And then the Reavers came back . . .

It has been a long time since we've seen an actual Reaver attack on Hale's Moon. There were the occasional single loners that would come out from under some rock, scare the hell out of someone, then be put down in a hail of small arms fire. But even those had been few and far between since shortly after Krenshar had taken his Replicants with him to Caliban. The timing was almost certainly coincidental, but when he'd gone the Reaver activity had diminished quickly.

Even after Caliban's dome had been breached and Kren had evacuated his people to an enclave on the far side of the Blue Sun compound, the Destiny Reservation, the Reaver attacks had stayed at a very low level. With the intel access I had, it seemed that the Reavers had become much less active over the last six months or so across the entire Rim.

It made sense, of course. Entropy was a cruel Mistress. There had never been a lot of them to start with, and the Reaver population had been on the decline almost since the start. Even with dubious claims of further experimentation and the occasional deep space crewman losing his mind, there weren't enough "new" Reavers to replace the ones lost to attrition.

That being said, it was a bit of a surprise when a small boat came in hot and disgorged a band of those loonies in the middle of our little slice of Heaven.

The timing was awkward for us. Most of the resident miners, which made up much of the Militia, were dealing with a large order of high grade ore when the Reavers landed. Most of the folk around town were either non-combatants who relied on their neighbors firepower when the Reavers struck, or visitors off board one or another of the transports that were on the pads.

I could hear the gunfire and the terrified yells of the transients who'd never seen a Reaver before, let alone been under attack by them. The locals knew what to do. Hole up in their shelters, or Town Hall, or Fooks, or behind someone with a very large gun, while others tried to set up a defense.

Where I'd normally be coordinating the defenses, when I wasn't perched on the tower with my long gun, Genni'd gotten on the local net and started assembling the Militia while I sealed up Wave Equation to protect our passenger. To get to Anna, the Reavers would have to get through the boat's electrified hull and then get past me.

Not gonna happen.

The attack lasted longer than I'd expected. In the end, we counted at least half a dozen dead Reavers with several folk getting chewed up pretty bad. Backtracking their approach, the Reavers had come in from a new direction. Whether that meant anything or not was a bit too early to tell, but it did mean we'd have to stay on our toes. It'd been a while since we'd been attacked by anything, and this was a wake up call. One we'd have to heed, lest the next time be even worse.

Sitting on Baby

Her name is Anna.

At least that's what Cody calls her. She's a beautiful little child. A regular little blond cherub. Alert and active and amazingly well behaved for a baby. And, for the time being, my responsibility. Whether I'm a good mother, or ever will be a good mother, when someone asks me to take care of a child for them, I take the responsibility very seriously.

I'll admit, the timing was somewhat inconvenient. But, fortunately, it was after I'd returned from reconnoitering the derelict. The ship was a Joon Li-Kwan light cruiser as originally identified. One of the later models, before the class was retired in favor of a large Destroyer class to fill the same role.

According to the Cruiser's transponder, she was the IAV Reinhold MacDonald. I'd expected it to be one of the "known lost" ships that Fleet kept on the books rather than a ship that was, at last report, conducting routine patrol operations in the inner reaches of the Kalidaza system. She was out of her patrol sector out as far as we are, but she was at least in orbit around the right star.

But where was her crew?

Wave Equation's sensor array is a good deal more sophisticated than the one on the drone and being up close and personal, I could do a good deal more. But nothing. I couldn't see any reason for the ship to be abandoned as it was and I wasn't going to breach on my own. With suits and support, our salvage team could easily get aboard and possibly even bring everything back on-line.

Recovering the ship intact would be a serious coup for our folks. The recovery fees we could get from Alliance Fleet Command would be a godsend to the whole colony. Even if we only executed a legal salvage on the foodstuffs and non-military equipment aboard, we'd come out ahead.

It was something I'd have to arrange for later though. And not much later, since it was doubtful Tag would be able to hold the recovery team off for long. I'd have to get someone I trusted in charge of the field operation. General, maybe. Or even Cody. Get Sabrina aboard to try and bring the drives back on-line and they'd be set. Shouldn't even need me for it. Which, considering the timing, was good.

Taking care of Anna was going to be a priority. At least for a while. Genni Foxtrot would help, as would her husband. Would take a lot of pressure off me and Sabrina, neither of whom know a lot about taking care of a kid. Sure, I knew the technical aspects of how diapers worked and how to warm a bottle of milk. But that wasn't really being a mother.

Wasn't ready to be a mother. Not a real one. Not even briefly. But then, who is the first time?

Recon

When I first built that little recon drone almost two years ago, I expected it to have a life span of maybe a week. Two tops. Instead, two years and dozens of refits and upgrades later, the little autonomous spacecraft is still obediently sneaking into harm's way to gather information. Unfortunately, while it's proven to be more than adequate for the tasks we've given it and is better than what a lot of military teams use themselves, it's not a cutting edge sensor platform. There were some tasks it simply couldn't handle.

Initially, when I'd gotten the report of the Derelict from x0, I'd tasked the little Recee drone with doing the initial investigation. The information it sent back was, surprisingly, somewhat enigmatic. Power and gravity were on. Drives were idle. Stabilizers were still active. The ship didn't look to have any damage beyond the normal wear and tear you'd expect with a deep space cruiser, but there also didn't appear to be any crew. Even flying right up to the flight deck windows and looking in with the floodlights on didn't elicit a reaction from the derelict.

Stranger still, the escape pods all seemed to be in place but none of the ship's auxiliary craft appeared to be docked. If the crew had abandoned ship, they'd done so in an orderly fashion. Very orderly. Almost as if they were transferring to an orbital or another, larger, ship, to leave their cruiser for some completely mundane reason.

Had she simply slipped her moorings at a repair facility?

That seemed very unlikely. Even if she had, someone would have gone out and quickly recovered her. Unless, of course, the repair facility or tender had suffered some sort of catastrophic failure of its own. There should have been evidence of that if it had been the case, but it made more sense than the ship just drifting off on her own.

The drone wasn't designed to probe inside a target. It wasn't even designed to take atmo. It's native habitat was the vacuum of space. Without gravity. Without atmo. It wouldn't come apart inside a live ship, but it wasn't going to be moving much either.

No, this would take the more personal approach.

Wave Equation had considerably better sensors than the drive did. She was also considerably faster. Which meant I could burn up to the derelict and do a quick reconnoiter in person before assembling a proper salvage team. I'd just have to let Sabrina know that our home might be a bit, well, absent, when she got back from her latest shift. Not that she'd be especially upset with my doing a solo recon on a derelict Alliance cruiser. It was just, you know, the polite thing to do.

Eight hours. Ten tops. Burn out. Look around. Burn home. Formulate a plan for later. Plenty of time.

Piece of cake.

Derelict

I'm not used to seeing x0x0 rattled. Especially not rattled over something as "simple" as a derelict spacecraft. Of course, when the derelict in question is an Alliance light cruiser, it's easier to understand being rattled. Perhaps more so when one of her company hands turned up missing when they went aboard to check on the ship.

Derelict spacecraft aren't that uncommon, really. But having one slip through the Navtrac net is. A little, anyway. Especially something as big as a Joon Li-Kwan class light cruiser. From what I could tell when I finally got the array steered around that way, the ship had been in one of our few sensor shadows and would would have actually cropped up on the platform's array in a couple orbits when the relative position of some of the rocks shifted.

Subtle reminder that I needed to tune the arrays a bit more. Wouldn't do to have some hostiles creeping in just because we had a blind spot. Better EW, I wouldn't feel so bad about. But holes in the coverage? You'd think I was a Fleet officer or something.

x0'd said the ship appeared abandoned, but not abandoned for long. While she was a bit rattled, apparently by losing one of her employees aboard, I took her word that the ship was unoccupied and the evacuation had been relatively recent. Days? Weeks? Couldn't tell. She hadn't gotten a name from the derelict, and it didn't respond when I tapped it for a transponder echo.

Curious.

With x0 worried about catching flack for being aboard the ship without authorization, I promised to do something to intercede. Not that they'd ever give Blue Sun's Regional Director much flack for anything. She'd show her Ident and the officer of the deck would salute, apologize for the inconvenience, and offer her fresh baked brownies. Better than I'd get if I showed my Colonial Government Ident, though a bit different than if I showed the Military one.

It took a few minutes for Genni to find me the right forms and get them filled out properly, but they were exactly what we'd need. A couple minutes after transmitting them to the proper Cortex node, I opened up a line to the Sun Tzu since they were still the Fleet Asset for the region.

"This is Lieutenant Fries. How can I help you, Madam Mayor?"

The Lieutenant was young and appeared pleasant. Probably part of the job description for handling the Public Communications desk aboard the Sun Tzu. "Hello, Lieutenant. One of our residents has reported a derelict spacecraft, and I have formally filed a Form Ten dash Six One Six. We intend to execute a legal salvage operation on the vessel, and I wanted to make sure the Fleet's Regional Command was aware of our claim."

"Thank you for formally contacting us, ma'am." He continued with that cheerful expression. He probably didn't actually care that we were laying claim to a derelict. Just bureaucratic formalities. But then, he almost certainly hadn't seen the formal filing yet. "What class vessel are you claiming?"

I smiled faintly, keeping my voice deadpan. "It's a Joon Li-Kwan class light cruiser, Lieutenant. We haven't determined the registry yet, though it may be the IAV Charles Sinclair, or the IAV Gordon Conner. Regardless of her registrey, I assure you will will follow all the required procedures in a salvage operation of this nature. Including proper respect for any fallen crew."

The Lieutenant continued to smile a moment, but then his expression changed to a blank stare as what I'd said sunk in. The local government of a frontier colony was claiming salvage rights to a small capital ship.

"Is there a problem, Lieutenant?" I said with a bit more of a smile.

"Well, ma'am. Ah . . . I'm going to have to contact my superiors. You know there are special regulations regarding military salvage operations."

"Oh, I am quite well aware of the regulations, Lieutenant. You will find our paperwork in order and everything quite legal. Just wanted to send the formal notification directly, now that the forms have been filed. Be well."

I smiles and signed off a moment after he acknowledged, not wanting to extend the conversation any longer than needed. They would, of course, object. Fleet always objected. There would be an ocean of red tape for them to wade through before they could do anything officially, which gave us time.

Unfortunately though, there would almost certainly be an unofficial response. Probably a single strike team to go take possession of the derelict, but our formal claim gave us legal standing if we had anyone aboard when they got there. There was also something I could do to delay even that reaction. At least at some levels.

I kicked off an encrypted communication back to Tag.

Tag,

Locals found a derelict Light Cruiser in our space. Very unusual find. Filed formal salvage claims on the Colonial Government level per cover's SOP, but suspect they'll dispatch a recovery team. Need to do at least a cursory to determine why they ship's gone derelict. Will hand off to Special Investigations or Fleet Intel if the situation warrants.

Request you intercede to delay their dispatch. May be nothing. Will update once I've gotten resources aboard.

-S

If Tag was able to pull strings behind the scenes, we'd have at least another 48 hours to look into the derelict. If not, it was closer to 12. Either way, I needed to get a crew aboard that ship to see what'd happened to her and her compliment.

Nothing else came of it, we'd at least get some good legal salvage before Fleet came in to pick up their lost bird.

Non linear arcs

If I have learned nothing else during my time on the Rim, it is that nothing ever works out entirely as planned. Not for me, not for anyone. Now, it's not always bad. It's just that chaos seems to have an undue influence on Human events in the outer reaches of the 34 Tauri system.

Since AuroraBlue's 'departure' and Lily's return, I thought things would start to return to something resembling normal. Normal for us out here at least. Actually, to be honest, I didn't actually think things would return to normal. I just hoped things would.

True to form, life continues throwing curves.

Take the situation with Lily and Cody for example. According to Cody, someone had "shut Lily down." How, and who, were never quite detailed, other than the implication that she'd somehow done it herself. Cody himself seemed to be having some physiological difficulties of his own, which, given the history he had as being a test subject, didn't surprise me much. I checked his vitals and they were all elevated, but it would take a real doctor to sort that out. Blue was somehow involved this too, asking Cody questions that sounded like riddles. Not that I was especially surprised by that. Blue had his way.

I'd have asked him myself, if he was talking to me. But that was Blue's nature. Some folk liked to say he was everywhere and, in some ways, he probably was. Mostly everywhere at least. There were a few places even he couldn't access, but the effort needed to keep him out was extraordinary. Still. A girl sometimes likes her privacy. Thing was, he didn't always bother answering when you tried to talk to him. Whether he wasn't paying attention, or choosing not to answer, or just wasn't there, I never questioned. I just accepted it.

What am I going to do? Ground him?

x0x0 seemed to think it was a mistake, what Cody was saying. She'd had some perishables shipped direct to Hale's, care of me. Some kind of biologicals I wasn't delving too deeply into. Again though, she kept getting diverted before we could actually talk about the situation. She'd send her girl, Emma, by to check on the package but she didn't know anything about it either.

And then there was Gallagher. Or not Gallagher as the case appeared to be. Some time back, there'd been a KM series mechanical with an semi-organic "wrapper" posing as Gallagher. The KM's were pretty versatile that way. The core chassis was slender enough to wrap a more or less Human looking skin around it. Most of them used one like Krenshar's. Kind of a semi rigid rubbery industrial sort of thing that worked well for field use. There were softer skins that got used in the service industry, and the rare and expensive semi-organic ones that'd pass for Human if you didn't look too closely. The Gallagher replica had one of those, and was programmed to act like him. At least as near as the Expert System code in a standard KM could pull it off.

The machine seemed to be back now. Saying there could be only one Gallagher, and he was it. Whether he, it, whatever, was speaking truth I couldn't tell. It was a reskinned KM that looked like Gallagher, but whether Gallagher himself was actually dead, or just half way to Beaumonde, I didn't know. The idea was just so incongruous that it seemed more like someone was pulling a bad prank than an actual fact of life. For the time being, I'd go along with it. There were a few people I could tap to see if the Doc was actually ok or not. But I wasn't going to dwell on it. While I respected Gallagher, I wasn't keeping him in my personal loop. He'd given me a measure of plausible deniability with his Dharma activities. I was keeping him, and most everyone else, out of my professional business. Safer for everyone that way.

Now though, I was back to figuring out where all the curved paths were going to converge. Because inevitably, the paths would converge once again. Only question was what fresh new particles were going to spin out of this particular high energy reaction.

Routine operations

Sabrina's work on the platform still has her leaving in the middle of the night, a kiss good morning, some loving cuddles, then back to sleep for a couple hours before I get up for my own morning routine. It's not an ideal situation, perhaps, but it leaves us each to our work and gives us time together as a couple.

It's those early, early, mornings, after Sabrina's left for the platform that my dreams usually wander. I rarely remember them though. A lifetime of training's left me with a situational awareness that extends into sleep. Even if Wave Equation's sensors didn't alert on an unrecognized presence, I would. The only difference between an intruder and someone I recognized as safe at a subconscious level, was whether I'd register it as safe and go on sleeping or shift gears into a combat mode that'd probably leave the intruder dead.

There were only a handful of people who could intrude into my space while I slept and not be treated as hostile. Sabrina, obviously. She was my wife. It made sense. There were a few others though. People I'd trusted with my life and they, in turn, had trusted me with theirs. x0x0, perhaps oddly, was subconsciously accepted. It only made our relationship that much stranger. And, of course, my girls.

There were times, even before I'd married Sabrina, that Lily would sneak into Wave Equation and watch me sleep. The boat's self defense system saw Lily as "authorized: all access" so let her in without question. It logged the entry, not that I'd ever needed it. Even without the logs, I knew when she'd been there. The part of me that never really slept identifying the presence of my little sister and letting me go on with what passed for sleep.

There were times AuroraBlue had done the same. At least before she changed. After? Even then she'd never been perceived as Threat. She was in many respects, but not directly to me. Dragons don't hurt their own. Except when they did. I may never know the real reason. Love? Respect? Fear? Had she thought that even with all the build up to be the greatest warrior ever, the woman who'd taught Operatives to fight might have been her match? Or was there a soft spot for the woman who'd been the closest thing she'd had to being the mother she'd needed?

I would never know. I wasn't even sure I wanted to know.

She was gone. That was what I knew.

But there were a couple times, in the days since her span had ended, that I could almost feel her there. Sitting on the edge of the bed watching me sleep.

Illusion.

Of course, Lily's return and Aurora's loss wasn't the only thing happening on our little slice of heaven. With the platform coming on-line we'd been getting more boats coming in to get repairs and maintenance. Even Reese had settled in to have some fairly major work done on his Firefly. While it might not have been especially exciting, it was the kind of thing the colony needed to survive. Townsfolk were here to live. Not to have an adventure.

Of course, they got a bit of adventure too, whether they wanted it or not. While having a well armed militia, and more corporate presence, had probably reduced the number of raider and pirate incursions in our space, we still got our fair share of unwelcome guests. Not to mention the occasional Reaver.

The Reavers were actually the most disturbing, not that the Militia couldn't make short work of anything less than a major raid. Ones and twos the townsfolk would usually just shoot on sight and tell the Sheriff about later. The fact that we were seeing them again was what I found disturbing. There'd been some ties to Lily and Aurora and Mindo's experiments, but after cracking the nest in Beetle's Baily, and Krenshar relocating to Caliban, right in the heart of what was left of Reaver space, the attacks had more or less stopped.

They hadn't started up again until after Krenshar'd been forced to abandon the facility on Caliban and x0x0'd offered him, the Order, and the other refugees, space here on Blue Sun's land. A young Mathematician I'd known would tell me this was quite likely a coincidence. An old Spook who'd trained me would say there is no such thing as coincidence in the context of enemy action.

It was something to keep an eye on, of course. But mostly, non-coincidental enemy action aside, I was more concerned with making sure the folk who called Hale's Moon home were being taken care of. That, and trying to be everything the 'Verse needed me to be. Wife. Mother. Mayor. Officer. Spook. Sister. Friend.

Not always in that order.