Ep.#14 - "The Weak and the Innocent" (The Frontiers Saga) (27 page)

“The Kalitans were being worked into extinction,” Kata countered. “They really
were
slaves.”

“Still, other than the Tannans and the Kalitans, everyone else seems to be mixed. Some like them and some don’t.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to think this isn’t going to be as easy a sell to our people back home as I thought it would be,” Kata said. “Let’s go get some shots of the production line, shall we?”

* * *

“I
didn’t think I’d be this nervous,” Deliza confided in the admiral as they walked down the corridors of the Karuzara asteroid base.

“There’s no reason to be nervous, Deliza,” Admiral Dumar assured her. “Your ideas are well thought out, your designs are solid, and you know more about the aerodynamics and performance parameters than either your father or I ever did. You will do fine.”

“What if they don’t like me?”

“You don’t need them to like you. You just need them to do what you tell them.”

“What if they think I’m a spoiled little princess or something?”

“You were a princess for only a year, Deliza. For seventeen years, you lived on Haven. If anything, they’ll think you’re a dirty, uneducated molo farmer.”

“I was not,” Deliza objected. “Okay, I
was
a molo farmer…and I guess I was dirty a lot of the time, but I am most assuredly
not
uneducated.”

“You’re smarter than most of them will ever be.”

“You think so?”

Admiral Dumar looked at her. “What happened? A couple days ago you were beaming with confidence as you walked down that boarding ramp.”

“I had been pretending to be a princess for a year, remember? I had a lot of practice. I’ve never
done
this before.”

“I still say you’ll do fine.”

“I just hope they don’t take pity on me,” she said, looking down at the floor as they walked. “That’s the last thing I need.” She looked up again, an idea suddenly popping into her head. “I could use my old last name. I could be Deliza Tugwell… Or maybe Liza Tugwell?”

The admiral looked at her crossly.

“Deli Redmond?”

“You landed in what is probably the most luxurious ship this sector has ever seen. Everyone knows who you are, Deliza.”

They turned the corner and headed down the final stretch to what was commonly referred to as ‘the black lab.’ It was a place no one talked about, yet everyone knew about it. It’s where the guys in lab coats got together with the guys in overalls and created new things. Unfortunately, not much had come out of the black lab since it had been started, just after the Karuzara arrived in the Sol system. Only one project had gone all the way to prototype and that was the Jump KKV, which they would be testing soon. Everything else had failed to match expectations. Admiral Dumar hoped Deliza’s project would change that.

They came to a stop outside the door. Admiral Dumar turned to Deliza. “The men you are about to meet will not want to listen to you. Some of them are Takaran and were raised in that patriarchal mindset. The Corinairans will be a bit better, as their women are generally the better educated of the sexes. However, they won’t want you to get in and tinker with anything, as they’ll consider that their job.”

“What about the Terrans?”

“They’ll be a lot easier. Their society is pretty well integrated, so most of them don’t really have any preconceived notions of male and female roles.”

“Great.”

“Unfortunately, you won’t have any Terrans working for you. The only Terran in there is Lieutenant Tillardi and he’s running a different project.”

“Poo.”

“Try not to say poo,” the admiral told her.

“What’s wrong with poo?”

“It’s too weak. They’ll just laugh at you. Try to really swear once in a while.”

“I don’t think I know any swear words,” Deliza admitted.

“All that time you spent with Lieutenant Commander Kamenetskiy and you didn’t learn a single bad word?”

“He always swore in Russian.”

“All I know is ‘damn’,” the admiral admitted, “and I suspect that’s not much stronger than ‘poo’. I’ll ask Lieutenant Commander Nash next time I see her. Or maybe Ensign Hayes.”

“Josh is an Ensign now?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t expect
that
,” Deliza commented.

“No one did.” Admiral Dumar took a deep breath and exhaled. “Are you ready?”

Deliza nodded.

Admiral Dumar looked at the guard at the door. “Sergeant.” The sergeant placed his hand on the palm reader then pushed a few buttons. The door slid open just enough to allow them to slip inside.

Deliza followed the admiral in and looked around as he signed in with the guard on the other side.

“Admiral on deck!” the guard barked.

Everyone in the cavernous hangar snapped to attention as the admiral and Deliza walked across the floor. Deliza studied the layout of the room as they walked. The hangar, like all the others, had been carved out by mining and boring machines, and was basically a massive cave. The walls were fused and ground smooth, same as the floor, but the ceiling was still rocky and uneven, with beams overhead and an array of lighting panels providing even lighting throughout the hangar.

As they walked toward the men, she noticed the hangar had been divided into three sections by sliding walls. Her team was in the middle section. The section to their right appeared empty, as the walls were slid back halfway and the lighting in that section was off. The section to the left, however, was completely closed off, with its own guard at the entrance.

They came to a stop a few meters away from the line of technicians and engineers. She knew every one of their faces from their personnel records. She knew each of their strengths and weaknesses, along with their backgrounds, education, and experience.

The problem was that
they
did not know
her
. All they saw was a pretty young woman who thought she had all the answers. A princess whose father and sister had recently been murdered, and her palace had been taken away. Even worse, they would see her as a favorite of the admiral.

This was going to be a tough sell.

“Gentlemen,” Admiral Dumar began. “Welcome to project ‘Super Falcon’.”

The men looked skeptical, more than one of them raising a single eyebrow.

“You’re going to take a poorly designed spacecraft that has been inefficiently utilized, due in large part to my own short-sightedness, and turn it into a versatile space-borne weapons and utility platform that every mechanic will want to maintain and every pilot will want to fly.”

“Sir, we’ve only got four Falcons still flying, and two of them are down for repairs,” one of the technicians pointed out.

“But we’ve got at least four, maybe six, good airframes to work with as well,” the admiral replied.

“The engines are shot on all of them,” another technician said.

“Then we’ll just have to fabricate new parts and fix those engines, won’t we?” Dumar countered.

“Admiral, there’s just not that much room left in those birds. Plus, if you add more weight to them, they won’t be able to lift themselves off the surface,” the first technician argued.

“That’s why we’re pulling the atmospheric drives and lift systems out of her,” Deliza chimed in, using her overly confident ‘princess voice’, as Yanni often called her authoritative tone.

“What? You can’t pull the lift fans out,” the first technician objected, “she won’t be able to fly.”

“She’ll be able to fly just fine in space,” Deliza replied, defending her position.

“Sure, but she won’t be able to take off and land on the surface.”

“We don’t plan on using them in the atmosphere any longer,” Deliza explained. “And if, for some reason, they do need to land on the surface, they can do so conventionally.”

The technician laughed. “402s fall out of the sky at slow speeds.”

“Then they’ll just have to land at higher speeds,” Deliza responded in a condescending tone.

“Admiral,” the technician complained, shaking his head. “Who’s our team leader going to be on this anyway?”

“You’re looking at her,” Deliza replied firmly.

“Oh, come on.”

“Don’t like it?”

“No, I don’t,” the technician admitted.

“Well, I don’t give a damn. The door’s that way, asshole. I’m sure the admiral can find you a new job scrubbing carbon scorching off the inside of shuttle thrusters…you know, man’s work?”

Admiral Dumar smiled, both eyebrows raised, looking at the technician, who immediately backed down.

“Gentlemen, my name is Deliza Ta’Akar,” she began, pacing up and down the line of men as she spoke, “and I’ve been working on 402s since I was tall enough to climb her service ladders. I know every bolt, every wire, and every circuit in that bird, probably better than anyone in this whole damned sector. Now, the Falcon’s a flying brick in the atmosphere. The only reason she can cut through the air is because of her overpowered engines and her damned lift fans. So I say stop using her in the atmosphere, and fit her out correctly… For space! Yank her atmo drives. She doesn’t need them. Her space drive is more than powerful enough to keep her speed up for basic aerodynamic flight, and she’s got a damned jump drive to get up into orbit and back down again if need be. Rip out her lift fans. This isn’t Palee, gentlemen. The Super Falcon won’t need to takeoff and land vertically, because she’s a
spaceship
, not a jet plane. We’ll have more room for reactors. More reactors means stronger shields, more powerful plasma cannons,
more
plasma cannons, and greater jump range. We can combine the weapons bays into one big bay, holding all kinds of fun stuff designed to blow the damned Jung to hell and back. We can elongate and widen the cockpit, and give her more crew space for longer duration missions, or for additional crewmen to operate more complex weapons and ECM systems. We’re gonna make the Super Falcon the bad-ass bitch of space she was always meant to be! When we’re done with her, she’ll be able to take a Jung Frigate all by herself. Two or three of them will be able to take out a cruiser!”

“I think they get the point,” Admiral Dumar muttered, ending her speech. “Gentlemen, this isn’t an invitation, it’s an order. You will follow Miss Ta’Akar’s instructions to the letter. I expect this to happen and happen in short order. Any questions?” The admiral looked over his men. Although none of them looked genuinely enthused about the project, he knew they would all do as ordered. If not, he would find them another job, or simply send them back to the Pentaurus cluster, preferably on a nice, slow, propellant tanker. “Very well, as you were.” Admiral Dumar turned to Deliza.

“Too much?” she asked.

“Maybe a bit,” he replied. “Where did all that come from, anyway?”

“I tried to pretend I was Jessica.”

“Good thinking. Now go and build me a Super Falcon.”

Deliza smiled. “Yes, sir.”

* * *

Suvan Navarro strolled casually through the crowded dusty street market, feigning
interest in the occasional items so as not to look out of place. He was wearing the traditional overcoat that men of this world generally wore, and carried a bag filled with various items he had purchased, to keep up appearances, over the last hour.

He paused momentarily to take in the alien sky. It was not often he got to set foot on such worlds. A pale-amber sky, with its distant orange-hued sun rising slowly on the horizon after its long absence. The massive gas giant, around which this moon orbited, filled the bottom half of the sky, its reflected light casting eerie secondary shadows opposite those cast by direct sunlight.

He wasn’t looking at the sky to enjoy the view, however. He was scanning the rooftops for snipers. He was sure they were there, and he had spotted at least three men that looked suspicious to his trained eyes. But here on Haven, suspicious was normal, as many unsavory characters from every system in the sector seemed to flock to this dirty, strange little world.

He had arrived several hours ago, having come out of his jump just outside the system. He then used the Corinairan shuttle to finish the trip, using its old FTL drive, which had yet to be removed. He even had the gravity adjusted in his quarters, on board the Avendahl, to match the lesser gravity on Haven, so as not to appear awkward or overly ‘bouncy’ in his stride, a sure giveaway that he was not a local.

Satisfied there were no overt threats on any of the nearby rooftops, Captain Navarro wiped the sweat from his brow and made his way over to a nearby cafe. Business was good that day, just as he had expected after fifty days of darkness. More importantly, it meant that there were unlikely to be any empty tables, forcing him to share a table with another patron, which is exactly what he wished to do.

Captain Navarro spotted the person he was looking for. He had no description to go by, but the well-groomed hair and mustache, and properly fitted local attire gave him away. He wondered for a moment if the man he was to contact had made such an obvious faux pas by intent, or by accident. He hoped for the latter, as it meant he was likely to make other errors as well.

He stepped up to the man’s table and reached for the chair. “Mind if I sit a spell?” he asked, using his best Haven accent. “I won’t be much bother to ya, I swear.”

“Of course, my good man.”

Good, it was an accident
, the captain thought. If there was one thing about Takaran nobles that seemed truly universal, it was that they were all rather arrogant, himself included. “Thank you, kindly,” he replied as he took his seat, purposefully not bothering to dust it off first, despite the fact that he desperately wished to do so.

“Glad you could join us,” a third voice said as he came and sat down in the other empty chair.

Navarro looked at the other gentleman. “Ganna. You’re looking rather pale for a Havenite, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” Lord Ganna admitted. “You seem to fit in rather nicely, however. Perhaps there is a bit of commoner in your blood, from a few generations back of course.”

“Is that why you invited me here, Ganna, to make thinly veiled insults about my heritage?” Navarro looked unamused. “I’d suggest that such behavior is beneath you, but…”

“I feel it only fair to warn you that we have snipers ready to fire on your person should something go awry,” Lord Ganna warned. “And of course, they are quite accurate.”

“Probably not as accurate as the ones who just took yours down,” Navarro replied with a wry smile.

Lord Ganna looked to the waiter standing in the shadows along the door to the cafe. The man held out four fingers. “Are you sure you got them all?” Lord Ganna asked.

“I don’t need to. I just wanted to give my men some practice. Killing me would only bring the Avendahl’s fury down upon all your houses, as my executive officer has standing orders to take out every noble house in the Takar system, should I meet an untimely demise during my little shopping trip. Now, would you like to tell me why you asked me here, or are we going to continue having our snipers kill each other?”

“We want to know what your intentions are, Lord Navarro.”

“Well, I was planning on making a really nice molo stew for dinner tonight,” he said gesturing to his shopping bag.

“About Takara,” Lord Ganna added.