Another year goes by

The celebration of the New Year is strictly a calendar event. For no reason other than tradition, the Alliance officially still recognizes the old Earth that Was calendar. Never mind none of the worlds of the 'Verse were especially close to the old calendar. Different worlds. Different orbits. Different rotational periods.

Keeping the old calendar was convenient, at least. It gave a common reference period, even when the local cues were completely different. Still didn't make it any easier though when you were trying to convert calendar dates and such to local references. Since everyone, for the most part, kept local time wherever they were, it was sometimes a bit dicey keeping things coordinated. Like trying to call your mother to wish her a happy birthday, only to get the comms service because it's the middle of the night back on Ariel.

Considering the fanfare of last year's Year End celebrations, it's almost a surprise there's nothing in the works that I know of for this year. Not that I'm especially worried about it. Not being much of a social animal, whether I spend Year End at a party, with a close friend, or just alone in the Black doesn't matter so much.

This year, I would spend it with family. At least one of them. The one who mattered most right now. Though, uncharacteristically, I was actually missing other members of my frontier family. Lily was off on her Hunt. Aurora was . . . not acting herself. In fact, her behavior was more than a little disturbing. In fact, she was close to getting taken out behind the hangers for a brief lesson in humility.

Understand something, Tiny Dragon. Krenshar may be feeding you the 'Greatest warrior in history' line, and you may have bought it. But the fact remains I can still hand you your skinny little ass. Genetic predisposition and conditioning is no substitute for actual experience. Ask an Operative of the Parliament. They know.

I was honestly close to my wits end with her. Something changed. Something I can't put a finger on. But her spending much of her time with Krenshar, 'Daddy' as she calls him, didn't appear to be helping the situation any. He was a person, certainly. A good one at that, or so I wanted to believe. But he had no experience as a parent. How could he? Krenshar was a machine. Artificial intelligence in a robotic shell. The Ghost may be real, but that didn't mean he had any clue how to raise a little girl.

Part of me wanted to intervene. I had a vested interest in her development, but I'd agreed to give Krenshar's 'colony' as much autonomy as we could manage. Never mind the entire enclave was on land subleased from Blue Sun. x0x0 had her own reasons for giving them a sizable chunk of the land she'd leased from the colonial government, which translated to me and the rest of the town council.

Still. If things continued to deteriorate with her I'd have to step in and put a stop to it. Considering how she was treating me now, I couldn't see a trip behind the hanger making our relationship any worse.

Right now though, I didn't want to think about it. It was Year's End and I had a few minor preparations to take care of. Even if it was just me and 'Brina tonight, I wanted it to be a night to enjoy.

We may still be looking for a vacation, but at least we had each other.

According to tradition, the Yule holiday on Earth that Was happened towards the end of the calendar year during the Winter season in the Norther hemisphere. For many folk back then, at least if you believed the little history we had left, a "White Christmas" was something they looked forward to. Was hard to reconcile the calendars and the seasons of our homes now with that old calendar, but folks still tried. They still wanted a white Christmas even out here, where we were pretty much guaranteed a dry Christmas.

There's been a lot written over the centuries about what the holiday meant and to whom. Being raised with Buddhist and Shinto traditions, my perspective on these holidays was 'something my friends did'. I always understood, and enjoyed, the tradition of giving each other presents, but the religious aspects weren't my world. It was the Shepherd's Way. Where I could respect it, and those that followed it, it wasn't mine.

But it was the Way for several people who were very close to me. For them, I could celebrate this season. Share a bit of the good. The joy they felt in the midst of a chaotic 'Verse. The fact was, you could share folks friendship and good will regardless of religion. The holiday was a convenient reason to be extra nice to one another. If only for a little while.

That's something I can share.

Whether someone believes in the Shepherd's Way or not, it doesn't really matter. No reason we can't set aside our differences, if only for a day, and put some good in the 'Verse. Spend some time with friends. Spend some time with family. Have a kind word for a stranger. Lavish some affection on the folk you love.

Enjoy your holiday. No matter what the weather.

Calibration

Traffic in our part of space has been picking up recently. Strangely, perhaps, we've seen more boats in and out of the small colonies like ours, and MacLaren's Drift, since the incident with Sentry and Mikie and the loss of Caliban. Par for the course, perhaps. Though we're so far from either of those worlds that incidents there are more a footnote in the evening Cortex News report than a cause for increased traffic. Can't complain though. Some of them have taken advantage of the new maintenance platform, and more than a few of them have left some extra coin at Fooks. Would make more for landing and transshipment fees, that is if we charged much more than cost. Assuming anyone bothered to collect the fees in the first place.

Intel was still coming in, albeit slowly, from multiple points. Someone back in the Core was taking their sweet time with the analysis and dissemination of pertinent data. That, or they were ignoring requests from field commands. Again. Realistically, it was probably a combination of information overload and priority dispatch. There wasn't just one monolithic Intel unit in the Alliance. It was called the Intelligence Community for a reason. There were a lot of us. Local and regional law enforcement units. Military units for different branches, commands, even specializations within the different branches. SigInt and ImageRecon. Personnel. Criminal versus Military versus 'Government'.

And none of them talked to each other.

An exaggeration, perhaps. There was actually an entire unit, several of them in fact, who's entire job was to try and coordinate and distribute relevant information between the different Intel services. The problem was, not surprisingly, there was just too much information to handle and disseminate in a reasonable amount of time. And of course, there was still compartmentalization, 'need to know', and territorial conflicts to content with. Even though we were, at least in theory, positioned to avoid most of that, there were still insane logistics and uncooperative personnel to deal with.

Which meant I was still waiting for Intel requests to get processed and sent out my way. Tag never asked why I wanted to know anything. He never had. Even when I was a trainer and not a field agent. If I'd asked for information on something, it was never questioned. It was just taking longer than it used to.

The funny thing, perhaps, was that I probably had a better idea where Sentry, at least, was than anyone in the Core Intel community. Not that I planned to tell them anything about that. Though Tag did support my assertion that the Londinium nuke was a False Flag event and that how I handled the fugitives, if I found them, was at my discretion.

I was going to discretely pretend I didn't know where they were.

I'd even gotten an encrypted wave from Sentry the other day. He apologized for any risk he'd put the colony at when he'd been by with the injured JJ, and thanked me for reminding him of that very risk. You're welcome, Sentry. Though I'm going to skip sending a reply on the off chance someone picks it off. No sense putting him at further risk.

Thing was, someone had been paying attention to the feeds. Someone in Alliance command had spotted hum, but had also spotted him boarding a boat to boost off Hale's. The patrol that showed up a day later was a little more thorough than they had been in the past couple months, but they were still polite. Asked a few questions about the fugitives, then went their way without so much as overturning a storage crate.

Might have been the Blue Sun and KHI presence here, or a polite word whispered up the chain of command to back off, or maybe just Silvermane being rational about the whole situation. In any case, they didn't raise much fuss in spite of Sentry being spotted. Something I couldn't rightly complain about.

Still. While recent events didn't bode well for Year's End, there was always hoping it would get better.

Tis the season - somewhere

There are days that x0x0 honestly surprises me. With everything that's been happening over the last few weeks, between the trial and subsequent escape, the troubles on Caliban and the Replicants coming home to Hale's, and some more personal issues, it's been a bit confusing. A bit depressing on some level, truth be known. But x0x0's somehow managed to brighten the whole Gorram colony.

We don't really have Seasons so much on Hale's Moon, as an epicyclic change in ambient light and radiation. Our axial tilt was only a couple of degrees and our orbit around Kalidaza was close to spherical. While Penglai was in orbit around Kalidaza with us, as a protostar it wasn't any brighter than Bai Hu, a type A0, or even Georgia, a G0, in our sky. Our seasons, such as they were, weren't the usual cycle.

And it was always dry.

That didn't stop x0x0 from importing a fair bit of preserved greenery and decorations for the Yule season. She'd set it up to celebrate a season we didn't have, based on a calendar we didn't use, from a world that was lost to history, to celebrate a holiday based on events that may, or may not, have happened twenty one hundred years before the Exodus from Earth that Was.

Not that it mattered. It was awful festive and the townsfolk loved it. Even had people dropping in from nearby colonies to have a gander. There was a cynical streak in me that could see it as Blue Sun making nice in a public relations sort of way: Give the people something cheerful so they'll look the other way when Blue Sun did something that maybe they shouldn't ought to.

But I also knew x0. At least as much as I could. And I could see x0 setting all that up because she really did want the folk here to have a bright spot. Reminded me that this time last year, on the old calendar anyway, Sabrina and I were just getting together. Didn't matter that I didn't follow the Shepherd's Way, there was a reason to celebrate the season.

Such as it was.

The Dry season.

Always the Dry season.

Was a good distraction though. Sentry and Mikie were still on the run. Or in hiding. Or something. Krenshar and his kin were still settling in, along with, it seemed, a fair number of folk who'd had digs on Caliban. Somewhere out in the desert what remained of the Loyalists, if anything remained of the Loyalists, weren't having a good time of it. And deep beneath Hale's Mother Bot and her young were still biding their time. Unless the thing had spontaneously shut itself down.

Ah . . . the holidays.

Breaking the Bubble

There are just some events that seem inevitable. When someone popped the nuke in Aberdeen on Londinium, there was no question the Justice Department would parade someone out in front of the public to take the fall. While the speed of the arrest and the people arrested were mildly surprising, the fact of the arrests and trial were anything but. Someone had to hang. Or get shot, as the case was to be, but still, inevitable.

Though, in truth, I'm surprised both Sentry and Mikie were allowed to escape. While Tag assured me he would forward what information our section could get, many aspects of the whole chain of events made little sense. Perhaps chain was the wrong analogy. More like a train. One event following the other like cars in a train, until the inevitable train wreck at the end.

I hadn't payed much attention to Mikie since she left Hale's with Cobb. We hadn't been especially close. The friend you'd ask to help you move, but not help you move a body. Still, I remembered well the incidents that led to their departure. There was a reason her escape from what seemed certain doom was less surprising, perhaps, than expected.

Was Sentry part of it too? I didn't know. Insufficient data. In any case, this game was being played at a very high level. Not exceptionally well played, either, if what I'd seen so far was par for the course. The only question was who the players were. Their game was obvious.

But not my problem.

At least until someone made it my problem. Which Sentry did when they brought JJ to our Infirmary after the Alliance attacked Shadow, Maclaren's Drift, Washtown, and a couple of other outlaying colonies, in their effort to find the fugitives.

Wo de ma he ta de fengkuang de waisheng dou. What were they thinking?

We were fortunate that no one appeared to be paying any attention to the security feeds from Hale's Moon. While I had a fair bit of intelligent filtering going on, keeping enough outgoing to not raise suspicions while still hiding a good deal from prying eyes, walking into the Infirmary with wounded in an Alliance attack was just asking for trouble.

I know he's gone to ground since. Possibly at the same 'sanctuary' Mikie's holed up in, but I really don't need them bringing the wrath of the Alliance down on our heads. Colonel Silvermane gets wind Sentry was here, there was no way we'd be able to keep them from sending down a couple Marine squads to scour the surface looking for them.

Blue Sun's compound, and the area x0x0'd subleased to Krenshar and his Replicants not withstanding.

Krenshar.

Another inevitable.

Truth be known I was happy to have him and his brethren back. On a Karmic level, I owed him a very subtle and specific debt. I knew when he'd left for Caliban to conduct his research he'd eventually be back here. It wasn't just that this was home for him, but that the situation on Caliban had been tenuous from the start.

Miranda was Reaver space. Such as was left of it. Another ten or twenty years, and they'd recolonize it. The Reavers would be gone. Attrition would do what the Alliance didn't have the stomach for. Entropy would win, as it always did. But until then Caliban, in orbit around Miranda, was just looking to be humped by the remaining Reavers.

The Alliance too for that matter. Once Krenshar's research got him working with them, in that particular field, it was inevitable they would put an end to his operation there. It just surprised me it had taken so long. Then, when they'd started to reclaim the little moon, it surprised me even more how long the Replicants and their friends were able to hold out before the Alliance finally had enough and cracked the dome on them.

Which brought them here. Here to a chunk of moon subleased from the ground we'd leased to Blue Sun. Their own colony, at least in name. I wouldn't interfere unless the interests of the colony as a whole came into question. Ultimately, I was more colonial governor than mayor. Not that there was a lot to govern. For the most part, aside from a few clusters of homesteads, our little town was Hale's Moon.

Ultimately though, that didn't matter. I wasn't here for the power or control. I was here because this is where I needed to be. Two years ago, it was just a place I was. Now it was home.

It was just a question of whether I could keep it, and the folk I shared it with, half way safe.

The expected verdict

It's been busy on our little slice of Heaven. Between x0x0 wrecking her Osprey and then turning out to be ok, the wreck in part a cover for her bringing Aurora home. Aurora herself making fleeting appearances, at one point making a comment about not having any friends because Krenshar taught her to snap their necks. And everyone and their brother crawling around our colony looking for some kind of clue to some kind of key to some kind of place that no one seemed to understand. It's been busy.

When you end someone you cross a metaphorical line. Once you cross that line, you can never come back. Most folk who've been across that line never look back. It's not so much an innocence lost, but the karmic weight of ending someone's span. In some cases it's not such a bad thing. Ending a Reaver is a kindness. Setting someone free from the madness. Ending an innocent is a different matter. It's the kind of thing a Shepherd'd say you were going to hell for, if you followed their Way. You took on that weight every time you ended someone's span. How much weight was on which side of the scale wasn't always so easy to determine.

I'd tried to instill in Aurora a respect for life, Organic or otherwise. I didn't want her to bare the same karmic weight I carried. If she chose it for herself when she was grown, so be it. But she was too young still, in spite of having knowledge far beyond her years, to cross that line. Only she'd chosen Krenshar as her role model, and Krenshar didn't have the same feeling on the matter as I did.

Seems I wasn't so good at this Motherhood thing.

Of course, that was personal. What wasn't so personal was the coverage the Cortex was giving to the Mikie and Sentry terrorism trial. I hadn't even checked the casualty count from Londinium when the first reports came in. I hadn't realized that the warehouse district in Aberdeen city was at the heart of an urban slum, so half a million dead wasnt' out of the question,

Was the kind of thing that left a knot in the pit of your stomach. It was the kind of thing that started wars, which was inevitably what the real perpetrator was after.

I had no doubt, at all, that this was a False Flag operation. The Dust Devils, the only faction in the Independence movement who'd consider popping a nuke on a core world, knew as well as anyone that the Alliance's urban poor were their best ally in the Core. Nuking them was the sort of thing a Hardliner might do. Would do. You'd foment a good deal of unrest in the Alliance population with the raw number of dead, and the fear and anger would override most folk's common sense when anyone who was Indie friendly protested they hadn't done it.

It was a good set up. Evil. But a good setup nonetheless if starting a war was what you were after.

The trial was for show. While I wasn't especially friendly with either Mikie or Sentry, history aside, they weren't bad folk. Neither of them were the kind of folk who'd resort to blowing up civilians to make a point. Military base, or a Cruiser? Maybe. An urban slum? Not a chance.

This was pure reflex reaction by the Powers that Be. Quick arrest and a show trial to make the public see just how powerful and unitized the Justice Department was, and then bury the real investigation under a few layers of red tape.

While I personally wanted to dig in and find out who was behind it, I resisted the urge. Not everyone in Parliament, the Military or Intel, were going to let this slide. Someone back there was investigating. Chances were they'd find the real culprit and quietly end their span. The public would think that Justice had been done, while Justice really was done behind the scenes.

Thing was, it wouldn't save Mikie or Sentry. They were as good as dead. Even if they somehow managed to avoid execution, there'd be folks hunting them down for the rest of their lives. Most Indie minded folk I knew hated the Alliance. But not a one of them considered blowing up half a million innocent poor acceptable. Either of them show their face on any of the Rim worlds, chances were pretty good someone would put a bullet in it.

Their only hope was being publicly vindicated, and even then someone was apt to take a shot at them. People were apt to believe that first report and act in kind. Either way, they were both likely to have a short span from here. Not something I envied.

Fact was, I had a measure of sympathy for them both. Didn't know Sentry's past well, but I knew Mikie had her share of history with the Alliance. None of it pleasant. Not that I could do much to help them. Though I had a gut feeling that some of the activity we'd been having around here of late was related to this whole thing.

Just being kept out of the loop. Plausible deniability.

Best I could do now was get a wave off to Tag and see if any of the Core units were on this. With all the compartmentalization, chances were he'd only be able to tell me a "Yes" or "No." If even that. Reality was there were probably several units looking into it, and none of them would know about the others.

There was more though. There were still some reasonable voices in Parliament. There were still some folk willing to listen to reason. It might take some time and favors, but there were still a few things I could do. A whisper in the right ear and maybe, just maybe, we could avert a war.

Butterfly wings flap
Voices of reason whisper
Dragon's gentle touch

Third time is enemy action.

It's a big 'Verse and people turn up missing all the Gorram time. It's the way things are. "Missing" is a relative term. Just ask any parent when they've lost track of their kid, even briefly. The folk out on the Rim tend to be of one of two types: Either the colonists or professionals who've found themselves a home and rarely leave it, or the folk who work in the Black and rarely stay in one place for long. Folk like that are, often as not, going to be 'whereabouts unknown' for extended periods of time.

Of course, none of that really applies when someone's taken from wherever they are by some level of coercion.

That sort of thing happens all the time. Fact of life. But when two of the folk you know get snatched the same day it's more than a little unusual. Of course, having a competitor of KHI's out here on Hale's, as well as a number of other Rim worlds, recruiting for 'security forces' a couple days before the incidents didn't give me the warm fuzzies.

I wasn't worried so much about the competitor. Like most of the major shipbuilding firms, they were competitive but played fair. That, and they weren't that big a player in KHI's markets. But the timing was still suspicious and the hiring had been referenced in the aftermath of the disappearances.

Honestly though, neither of the snatchings were much of a surprise. Sentry had a list of enemies as long as he was tall. With the sort of business he did and the company he kept, it wasn't much of a surprise. Folk on either side of the law were apt to want a piece of him and, technically, I couldn't blame them.

With Mikie, my first thought was "Wait. What? Again?"

While I doubted most of the folk living on Shadow now knew of her past, a fair number of us out in this little corner of the 'Verse remember well her being spirited off by the Alliance. What a lot of people didn't know was what happened in the aftermath of that incident. How the locals from Hale's Militia and a few friends raided the Sun Tzu to get her back. Or how the Operative in charge of the whole mess was found dead, pinned to the bulkhead with his own blade, after the rescuers had gotten clear. Except they never published the pinned to the wall part.

Now, it was possible that the two incidents were coincidental. Just a fluke of timing. Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Third time was enemy action. And there wasn't a third time. Until a couple days later when x0x0 went missing.

I was used to her coming and going fairly often, so it wasn't a big surprise when she called in saying she was coming to see me after landing. But then interrupting to say she'd been hit and was going down.

With a damaged boat on final, there wasn't a lot you could do except prep the rescue teams and hope the pilot could work a miracle. Which, in this case, seemed to be x0 making it to an escape pod and punching out before her Osprey broke up West of the colony. The rescue team got to the boat and prelims looked like she'd fired the self-destruct charges.

The escape pod made it clear and landed fairly hard not far from the Blue Sun compound, but when the rescue team got there the pod was open and x0 was no where to be found.

Now that was odd.

While it seemed unlikely, it was the classic 'third time,' which implied enemy action of some firm. But just who was the enemy? And what had x0 meant by "dropping off the girl" before her boat went down? They'd found a stuffed animal in the wreck, hadn't yet identified who it belonged to. Was someone after Aurora? Or was there someone else involved?

Hopefully, she'd turn up soon. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, I'd grown rather find of x0x0. I didn't want to see her hurt.

The one wherein things go very wrong for Caliban

If there is an ass-end of the 'Verse, it would have to be Miranda. Until the Pax incident, Miranda had been the outermost colony in the Qing Long system, itself the outermost star in the 34 Tauri system.

The ass end of the 'Verse.

Nothing out there now but what was left of the Reavers and the few hardy folk who'd settled back into the research station on Caliban. Hardy souls. Most of them Human. All of them 'people', including Krenshar and the two hundred odd Mechanicals who followed him.

I knew why they were there. I'd known for a while. Why Kren had reactivated the installation. Why Lily and Aurora and others kept going out there. The implications of the research activities, whether I agreed with them or not. Wasn't my place to interfere except where it directly affected my girls. And, even then, I tried to stay out of the way.

But I knew it wouldn't last forever.

They'd had a fair bit of dealing with the Alliance since the beginning. There were things they needed to keep the installation going, and things the Alliance wanted from the research. It was a delicate balance though, and only a matter of time before someone tilted it too far to one side or the other. It wasn't a matter of if, but when.

Unfortunately, the when came sooner than any of us anticipated. From the Black Tortoise system, we were powerless to help when the call came in that an Alliance cruiser had moved into range and launched an assault on the installation on Caliban. The best we could do was monitor traffic and see if we could find any sympathetic transports willing to skirt the Alliance attack and evacuate survivors.

Krenshar and the Replicant Order would fight to retain control of the installation. He was stubborn that way. But he also knew that against the full might of a Cruiser it was a battle he couldn't win.

All we could do was hope. Hope the residents managed to escape without getting killed, or were well treated if the Alliance decided to take them prisoner. Hope Krenshar and his brethren didn't throw away their existence in a hopeless fight. Hoped they managed to salvage something if they took the better part of valor and evac'd the base.

It might be days before we knew what was actually going on out there. At least without going out there ourselves. But we did have an inside track on the Alliance Command structure. Whoever was in command of the attack wasn't the same person who'd been working peacably with Krenshar in the past, and there was a chance I could get more information through those channels.

I just had to hope it wouldn't be too little and too late.