War Ends

Looking back at the past week, Kayleigh had to smile. She had never been in a position where a war had been so profitable for the defending corporation.

No one had even quite figured out why this corporation, Schindler’s Ignore List, had declared a war on SPHERE. The best they had been able to guess was that they might have been spotted at the ice field in Vaurent, all on barges, mindlessly mining ice, and someone might have wanted to have some fun at the expense of clueless miners.

What had happened instead was that all SPHERE pilots had moved over to the facilities on J170132 and throughout the entire week had proceeded to mine, harvest and fight like a well-practiced team, and the corporation would be making a very nice amount of money once she could get all this stuff on the market.

There had been a few exciting moments when, in a bout of cosmic humour, the exit wormhole had connected J170132 first to the very home system of their war targets, then two days later to a system just next-door to them, but even then no action had happened. Even their friends in empire would barely get glimpses of their aggressors in local channels.

Well now the war was drawing to a close, Kayleigh found herself secretly sorry for that, as a number of her corp mates prepared to go back to their usual lives and occupations in empire star systems. She was sure it was about to get a little lonely out here.

War on Ice?

Kayleigh sighed for what might well have been the hundredth time. Bored, bored bored. Corporate banter could only go so far, after all. Sittting still, staring at the very same huge chunk of ice tended to make people go quiet, most likely out of the same utter boredom she was feeling right now.

She couldn’t for the life of her fathom what made people harvest this for a living. Desperation, likely. She glanced at her own assistant, Laureline, sitting nearby in the Masalle, a Retriever which had started its career belonging to Kay. She as working hard to get a Mackinaw and mine even more ice. Kayleigh might not understand the appeal, but she was sure willing to buy her ice for Sphere’s wormhole control tower.

Another sigh. And then suddenly she noticed the blinking icon informing her a new message had arrived. The jin-mei took her eyes off the static scene outside and opened it. CONCORD? A war dec? She arched her eyebrows, incredulous as she read again to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

A moment later, she broke silence on corporate comms. “Has anyone else noticed someone declared war on us? Does anyone even know who they are?”

First Batch

Quintrala often said boosters weren’t really drugs, more like energy drinks. Unfortunately Kayleigh didn’t agree, which was why she was now looking on in dismay while Tor XianKun busied herself onlining and feeding their newest toy. SPHERE was about to make its very first batch of combat boosters.

When the XianKun sisters had seen her look of horror at the new structures – she hadn’t been able to help herself, really – they had patiently explained to her that such boosters were important for pilots in combat. They could mean the difference between life and death. And still Kayleigh swore to herself she’d stay well away from those. She knew they had side effects. She knew they caused addiction. These were not some simple energy drinks.

In the end, she kept her mouth shut and just shrugged. The gesture made plain the words she would not speak to her employer: Do what you will, it’s your corporation, your life.

So she floated in her pod, watching through her camera drone eyes, jaw set in a stubborn face which fortunately no one else could see. Head of logistics or not, I refuse to touch that. I didn’t lecture Nakatre about illegal activities to then turn around the next minute and do it myself. You make it, you sell it, you ruin pilots’ lives if you want. I wash my hands of this whole affair, she thought to herself as the array finally came online and started working.

Home

I know even before I open my eyes: I’m home. I’m home in all senses of the word. Home where all my things are, in the apartment I’ve decorated to my taste, in the station where I’ve lived so much of my piloting life. But most of all I’m home where my heart lies because this warmth, this delicious weight on me, this soft breath tickling my neck, they all mean my love is back.

Lest I be dreaming, I open my eyes and there she is, in all her sleeping glory, half-draped over me. Her hand is on my breast, so warm, so soft, so close to my heart. Her leg thrown over my thighs keeps me deliciously pinned down. She keeps me warm. She makes me feel safe.

My heart fills with so much love that I simply must sigh, and I look at her face. She is angelic in her sleep, relaxed, vulnerable. I want to touch the curve of her cheek, kiss the tip of her nose, but she might wake up and I don’t want that just yet. I like to watch her sleep. So instead, being ever so careful, I run my fingers through her hair. I’ve always loved that it looked like spun silver.

Finally I can’t resist anymore and I softly press my lips to her forehead. I whisper so softly it’s hardly more than a breath, “I love you, Nakatre.”

A Surprise

Instead of closing doors to new members and licking their collective wounds, SPHERE had reacted to the entire corp theft episode by taking in new blood after a few days. It was perhaps risky and it certainly was a pain in the rear end security-wise with all the new measures in place around the tower, but they refused to let Moonora stunt the growth of the corporation.

In a strange way, the theft had brought the rest of the corp closer together. Blood still raced in some people’s veins, but Moonora had gone to ground, disappeared within the bowels of one of the stations in Adacyne. Those bereft of their possessions couldn’t vent their fury on their target. Morale was a little low.

Kayleigh was scratching her head – figuratively speaking, since she was in fact on board the Second Breath – staring at the security measures, trying to fathom why the corporate hangars weren’t letting the newer members access the public sections. She was peripherally aware that one of the XianKun sisters was busy with something or other because she’d disappeared outside the tower shields, and she knew Nethys was patrolling the system. So the jin-mei was startled out of poring over security measures by a bleep indicating an incoming message from her boss.

“Maintain radio silence, Kay. Warp to me.” Tor’s voice sounded mysterious. Anything but staring at this, she thought while she promptly aligned her Loki toward the coordinates.

When she came out of warp, she gasped. A new, bigger tower was already online, and the sisters were clearly busy assembling and onlining more modules around it. “It’s a surprise,” her CEO was explaining. As she listened, Kay couldn’t agree more: they needed more self-sufficiency out there, more labs, more industry.. and most of all it was wise to perhaps move from the location Moonora was aware of, random wormhole exits or no.

The jin-mei felt optimistic. It was a good plan, a good move. It would make the corporation end the year on a positive note. She warped back to the old tower, re-evaluating Tor XianKun in her mind and finding she grew fonder of her the more she got to know her CEO. Underneath the mischief Tor seemed to harbour a genuine affection for her pilots and an uncanny sense for doing just the right thing to boost morale.

For the first time in days Kayleigh found herself giggling when Nethys reported in corporate comms that she was getting a second control tower on her scans and Tor essentially talked her into thinking she was perhaps getting ghost images from the one known tower.

A Thief Among Us

The investigation revealed the window of opportunity had been rather small. Three hours at the most between when Kayleigh had disembarked from her ship and the first shout of alarm from Moonora in corporate mail.

Kayleigh hadn’t needed a corporate mail to know something was wrong. One of the perks of being a director in the corp was that she had actual windows in her quarters with a view to the nearby moon and some of the tower structures. The first thing she’d done when she’d woken up in her rather cramped quarters had been to stretch in front of her window as usual.

The view which had greeted her had been unusual, however: several ships were undocked and just floating around. She had rubbed her slanted grey eyes and squinted sleepily at them. The adrenaline surge had come when she’d recognised the dull, rust-coloured Loki hull outside. No one else in SPHERE had a Loki, much less one that would look exactly like the Second Breath.

Her entire day was a rush: reading messages, alerting the leadership, getting ships back into hangars and securing them, trying to figure what was missing and who had taken it. Once she pooled information together with the XianKun sisters, it became clear who had done it

And it had been Moonora.

She didn’t think Moonora was particularly bright. Why else post that alarming mail to all the corporation? The only reason Kayleigh could think of was to perhaps shift suspicion away from Moonora herself, but all the mail had really managed had been to narrow down the window of opportunity to a mere two or three hours, during which the logs showed only two pilots would have been active: herself and Moonora. If not for that message, the list of suspects would have been much longer.

Once all ships were accounted for, Kayleigh could only consider herself lucky, despite everything. All she’d lost had been the Alenia, one of her old Retriever hulls equipped with tech 2 strip miners and a choice of mining crystals in the hold, and the Racing Team III, the Iteron III which still sported the faded-out colours of the old Dragonstar Racing Team from the days when she used to assemble replacement ships in strategic points of the circuits. They had sentimental value, for sure, but they weren’t a big dent in her wallet. Other pilots had lost battleships, battlecruisers even the odd stealth bomber, with expensive fittings more often than not. She didn’t even want to think how broke she would have been if she’d lost her second Loki so soon after the first.

Moonora.

Kayleigh officially hated her, now. And it wasn’t just for the betrayal in trust; it was because Kayleigh herself had been the one to post the day’s exit on the billboard for all of the corp to know and come or go as they pleased even when the current wormhole dwellers were docked and getting their night’s sleep. Kayleigh had only posted it at all because some corp mates – and Moonora most vocally among them – had complained it was sometimes hard to get an escort into the system. By taking advantage of Kayleigh’s willingness to help corp mates Moonora had made the jin-mei feel particularly stupid and gullible. Kayleigh didn’t appreciate the feeling.

Going after the thief now was not a good idea. She was officially with a State corp, already, and CONCORD would frown on swift retribution without a sanctioned war which they couldn’t declare on Deep Core Mining, anyway. But jin-mei were nothing if not patient. And they do say revenge is best served cold. At any rate, Kayleigh had always been good at holding a grudge.

Reaction

Trepidation was the word for how she felt, as Kayleigh boarded her capsule and started to prepare for another day of life at the SPHERE tower in uncharted space. After the podding incident she had been unable to sleep in her capsule, something she hated doing anyway. But the clocks said a new day had dawned, and flying was what she did, so she swallowed her fears and connected to her navigation systems.

As it turned out, getting back onto a ship was the easy part. Once she undocked, she just hovered aimlessly in space, hugging the corporate ship hangars, feeling ridiculous and yet not quite getting up the courage all by herself to go perform her usual scans around the star system.

Her eyes alighted on the new structures. The XianKun sisters had brought over a polymer reactor array and some silos which were installed off to the side. Kayleigh bit her lip and wandered over to inspect them.

Within minutes she had forgotten about her fears, slanted grey eyes hardening with resolve as she pulled up all the info she could find on GalNet about running these reactors. There sure was no shortage of assorted fullerites that she herself had been harvesting every time she found ladar signatures. Half an hour later, she was following a guide step by careful step, supplying and then onlining the relevant structures.

Finally, once it was all online, she had to try twice to establish the links on the tower interface but then with a satisfying hum faked by her capsule interface, she saw the reactor go to work. Her lips curled into a smile. Ten hours to completion? Certainly. In the meantime…?

In the meantime there were signatures to check and probes to launch. With renewed resolve Kayleigh boarded her Cloak and Dagger and set off – properly cloaked – to check on the known sigs and probe for unknown ones, her troubles pushed somewhere far to the back of her mind. Thank you Tor. Or Yal. Whichever one of you installed all that machinery.