A Matter of Honor (Privateer Tales Book 9) Page 17

  "Their families are understandably upset," Shem said.

  "This is not the place for that, Shem." Gian looked at Shem with a raised eyebrow. "Please continue, Eliora."

  "Shem is right. These were normal citizens and I put them in danger. It is our job to protect them," she said.

  "I shouldn't have to explain this to you both, but the fact is we're fighting for our very existence on Ophir. The loss of any human is a tragedy, but let's be clear, we either learn to fight, or we'll all end up like Popette and Melifan. We are no doubt outnumbered many tens of thousands to one. Please, Eliora, continue with your report. What happened after your group was ambushed?"

  "Two of the Ophir were singularly focused on Popette and Melifan. So much so that the rest of the patrol, except for Coral and Dael, had time to draw the weapons that Smith Amon had provided. I'm pleased to report that both the long sword and katana pierced the natural armor of the Ophie," she said.

  "What of Coral and Dael? Do we have a problem there?" Gian asked.

  "No. As remarkable as the performance of the rest of the patrol was, the real standout was Coral," Eliora said.

  "You're just saying that because I down-talked her," Shem said.

  "That's enough, Shem," Gian said. "Eliora, if anything, understates her and her patrol's performance."

  Gian looked back to Eliora, willing her to continue.

  "I'd broken the patrol into four teams, combining an archer and a defender in each team. Coral's assignment was to target the Ophie we'd seen on the trail. Dael as her defender was responsible for protecting her while she was shooting her bow. Even as we were ambushed from behind, she did not break from her assignment and brought down one of the two 'bait' Ophies as they advanced on our position. Dael brought down the second as it attacked."

  "Two casualties for a pod of Ophie is quite remarkable, Eliora. You are to be complimented. Our casualties have been significantly higher to date. To what do you attribute your success?"

  "Certainly the bravery of the patrol should not be understated. They fought as well as any patrol I've been part of." She paused as Shem sighed and rolled his eyes, but didn't otherwise say anything. "But Shem is right to be skeptical. We've lost many fine men and women who were every bit as brave and were skilled warriors. No, it was the swords and bows that I believe gave us the edge."

  "Oh, that's funny," Merrie said and then clapped her hands over her mouth.

  "Merrie?" Captain Gian asked as Shem and Eliora both looked at the young engineer.

  "I'm sorry, it's nothing," she said.

  Gian turned back to Eliora. "I understand that a sword was lost."

  "It was. We searched and searched, but one of our long swords could not be recovered," she said. "We had to choose between returning with our wounded and continuing to search."

  "You made the right decision. It is a loss, but one we can live with. Do you have anything else to report?"

  "I would like to fill in the citizen patrol with new recruits. Even with our losses, I believe it was very successful," she said.

  "Shem, do you have any thoughts on this?" Gian asked.

  "It is just as I predicted. Citizens have died as a result of these patrols. I am against it, the emotional blow to the population is too much," he said.

  "Eliora, any response?"

  "I've been approached by a large number of citizens who want to join us and a larger number who would like training," she said.

  "How many?" Gian asked.

  "I've written down their names," Eliora said and handed Gian a notepad.

  "There are over a hundred names on this list," he said.

  "Yes. Coral is well-known and liked. Her story has spread like fire through the settlement," she said.

  Gian smiled for the first time in as long as Eliora could remember. "We may just survive after all," he said. "I'm creating a new position equal to First Protector, Eliora. You will lead our citizen training program as First Protector of Citizens."

  Shem sucked in a quick breath and Gian looked at him waiting for a response. When Shem didn't say anything, he continued.

  "Now Merrie. Our First Protector of Citizens has requested you be given a voice at our meeting. What would you share with us?"

  Merrie looked away from Shem, embarrassed by the tension in the room. Clumsily, she reached for a bag on the floor, missed it, and then decided to stand up instead. After a few moments, she finally retrieved the bag and set it on the table, drawing out two hand-sized, rectangular objects.

  "Communication devices," she said. "The old Earthers called them walkie-talkies. Kind of a cute name if you ask me, 'cause you can walk and talk with them… get it?"

  When no one laughed with her, her face burned with embarrassment. She handed one of the devices to Captain Gian, the other to Eliora.

  "What do you mean, communication devices? You were able to repair the lost technology of our founders?" Gian asked.

  "No. That is still broken. We don't have the materials to fix it, but I was thinking the other day that maybe there was something that would still let us communicate, even if it wasn't our founder's tech. The design for this predates our founders by at least a millennia," she said.

  "How does it work?" Gian asked, holding the small device in his hand.

  "Push the button on the side and talk into the bottom…" Gian lifted the device to his mouth and Merrie reached across the table to turn it over. "That's right, now push the button and talk into it."

  As soon as he did, his voice emitted from the device Eliora held, causing her to jump.

  "Pretty great, right?" Merrie asked, all smiles, forgetting about her earlier embarrassment.

  "But, I can hear him just fine already," Shem said.

  "Notice there is no wire between them. These devices can be separated by quite a range," she said.

  Gian looked at her with intense interest, "How far?"

  "I don't know, but I tested them with Amon between the southwest gate and the main gate. They reach that far, at least," she said.

  "I think 'pretty great' is an understatement. How many of these can you produce?" he asked.

  "I brought six to test. They take twenty minutes on the maker machine, but you have to find some old polymer based material. I used what I had on these. I think I could make 'em work with gron-rubber, but it would take time to modify the pattern," she said.

  "Merrie, this type of technology changes our tactical capability by more than you can imagine. Why haven't we had this before?" Gian asked.

  "We're so focused on what we lost that we didn't look far enough back in time to see what we could have. Steel swords are hardly a new idea," she said.

  "Right you are. I believe Eliora said you had two things to show us. What is the next piece of magic you'll pull from your bag?" he asked.

  "Bag's empty. We'll have to go to my lab for the other thing," she said.

  "Just tell us," Shem said impatiently.

  Gian lay his hand on Shem's arm. "I think she's earned a trip to the tannery, don't you?"

  Shem looked to the walkie-talkies on the table, to Merrie and then back to Gian. He smiled broadly. "Yeah, I suppose you're right. The world's changing so fast, I guess I better try to keep up."

  "Give us a hint," Gian said. "While we travel."

  "It was really Eliora's idea. She mentioned that we had two major problems. The first is the inability to keep track of our people in the field, which I think the walkie-talkies will do a nice job of addressing. The second thing was that we don't have any idea where the Ophie live. The only way we've gotten a general idea is because if we send a patrol in certain directions, they never come back."

  "Tell me you have a way to map the Ophie's location," Gian said.

  "No, but I have something that was invented about the same time as those walkie-talkies," she said. "We've been ignoring all of that early technology, but that's stupid. Our maker machine can actually manufacture that generation of tech."

  "You still haven
't told me anything," Gian said.

  "No, but it was a pretty good hint," Merrie said as they pulled up in front of the old tannery.

  "You've been busy," Shem said.

  The once ramshackle factory had received a recent facelift. The brick had been tucked, doors repaired and windows replaced.

  "Dad… er… Master Merik called in some favors so we don't have to work in the rain," Merrie answered. "We'll go in the big doors."

  Merrie jumped out of the vehicle and walked over to two new barn doors that smelled of freshly cut wood and pulled open the rightmost. The four entered to the sight of half a dozen long tables filled with compound bows and arrows in different states of assembly. An older woman worked at a station, fletching arrows, while another at assembling the bows. The workers looked up as the doors opened.

  "We're still making bows?" Shem asked.

  "Oh, yes, the council ordered more than two hundred thousand arrows. We're hoping to be done with the bows by the end of next tenday," Merrie said.

  "And the arrows?" Gian asked.

  "I'm not sure, we're waiting on stock from the carpenters and we need more labor," Merrie said.

  "Shem, remind me to follow up on that. We should have plenty of lumber available when we cut back the forest," Gian said.

  "Will do."

  "We're back here," Merrie said, leading them through the manufacturing space.

  The table that she stopped at had a large array of ancient looking electronic equipment, most of which hadn't been seen for over a millennia.

  "These are old-fashioned computers," Merrie explained. "They're not powerful enough to load a founder's AI on them, but they're surprisingly useful. The bad thing is they take up a lot of space. Even better, the AI in my engineering console can communicate with them, albeit slowly."

  "How is all of this useful?" Gian asked, looking at the morass of equipment.

  "Not all of it is. I've been experimenting with different ideas. What I wanted to show you, however, was this." Merrie sat down in a chair and pulled back a cloth revealing a thin panel with two joysticks and a keyboard. "Take a look at this."

  The panel was blank, but before anyone complained, a video image of the ground in front of the gate appeared on the panel.

  "How are you doing that?" Gian asked.

  "Completely old-school, Captain," she answered. "Pretty great, right?"

  "I'm not sure…" he started. The image flipped to a view outside of the southwest gate, where the farmers were working in the field.

  "How many of these do you have?" he asked.

  "Just two, but practically, you could install them anywhere," she said. "The maker machine can manufacture ten of these in fifteen minutes. The best thing is that they communicate with each other so you just need to have them within a tenth of a kilometer of each other."

  "Don't misunderstand, this is excellent technology," Shem said. "I just don't understand how we will find the Ophie with them."

  "That's because I love an audience," Merrie said, grinning widely.

  "I don't understand," Shem said.

  "You will."

  Merrie typed a command on the keyboard and the display changed back to the front gate. She then grabbed the joysticks and pushed forward on the left stick and lightly tipped the right stick over to the left. The image changed as the camera appeared to raise up and tip slightly to the side.

  "What are you doing?" Shem asked.

  "Just hold your pants. I've a limit to my multitasking," Merrie said.

  She leveled out the image by re-centering the right stick and the camera continued to gain elevation as she pushed forward on the left stick. With a tip of the left control, the image swung around until it looked back into the settlement and then, astonishingly, it advanced along the main street of Yishuv, turning back toward the west, sailing over the tops of the small homes.

  Eliora was the first to verbalize it. "It's coming back to the tannery?"

  "Yup. That's why I left the big door open. I haven't exactly mastered it yet," Merrie said.

  A buzzing sound at the open door accentuated her point and they all looked out to see a small device fly through the door.

  "What is it?" Gian asked.

  "They called them quadcopters, because of the four props," Merrie said, lowering the device to the table in front of them.

  "You can fly this up to the Ophie camp?" Gian asked.

  "That's what we're going to find out," Merrie said. "I'd have tried already, but I have no idea where they are."

  "It's not hard," Shem said. "They're up the mountain, behind us, we're just not sure how far. What kind of range does this have?"

  "We'll see," she said. "With no assistive technology, we're limited to half a kilometer, but I have something that I think will fix that. The problem is, the communication network I'm using has a limited range, but I had the engineering AI design a repeater that we can launch from the quad. If it works, all we need to do is salt the route with repeaters to extend our range."

  "What do you need from us?" Gian asked.

  "Directions," Merrie started the drone's props back up and sailed it out the door.

  Shem had already given her instructions to head up the mountain to the north, so she gained altitude and sailed over the wall of the settlement.

  "Eliora, watch that gauge, right there. When it gets to about halfway, tell me. That's how good our signal is. I can only carry twenty repeaters, so we'll have to make multiple trips. I'll just be happy if the launch system works," she said.

  "What happens if it doesn't?" Eliora asked.

  "Patrols will need to install them and I don't think we want to do that."

  Three hundred meters into the trip they all watched in anticipation as the signal strength gauge dropped to half. Merrie slowly lowered the drone into the forest, painstakingly found an opening in the canopy, and even more carefully nudged her way up to the first tree.

  "Here goes nothing," Merrie said, thumbing a red button on the side of the joystick.

  For a moment, everything seemed to have gone perfectly. The gauge returned to a hundred percent and the screen remained stable. Then, their view tilted and went black.

  "What happened?" Shem asked.

  "Frak. I have no idea," she said.

  SEPTIC MATTERS

  Deep Space

  "Liam, something's wrong with the main head," Ada said. "There's a greenish fluid coming out of the shower."

  I sighed and poked my head up from the hole in the floor of the bridge.

  "You might want to check that out," Nick grinned up at me from where he lay on the floor of the tween deck.

  "Crap. It was working earlier," I said, looking hopefully to Ada who was standing at the back of the bridge.

  She and Tabby were whispering and giggling. I pushed my hands down on the bridge deck and lifted myself out of the hole.

  We'd been working for the last forty hours to patch up Hotspur. Moon Rastof had taken responsibility for repairing our starboard engine. We were holding O2 and had linked up our atmo scrubbers and regenerator with Cape. Their air was now clean. With Hotspur bearing the burden, they had set to work on resetting their algae field. Rastof assured me the Cape's systems would be operational within another ten hours.

  I took the lift to the berth deck and walked around to Marny and Nick's bunk room.

  "Heya, Cap," Marny said as I looked into the room where she lay on the bed, still face down.

  "You doing alright in here?" I asked.

  We'd been lucky the Cape had been nearby after combat, as Marny's back had been severely injured. The large cruiser's combat medical tank had laminated nano-steel plates onto the bones of her back, repaired the damaged tissue, and lay down fresh synthetic skin over the wound. Without it, Marny would have been disabled - at least until we'd been able to afford the surgery.

  "I'm good, just a little bored," Marny said, trying to sound cheerful.

  "Wish you were up and going. Apparently, we have somethi
ng broken in the black water processing system," I said. "I could use the help."

  "I would if I could. I hate lying here," she said.

  "When did the surgeon say you'd be up?"

  "Tomorrow. That is if I promise to take it easy," she said. "And I have to keep this darn wrap on my back." The medical patch she was wrapped in was filled with repair materials the medical nanobots required to finish their job. The fact she was down for so long was a testament to just how much damage she'd sustained.

  "Okay, glad you're going to be up and about," I said.

  The main head was right next to Marny and Nick's room. Sure enough, a foul odor and green slime was seeping up from its drain. I turned on the water and was grateful to see clear water sprinkling down. I could deal with a drain blockage, but black water in the potable line would require a refit which would be next to impossible this far from civilization.

  Trace blockage to first cleanout.

  The AI overlaid my vision using the HUD to show that a cleanout was accessible just beneath the head as long as I was willing to dive into the bilge. I resignedly gathered a bucket, tools, rags and gloves to pull over my vac-suit's gloves. I'd had trouble getting the smell out of the suit the last time, so I'd stowed gloves for just this eventuality.

  Quickest way to the bilge was through an access panel in Ada's bunk room, just around the corner at the aft of the berth deck. I set the bucket down and pulled the panel up. A waft of sour smell assaulted my nose and I instinctively shut my suit's visor.

  A noise in front of me, deep in the bilge caused me to nearly jump out of my skin.

  Auxiliary illumination.

  Forward, I saw a leg across the keel - the long steel beam running down the center of the ship along the bottom. The rest of the person's body was out of sight, but the foot jiggled slightly.

  "Jonathan?" I asked.

  "Yes, Master Liam." His voice sounded through my headset.

  "What are you doing down here?"

  "I'm working on the fold-space drive, as we discussed," he said.