
Phil nodded and watched, so Kohahu decided to expand. He had asked her an open-ended question.
“They will see the terrible firepower you command, and have to bring something roughly equivalent, or perhaps just slightly less, because to bring more would suggest to an outside witness that they are afraid of your fleet,” Kohahu expanded. “That they would fight you anyway from weakness just meant that their destruction would be recorded in one of the great oral poems for which they are known, harking back to primitive warriors around a fire recounting tales of glory and lost friends.”
“And if we aren’t here to fight?” Phil pressed.
“They might not be sure how to react,” Kohahu said. “Everything for them is seen through that lens. We do not wish to be seen as menials or servants, but the act of offering to help can be taken that way, if they chose. Or it can be an acknowledgment of peers assisting one another because both happened to be present. Warrior comrades in the field, as it were.”
She had said We. Interesting choice of unconscious vocabulary, though it was likely never to emerge from this room, so she would be safe later when others accused her of being seduced by the power and glory of Aquitaine.
They would be right in the outcome, and wrong in the reasons, though she might have to formally raise Morninghawk to one of the Great Houses in another few decades, just to make that point clear to the fools not paying attention.
“Dalou had a…concern that I would decide to attack them at Ellariel,” Phil shared a ghost of a grin with her. “They had to bring home three battleships, just to establish my place in their hierarchy.”
“At the time, I think the Shogun’s Advisors probably thought it would be sufficient,” Kohahu noted dryly. “Today, they are probably offering extra blessings at their family altars, having read the reports from Ewinhome.”
They all had a smile at that. Dalou would have only attacked out of panicked fear, and Phil Kosnett had offered no hint of treachery, even when Dalou nearly turned itself inside out anyway.
Kohahu could at least put that down to a frustrated Emperor testing his leash.
How would the history of the Balhee Cluster have turned out, without Lord Morninghawk there to guide everyone? To literally save Dalou from imploding at one of the most critical moments in their entire history? Captain Sugawara aboard Forktail had been at pains to live up to that standard, that legend, but Kohahu was mature enough to understand that nobody could, with the exceptions of Phil and Heather.
Kohahu slipped backwards to some of the histories she had read of Kosnett’s adventures in Buran. Neither he nor Heather had written a definitive treatise, letting their reports speak for them, but others had been privy to enough material and witnesses to piece together some kind of truth.
Having met Markus, Stunt Dude, and Sam Au, Kohahu was certain that the writers had never been told the really good parts.
And Kohahu needed to lean on Stunt Dude and Sam to write down their story. Too often, it started with her sailing away aboard a returned hospital ship, Stunt Dude retiring from active duty, and then showing up on her doorstep with roses, two years later.
Nobody had ever gotten the rest from the man.
“You were a pirate,” Kohahu said after a short break.
She couldn’t help that her voice had turned authoritative. Side effect of dealing with most of Father’s previous advisors. The Stodgy Old Farts, as she had taken to thinking of them.
Kosnett nodded, eyes sober and focused on her.
“What do pirates do, when they want to attack some isolated colony?” Kohahu asked.
She looked purposefully over at Markus Dunklin, including him in the conversation by force of will. The man sat up straighter, then actually stood up from his chair, though he didn’t yet approach the command table.
Phil noticed and nodded the man over. Then he opened a channel and Heather’s face appeared in the projection.
“What’s up?” Heather asked.
“Kohahu just asked me a most interesting question,” Phil said. “It offers us an in with the Imperial Suite that they might not have seen coming. What do pirates do, when they want to attack some colony?”
“Scout the damned place secretly,” Heather replied instantly. “Stay off scanners and make sure nobody sees you coming.”
“Where?” Phil asked.
“Mansi-D,” Markus replied instantly.
Heather had been an officer serving aboard CS-405. Markus had been an actual pirate marine, boarding and capturing several enemy warships, if you could call those vessels warships. A freighter, a mega-freighter, a hospital ship, and a rescued police cutter stolen out of a boneyard on the surface of a moon.
A moon. Mansi-D-3.
Persephone.
Kohahu had an idea.
“I need Nam,” she said simply.
No one else in this room could answer effectively. Kohahu didn’t have the experience. The others had the background, but maybe the RAN did things differently that Cluster pirates. Well, of course they did, but how differently?
Phil did something and Nam’s face appeared next to Heather’s.
“First Centurion?” Nam asked.
“Need you on the flag bridge, Nam,” he said simply. “Please drop whatever you are doing and haul ass this way. Heather, you too.”
He cut the line and looked at Markus now.
“Lady Blackbeard,” Phil said in an almost reverent tone.
“Miss her,” Markus replied. “We’ll get you close, though.”
Kohahu had no idea what message had been communicated, but Nam and Heather arrived quickly and took up spots.
“Mansi-D, the first time,” Phil set the stage as Kohahu watched, the man surrounded by many decades of hard-won naval experience Kohahu could only imagine.
And now use.
“Piracy,” Kohahu said to start things.
“So we set ourselves up in scanner shadows from our target,” Heather said. “Then Evan Brinich, or maybe West Lovisone slipped us up over the edge of the planet, blacked out and listening. Passive sensors only, but when you are a scout, that’s a lot of electronic firepower and processing capabilities. Stay put for a bit, pretending to be an anomaly or a moon, then drop back down. Stay hiding, and drive backwards in such a way as to remain hidden before hitting JumpSpace.”
Kohahu nodded. Just as she’d read about. CS-405’s legend had come with so many important members of her crew aboard Urumchi.
She turned to Nam now.
“Pirates,” Kohahu said simply, waiting for the woman to nod. “Let’s assume that they’ve done the same thing. Let us assume sufficient competence to actually pull it off against a halfway competent defender. At least until they know that Carinae II doesn’t have any warships in orbit to worry about. Do they dump their trash, just before launching the attack, so they have that much extra space to store whatever valuables they intend to steal?”
Kohahu could tell she’d hit on something from the way everyone around the table rocked backwards. Along with several people who still sat around the edges of the room listening with one ear.
“Shit.” Nam seemed to sum it up nicely with that word. “We probably would have. No reason to suspect that whoever hit this place didn’t. Won’t say standard operating procedure, but yeah, maybe we don’t keep things as clean and formal as we should. It all burns up in the atmosphere anyway, eventually.”
“Assuming atmosphere,” Markus said. “Or simple gravity wells without messy multi-lunar attendants with some big planet.”
He stopped and did something on the console in front of him. Leyla Ekmekçi, Urumchi’s Science Officer, appeared suddenly.
“Leyla, I need the orbital layout of the local system, as it was on the day of the attack, with vectors and known moons,” he said simply.
Kohahu was still getting used to a place where a burly redneck Senior Chief could just give a Senior Centurion orders. And have them followed without question.
“Stand by,” Leyla replied. “Rewinding. Transmitting. Want it in the projection?”
“Please,” Markus said.
The image appeared. Star off to one side, not to scale. Carinae II in the center.
Kohahu had to get used to the Aquitaine method of lettering planets from closest to farthest, instead of numbering them. Carinae II, one of three rocky worlds relatively close in, with three more gas and ice giants beyond that, before you got out to comets and iceballs in the distant darkness.
“Four?” she asked Markus.
“That’s where I would hide right now,” he nodded. “Angle is good. Three is too far off on the other side of the star to be any use. Five and Six are resonant, but not particularly well placed. I’m a pirate, so I’m a lazy-ass punk who bullies people because it is easier than working for a living.”
“Don’t tell Hollywood that,” Heather snapped.
“She’s a woman, in a place where the folks around here are too dumbass to admit that she’s smarter than they are,” he snapped back. “And works three times as hard.”
Neither of them had spoken harshly, but Kohahu was still amazed at the openness of their conversation. Nothing at all like Dalou.
Old Dalou. The sclerotic nation that had been slowly sliding into senescence.
She needed to change a lot of things when she got home and started building her own networks to take over, one of these days.
“I agree,” Phil spoke anyway. “I’d look at Four. Leyla, we’re going to stay over here for now, but I want you and Sunan Bunnag from Viking studying Four like I expect a doctoral dissertation on the planet at a later date. Throw Arkan Bobrov on CM-507 in as well, but keep everything generally quiet and passive for now. I’ll talk to the locals about sending a task force over to investigate it later, once we know how they will likely respond to us meddling in an internal Gloran thing. Questions?”
Nobody had any, but that was to be expected. Still, Phil turned to her with a broad smile.
“Extremely well done, Kohahu,” he said.
She found that she could blush, after all. It felt weird, but good.
Like she belonged.