Artemis Files 0.5: Lexington (4 page)

“Okay, if you insist.”

She frowned at him. “It’s a suggestion… and one I’d listen to carefully. The other teams will on the main be acting as mercenaries or privateers, but in your case it’s not possible.”

“Of course.”

Releasing a deep sigh, she leaned back in her chair.

“I know you hate these sessions, but we still have
thirty minutes before your physical training with Mister Farquhar. I’d like to use this time to delve into more of your underlying motivations and value choices. The two examples I’m interested this time is the period at New Algiers when you were first deployed as a TAB pilot and before that when you were still an enlisted rating and encountered your first slaver.”

“
Um… both of those were long ago. I’m not sure I can remember enough that will be of use.”

Her voice took on the calm, soothing tone she used when trying to get him to open up. “That’s okay, Bren, let’s just start with what you can remember. Tell me about the boarding action on that slaver when you were serving
with the light cruiser,
Thor
, what were your impressions of the Taslians and slavers?”

Holding back the sigh, he
made himself comfortable in the chair and tried to order his thoughts, casting his mind back to those earlier years. They seemed so far away, almost like they had happened to someone else.

“I’d just been made an Able Spacer and I think I was about eighteen or nineteen at the time. Like I
said, it’s been ages since I’ve thought about those years. It was six months after I finished my training at Yarrow, and the
Thor
was on an extended anti-piracy cruise in the Frontier, trying to stem some of the merchant losses. As a general duty rating and because of the nature of my past, the Petty Officer for my division gave me the honourable duty of ensuring the heads were kept clean.”

He laughed to himself, remembering the extra duty they would assign him and the worst jobs imagined, all to try and break his spirit. It hadn’t worked, instead it made him strive harder, just to prove to everybody that could be as good as any of them or better.

“The only saving grace for me was they always chose me for boarding parties, thanks to my weapon skills, and that’s what happened the day the ship came across a Batavian Clipper trying to slip past our patrol. They’d come the long way down from where they’d bought the slaves at wholesale, trying to make it out to one of the slave centre planets in the Hinterlands.

“
I wasn’t in the first party sent across on the pinnaces, that was full of marines, but I came on the second with the naval contingent.” He paused, sucking in his breath at the memory. “It was one of those epiphany moments, you know where everything you believe changes in an instant? It wasn’t the combat, fighting off slavers that had hidden from the marines and then appeared when we stormed aboard…. It wasn’t the sheer terror when you find yourself cut off from the others in the boarding party and surrounded by three desperate crewmen looking to stick you with their swords or daggers…. No, it was the slaves.

“There were hundreds of them, mostly Taslian but a few dozen from other worlds out on the rim of the Great Empty. They were stacked into cargo holds
not fit for human passengers, where there wasn’t even enough space for washing facilities or meeting any basic hygiene standard you’d expect to see in a tramp freighter, let alone for hundreds of slaves. Chained like cattle to each other and the bunks, they needed to bring a dozen others with them if they wanted to use the head out in the centre of the hold. And then, the slavers don’t care if some of them die during the long journey because the profits made from selling one is a fortune and if half the cargo survives, it can keep a man in riches for the rest of his life. That’s how valuable the Taslian slaves were… like living, breathing gold and almost worth their weight in the metal too! Not like the other slaves you hear about on the news from lesser fortunate systems out on the Frontier… the Taslians are seen as a valued treasure and you can understand why when you see them all cleaned up and fed properly.

“All of them on the ship were female, mostly young, but a few hitting forty or so although it’s hard to tell with Taslians as they seem to have good genetics. I mean, any of them could be fifty and still look eighteen, but it
’s not from anagathic medication so I don’t know why they seem to age really well. When you first see them on the slaver, you’re struck dumb with shock at the way they’ve been treated, and the way those large, almond shape eyes peer back just rips the breath from your lungs.

“
Imagine the sight, Doc, hundreds of eyes of different colours; amber, violet, red, or black, as well as the normal shades we see here and all of them watching you and wondering if you were going to kill them or sell them like cattle down the market. All were pulling back in fear of the new arrivals, watching with those multi-hued, bright eyes and waiting anxiously as you took a half step into the hold. Most of them didn’t even know basic Anglic at that stage, it’s something they learn in the slave training later depending on which cartel or trading group buys them, so you can’t even tell them that they’re safe and sign language just doesn’t convey the same meaning in a situation like that.”

His voice tapered off, remembering the foul stench of humanity pressed together in horrid conditions with the barest of environmental systems functioning to keep them alive. The sight had stayed in his mind for a long time after that boarding action, horrified at the depths man could go against his fellow beings.

Looking up, he saw her making a note in the comlink and then peered up to catch him watching. He leaned forward, clenching his fists at the memory he was forced to dredge up for her benefit.

“Doctor, when you see something like that, especially when you’ve come from somewhere like I have and was still young and innocent… it rips you up. Your first emotion is to make the bastards pay that are doing this, but killing them is too merciful so you want to draw it out and make them suffer in turn for the suffering they cause.
For some it hardens them and they get immune to sights like this… but tell me, how can a teenager be the same again when he sees that the first time?”

* * *

The thirty minutes had turned into another hour. When he finally made it out of the office and found his way to the cargo bay, Farquhar was on the temporary range that had been set up and was sending rapid bursts of gauss rifle fire downrange.

The Packet Boat they were aboard was one of the ubiquitous vessels keeping the numerous, far flung worlds of the kingdom up to date with dispatches and news. The kingdom was dispersed across more than two dozen worlds close to the centre of the Core Sector, and with travel between stars limited by the fundamentals of TEL physics, it came down to ships like this to keep news, data and mail flowing between worlds.

The TEL drive had been discovered back on old-Earth and it changed humanity for the better, or so they say. It enabled an overcrowded world to send out colony ships, offloading millions to new worlds to start fresh. Over time, clusters of cultures developed, mimicking old-Earth history and forming extensions of Earth’s nations. Even today, you still have most of the Core Sector dominated by several of these, such as the Britannic Kingdom, Merovingian or Frankish kingdoms, the Independent and Federal States of America, and many others.

Due to the limitations of physics, starship drives were only able to traverse a maximum of seven parsecs at a time, taking a week or 168 hours in a different dimension called TEL Space. In practice, starships could travel a varied amount of distance based on the TEL generator model fitted inside the hull; a TEL-1 drive would travel one parsec in TEL space through the lowest layers of this dimension. A TEL-2 drive can take the ship up to two parsecs through TEL space, and so on through to the TEL-7 drives that likewise travel through higher layers of the dimension and greater distances, but never beyond the fixed limit of seven parsecs or that same immovable time period.
It was as if nature had decried enough of playing outside the rules and set this limit, forcing mankind to obey the immutable laws of physics.

The restriction meant that communication was limited to the speed of travel by starship, necessitating the use of fast ships like this Packet Boat with a high-performance TEL drive.
Displacing close to one thousand d-tons, the boat was larger than those commonly used by the government for diplomatic and civilian purposes, but smaller than the enormous freighters and merchantman carrying bulk cargo between worlds. Lightly armed with only two dual fusion cannon turrets on the dorsal surface, it depended on speed and agility to evade threats when traversing hostile reaches of space. Cabins and recreational facilities were sparse and small, most of the internals given over to carrying fuel for the TEL turbines and large powerplant, with any remaining space being used for the long and wide cargo bay that ran the length of the needle-shaped vessel’s spine.

Casting his eyes down the cargo bay, he watched Farquhar squeeze off several more rounds. The range had been custom fitted into this Packet Boat, making him wonder if it was reserved just for Special Forces or related operational tasks to this project. This vessel was pennanted by the navy and carried only himself and
several others destined for the Artemis Project facilities on Lexington, as well as the fifteen officers and crew who kept themselves separate from the passengers as much as possible.

With the sharp whoosh-crack of the gauss rifle firing drawing his attention, he observed the impacts of the flechette rounds
downrange. The targets were the traditional human silhouette figures, and as his carefully aimed bursts tore one after another apart, he had to offer a grin at the sight. The man knew more about dirty brawling and hand to hand combat than he’d ever learned, but when it came time to shoot on the makeshift range, he knew he could hold his own. Ever since being forced into the navy, he’d focussed on his weapon skills whether pistol, rifle or blade. Even as an officer and a pilot, he’d borne the brunt of jokes from his squadron-mates for this dedication to perfecting weapon skills.

It was one of the holdovers from his young days, when he found himself outside the formal schooling system and resorted to learning from books
or flex at his own pace. He used to thrill at the tales of ancient heroes on Earth flying ancient aircraft in combat, and one maxim that he’d learned from those stories was that to be a good combat pilot, you needed to learn how to shoot pistols and rifles. It wasn’t enough knowing about physics and engineering, or trigonometry and calculus, but understanding how a weapon handled when firing at a fast moving target, whether on the range or out in the forest, was a valuable skill to master. It had stayed with him, and even when he was in the navy as a general service rating with no hope of ever seeing a fighter or attack boat, he continued the training. It had been one of the reasons he was always chosen for boarding parties or shore brigades when there was a risk of combat.

Casting his eyes over to the other weapons arrayed close by, he wished
again that he had his trusty naval sabre with him to use in the bladed weapon training sessions, instead of the shorter cutlass. He preferred the longer weapon and the different martial art in using the sabre verse the cutlass, but that was somewhere else and if he was lucky it might be in Lexington when he arrived.

With
the man ‘safing’ the weapon and turning to face him, he saw the customary frown set on the face. “You’re late… again. These sessions might save your life, Montclare, so if you have any interest in staying alive out there in the black, it’ll pay for you to show attention to your schedule. We only have a limited space of time until we arrive and you need to improve your skills if you want to stay in one piece.”

He gave the man a wave in return and held back his sarcastic comment. Farquhar hadn’t declared which branch of the military he served in, neither had he advertised if he was working for one of the alphabet soup governmen
t intelligence agencies. All he’d been told was that the man served the Artemis Project and was involved in the high-level planning and staffing of personnel. He could have been from the SSB, or Secret Service Bureau, the BJSIA or Britannic Joint Services Intelligence Agency, or one of the dozens of other agencies serving the interests of the kingdom against its many enemies. What he did know was that the man was highly skilled in unarmed and armed combat, with the many bruises from their brawling sessions owing testament to the knowledge and skill.

“You’re too late for
our unarmed combat session, so we’ll follow that up after dinner tonight. For the moment, we’re going to go over gauss weapons again, starting with the
Grail
carbine, then the
Reaper
rifle, and ending with your
Martina
pistol. Your ship will have all those carried aboard, and that’s why we’re focussing on them so much.”

He glanced over to the weapon
in the man’s hands and nodded.

“First up, I’m going to retest you on fieldstripping the
carbine. You’ll have two minutes to pull it apart ready for cleaning, and two minutes to put it back together.”

He shrugged. “That’s not too bad, we did that
yesterday.”

The man smiled,
although there was no warmth in the expression. “Yes, except this time you’ll be blindfolded and immersed in a combat environment sim. If you were a Marine, I’d demand you do it in less than thirty seconds. Now, come over here and show me that the sieve you call a brain can do a simple enough task for once.”