The one wherein Lilybell goes missing. Again

Lilybell is missing.

Again.

It's not the first time, though the circumstances seemed a bit unusual. At least for her. When she's gone missing in the past, there was usually something very complex going on involving Reavers, AI's, or some kind of unmentionable research. This time, it seems she stacked her boat. While that would be the usual way for someone to go missing out here, it's not for her.

An Alliance patrol found parts of her boat, then one of our local folk found the rest of the wrecked hull. Cody himself brought me a chunk of log Lily had left behind for us to find, though whether she was consciously thinking "us" when she wrote it is something we'll have to find out later. When that would be? That would be the hard one.

We'd gotten a ghost on Navtrac. Someone had picked Lily up and spirited her away, and the signature was very familiar. A distant image, classified by an Alliance recon skiff, of a large boat spotted in the area confirmed the suspicion of just who, or, more correctly, what, had picked up Lily after the wreck.

Reavers.

Only, on some fundamental level, they weren't Reavers. We'd seen this boat before. A large converted transport with distinctive markings. It had been Lily's home at one point. It had also been Mindo's home during some of his experiments, and the crew of Reavers weren't. Not in the way we'd come to know them. More like . . . experiments gone wrong rather than victims of an experiment really gone wrong. We were never sure of the origin of any of them, of course. But there was a fair bit of evidence to this bunch, at least, being the results of Mindo's intentional manipulation rather than survivors of the Pax on Miranda. If "survivor" was really the right term to apply. Victim was probably more accurate.

Mindo's experiment coming back to haunt us wasn't a good thing. Mindo himself was dead, or at least "half way to Paradise Beach" as the saying went. That his legacy was still out there causing us problems wasn't a pleasant thought. If it was them, Lily was safe. More or less. She had some kind of special place with them and that group had never shown an inclination to do her harm in the past. Now? Unknown. But it seemed likely the pattern would hold.

Since they'd managed to get clear of any of the Navtrac hubs we could jack in to, we'd effectively lost track of them. I suspected they were either going to a new nest carved out of a rock somewhere, or rendezvousing with their tribe, or flotilla, or however they organized themselves, deep in the Black. In any case, there were some resources I could throw at the problem. It would be another good test of Saule Silencieuse's capabilities. While she was designed specifically for the ELINT role, her sensors were better than anything short of a dedicated recee boat. I'd hand the assignment to her Captain and let him worry about the details.

The only question now: why?

Child of Science

Answers the call of the past

Present close behind

Assets inbound

The quite after the "Raidsish and the Mercenaries" incident has been good for the colony. The citizenry is a lot more comfortable walking the streets without having to worry that some trigger happy off worlder, or sadistic killing machine, isn't going to have a go at them on the street. Not to say that the colony didn't still have its issues. But, compared to people being fearful for their lives, arguing about who's drawing too much power from the colony's fusion plant was minor.

Even Lily's somehow being married to the young man, Lynx, he went by, was more of a 'nod and smile' moment than it perhaps should have been. Lily's outlook in interpersonal relationships was, shall we say, unusual. While she had a vast store of knowledge, she still had a curious lack of integration between the knowledge and her own experience. Probably had something to do with her being synthetic, without the usual 'growing up' period the rest of us had to come to grips with what society considered normal.

Lynx himself was just barely too young to deal with the situation on his own, being a ward, somehow, much as Lily herself was my ward. His guardians, somewhat surprisingly, were Tillery Woodhen and Pepper Siamendes. Though perhaps no less strange a guardianship than Lily's having, technically, four legal parents. Though, in practice, I'd filled the role of primary parent.

There was the worry that Lily would, again, feel the very real emotional pain that came with finding out she wasn't actually married. But I would deal with that when it happened. I've said, and thought, numerous times, that no parent in history has had to deal with the issues I have in "raising" Lily and later AuroraBlue. Be that as it was, when the time came, I would do for her what my mother had done for me when I'd had my heart broken as a girl: hold her close, let her cry, and just love her for who she was.

In the meantime, I would deal with the man who'd come to my office.

We'd first met years before, when he was the Tactical Officer on the Destroyer Escort IAV Chiang Mai and I was a ground force 'special asset' assigned to Intel, shortly after the end of the war. We'd spoken a bit then, but hadn't really become friends. The Chiang Mai was built to support the kind of operations I'd been assigned to, but the Navy, Ground Force, and Intel parts of the crew tended to stick to their own.

When I read the IAV Saule Silencieuse's duty roster, it actually took a moment to realize I knew her captain. And, now, he was here in my office making a courtesy call while his command finished her shakedown.

"Lady Kawanish, I am at your service," he started by way of introduction, giving me a polite bow. I remembered his distinct speech pattern: Soft spoken formality. Very proper. Always enunciating clearly. No contractions.

"Captain Hawke. Welcome to Hale's Moon." Outside my office one of his crew, a slender, vaguely effeminate man, was speaking with Genni. Neither of them were in Alliance Navy uniforms.

"My thanks. I wished to contact you directly before Saule Silencieuse finished her current mission. I understand you will be transferring some of your resources to us, yes?"

I nodded. He wasn't an especially large or physically imposing man, but he still had the air of command I'd recognized on the Chiang Mai. "That's the plan yes. A backwater colony like Hale's Moon is a mixed blessing for our sort of work, and it's been a something of a challenge to keep our Intelligence operation here concealed. Your ship should solve a lot of that."

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment before replying. "Yes, it should. We can have a transport bring your equipment up at any time. In the meantime, you are welcome to inspect the ship at your leisure."

I would, to be sure. The Kamkamoss class was new and packed more ELINT and signals processing equipment than I'd ever had available on the Orbital or here on the surface. Not counting Blue. But there was still a transport's load or two of gear I'd want to transfer to the Corvette.

"Thank you, Captain, I will. Now, here is what I will need to bring up . . ."

Priorities

While Ravish and the Mercenaries had been taking up a disproportionate amount of my time, I'd still been keeping my finger on the pulse of operations in my section. My situation was, to say the least, unusual. Enviable, actually, in many respects, in that I had the freedom to pursue whatever leads I thought relevant with very little oversight and even less accountability. The frustration with the position was having so many possible leads.

There were many places where my leads and interests overlapped, especially where they concerned x0x0, Blue Sun, my girls, the Machines, Blue, and the other AI's, of various levels of sophistication, that were known to exist. The issue was one of prioritization. Was the interaction between AuroraBlue and the Machines more important than Lily's obsessive pursuit of the Ardra AI? How did those priorities compare with the Hardliner, Loyalist, factions still active in Parliament and their machinations in the Rim sectors? There were the corporate operations to consider, with the ongoing interplay between Blue Sun and Umbrella and others. Each had their own agenda and potential long term outcomes.

Earlier in my career, it had been very easy to focus. I had a narrow field of view with a great deal of magnification. What I saw, I saw with perfect clarity. But I only saw a tiny part of a much larger picture. Now, I could see much more of the big picture and had the resources to focus in on any area within my sight. It was actually somewhat daunting. It became a question of prioritizing, since there were many, many, noteworthy happenings within my field of view.

Problem was, I was juts one woman. I could direct some assets into different areas, but which areas?

The easiest choice would be: "That which most directly affects myself and the people I care about." On many levels though, that would be the selfish choice. Easy, to be sure. But selfish. To be honest, part of me wanted to be selfish. I wanted to find a way to give Sabrina and my girls the best life I could. Keep them safe and happy. Not sheltered, as that wouldn't suit any of them, so much as in a position to do what would make them happy. If I could give them that, I'd have succeeded as a Mother and a Mate.

It was a choice I couldn't make. I couldn't take the selfish easy choice, no matter how tempting it might be. I could see too much of the big picture. I could see too many wheels turning, some of which threatened to grind the future to dust. It wasn't in me to stand by and not do something. Especially not when I had the resources, and ability, to do something about it.

But what? It was often easy to upset another's plans. The trick was upsetting them to achieve the outcome you wanted. Which meant considering that upsetting one person's plans would inevitably alter others and cause a whole cascade of change, some of which could be worse than what you were originally dealing with.

It was foolish to act without a plan. And I could not plan without a goal. But I had a goal. Too grand a goal, perhaps. At least for one woman with limited resources. But Buddha help us, I had a goal.

Butterfly wings beat

Wheels within wheels turn

Storm set in motion

Stories untold

"Not like you to not have a plan, Boss," Genni said, looking at me over a cup of coffee. We'd been talking about the aftermath of the Mercenary incident, with Ravish ending and Raids taking off for the badlands to do, well, whatever it is she planned to do with the kit she acquired from her dead sister. If a machine like Ravish could be said to really be dead, and if Machines really had siblings in the way we meant them.

"We had a plan, Genni. Me and Raids. The Mercenaries just pitched a Gorram wrench in it," I replied, more amused than annoyed. The fact was, there were only two important outcomes to the entire affair. Ravish's reign of pain ended, and Raids getting the chunk of core I'd promised in exchange for the intimate secrets she'd turned over to me. We'd reached the desired outcome, so I was good with it.

"So, what was the plan?"

The plan. It had been a simple plan, really. A trap designed to get around how evenly matched the two killing machines were at their cores. One on one, it would have been difficult to call. But it wasn't going to be one on one. Raids would have help. The trick was deploying that help in a way Ravish couldn't quite predict.

"Won't hurt to tell you now, eh?" I laughed, refilling my coffee. "It was supposed to have gone like this . . ."

* * * * *

I'd narrowed my selection down from nearly a dozen potential nests to a more manageable four. None of them was ideal. That was an intentional decision. Ravish was already aware of the nests the Militia had selected and was doing a fair job of keeping out of their sight lines. She had to know there were better snipers on Hale's Moon than we had in the Militia, so would be looking for the most likely nests from which a Sniper could take a shot. There were multiple nests with overlapping areas of coverage and accessibility, so her job would be to calculate the most likely sites and act accordingly. By settling for a less than optimal nest, I'd increased the odds in my favor. Increased the likelihood she'd guess wrong.

The wave from Raids was simple. "It is time," was all she said.

I had fifteen minutes to get the Ritter&Lau 599 and settle into whichever nest I'd chosen for the shot. Raids herself wouldn't know exactly where I'd be. Only the area she'd need to get Ravish into in order to be in my line of fire.

I wouldn't even know which nest until I'd flipped the coins. Two coins. A pair of platinum coins grabbed randomly from my desk. Four possible outcomes. Decided as they landed one after the other. Heads. Tails. Binary 10. The 3rd nest of four.

The route to the nest was circuitous, avoiding lines of sight whenever possible, breaking them as quickly as possible when they couldn't be avoided. Imperfect, of course, but it would reduce the chance of Ravish seeing me and figuring out where I was going before I could get in position. Once there, it would just be a matter of letting Raids flush her quarry then taking the shot when I had it.

Simple in concept. Rather more difficult in execution.

Patience was a virtue. Especially for a sniper. It could take hours, days even, for your target to be in your sights. You couldn't get bored, distracted, aggravated. You had to maintain focus. To wait patiently until the time was right, then settle into the zone. Mind and body ready to take the shot. To end a life.

Or, in this case, to put a single hypervelocity armor piercing round through one of two vulnerable spots on an otherwise hardened killing machine.

Time passed slowly as I waited for Raids to engage her foe. I had a passive link to the town and Militia security feeds. When the two fighting machines engaged, I was ready. We'd designated several areas Raids could lure Ravish where I would have a line of sight and be able to take the shot. If Raids had tried to force Ravish into one particular area, she'd have known she was being herded; known it was a trap.

Our preparations might have been excessive. Against a more common target, I'd never have bothered with so many possibilities. But Ravish was no common target.

I tracked the fight through my heads up, switching it off to look through the 599's scope when they finally came into view. The scene was like watching . . . like watching something from a Saturday morning Cortex combat vid. The two machines were almost too fast to follow. Bladed extension arms flashing as they tried to get an advantage over the other.

Through the scope, time slowed. My heart rate dropped. 70 beats a minute. 60. 50. Breathing slow and regular. I was nearly three quarter's of a second's flight from my target. It wasn't simply a matter of being able to put the shot on target, but finding a moment when I knew where she'd be three quarters of a second later. The scope could calculate an impact point based on environmental conditions, but it couldn't predict the motion of two Machines locked in melee combat.

But I could.

A pattern to their movements. Conscious or not, there were certain actions that triggered predictable reactions. Raids knew what I needed to make the shot. Perhaps she was giving it to me. A flash of blade. Feint. Counterfeint. Parry. Then a moment of clarity.

Between heartbeats, my finger squeezes the 599's trigger and a round rips out of the rifle. The inertial compensator keeps the recoil from breaking my shoulder and the muzzle where it was. Ravish was in motion even as the round covered the distance between us, ballistic trajectory intersecting the path of a moving target. My heart beats.

Ravish's backup core is, technically, an easier target than her primary, and the round impacts dead on target with sufficient kinetic energy to punch a hold through her shell and the armored braincase beneath. She reacts instantly, but it's not fast enough. In the moment it takes Ravish to react, Raids has used the opening to drive a razor sharp tungsten spike full force into her sister's primary core. My heart beats.

It's over.

Ravish's power core is still hot, and there's still motion in her actuators, but both of her processing cores have been destroyed. The killing machine is dead. Raids looks at my position, inclines her head in thanks, and rips the components she's been promised from Ravish's crippled chassis, before clearing out.

By the time I make it back from the Nest, the Militia has secured the "corpse" for our own needs. As far as I'm concerned, we can turn it over to Raids when we've made absolutely sure it's finally, and permanently, dead.

All according to plan.

* * * * *

"Except it didn't work out that way, Genni. The Mercs threw a wrench in the works. Same outcome, of course, which is all that really matters."

"All that matters, yeah. I hear ya, Boss. Must have been disappointing after all that planning to not get the shot though."

"I admit a little. But I'm still happy to have that gorram machine out of our hair."

Truth be known, I was. No one knew, except Raids, and now Genni, what we'd had planned. No one knew I hadn't gotten the kill. And it was OK. No one needed to know. Even if I had made the shot, I wouldn't have told anyone the details. It would have just been another thing I did behind the scenes.

It was, after all, what I did.

Hidden from glory

One single priority

Only that matters

Cleaning up

There are times when I consciously choose not to use certain resources at my disposal. While I had sent a few waves to very specific people after the Mercs got into conflict with Ravish and the town, I'd chosen not to pursue them with my own special resources. There really didn't seem to be much point in actively seeking revenge. I didn't hold the entire unit accountable for the actions of two specific members, which ultimately meant there were only two I would actively concern myself with. Should either of them come across my sights, I would end their span. But the rest of the unit could go in whatever passed for peace in their world.

The one that shot AuroraBlue and their leader, who's ultimately responsible for the actions of those under their direct command? If our paths crossed, they spans would end. It really was that simple. The how of it would be detailed should it ever come to pass. It would be humane, of course. I would not gloat over shooting a child, or, in this case, a miscreant. I would simply kill them humanely and efficiently.

Better than either would get if they showed themselves on Hale's Moon again.

Too many people here with large weapons, high explosives, and grudges, for them to get away unscathed. But that was the nature of a small community like ours. Not everyone got along with everyone else. There were some rivalries that were old and deep, but they were between folk who called Hale's Moon home. When outsiders upset the community as a whole, folk would set aside their differences to deal with the problem.

Two Mercenaries against a town? Maybe they'd win in a Cortex vid where they were the heroes. But they weren't the heroes here: they were the ones who got blown up at the end of the show to the cheers of the audience.

I was more immediately concerned with how the incident had affected AuroraBlue. She'd recovered quickly, both from the shot itself and the Rage she'd acquired from Ravish. By the time she'd come to me on Wave Equation, she was more 'confused child' than 'threshing machine with feet.'

Dragons know their own.

With the Mercenary issue off our plate for the time being, and Ravish no longer an issue, I could turn my attention back to other issues. Raids, for example. She'd taken some core components from her fallen "Sister" for purposes I had not seen fit to ask about. I had my suspicions, but I'd also chosen to treat Rads as one of us. That implied a certain level of trust. A certain level of respect. A certain level of privacy.

As I'd told others, if I was wrong I would rectify the mistake. But I didn't believe I was wrong. Raids was a fully sentient being with a right to self determination. I could suggest, offer guidance, mediate, moderate, and otherwise show her what was considered appropriate for a Sentient living amongst other Sentients. But it wasn't my place to force her into compliance.

We'd know in time, I was sure, what Raids wanted with the chip. I had to hope it was something that completed her transition to a fully free sentient. If not? We'd know, eventually, and figure things out then.

The recent incidents had put my focus off both the new Corvette and the research I'd asked Doctor Sinclair to do for me. All things I would have to catch up on, especially considering they were intertwined at some level.

For the moment, I needed to talk to Blue. And x0x0, for that matter. But mostly Blue. I had a fair idea what had happened to AuroraBlue and how it tied into Sinclair's research, but the big AI was probably the only one with the knowledge base to confirm my suspicions.

Assuming he'd answer.

Unforeseen outcomes: Or why I still don't like mercenaries

It's over.

It didn't end how we planned it.

But it's over.

There'd been quite a bit of flexibility in the plan to start with. There'd had to be, since we didn't know exactly when or how the confrontation between Raids and Ravish would go down. The two machines essentially knew how the other would think, but, that being said, they were each doing what they could to not walk into the other's trap. There were times when the situations were so evenly balanced, so hard to judge an actual advantage, that you really did have to roll a die to decide which way to go. This was like that. The 'die' might have been some kind of quantum switch deep with in a sentient machine's core, but it was a random factor just the same. We could figure out the most likely paths, and be ready to shift onto whichever one came up when it happened.

The Mercenaries added another measure of random chance to the mix. Not because they were evenly matched with their opponent intellectually and the only way to avoid being predictable was to add a random element. No. They added a random element because they were in way, way, over their heads, but thought they were in control. And that's the problem with the Stupid and the Batshit Insane. They do things you don't expect, leaving you altering plans on the fly in order to deal with a situation that's turned all Chòu shǐ.

Things would have gone down differently if Raids had been on the ground and I'd been in the nest, but she wasn't, and I wasn't, and it all happened very quickly. Surprisingly so. But in the end, Ravish was no more, Raids had the chip, and the Mercenaries were no longer a factor in our day to day operations.

That last was fortunate. In taking out Ravish, they'd injured AuroraBlue. Details were sketchy, but somehow she'd gotten up after the attack and gone a bit Rage herself, injuring several people before eventually ending up in Wave Equation's small cabin, curled up on a bunk under a blanket.

Lily confronted the Mercs over it shortly after the fact and, again, the details were a little sketchy. All that was absolutely clear was that the core of the Merc unit had evac'd after getting their asses handed to them by a somewhat annoyed not-cat. Which was probably better than they would have gotten had they been caught on the ground by an equally annoyed Mother Dragon.

They were gone. For now. Though returning would be a bad idea. The Militia and townsfolk were ready for them if they came back. While the Alliance wasn't exactly our closest friend in the 'Verse, they'd been informed of the Merc unit that had, essentially, turned on the citizens of the town. They wouldn't be too keen on seeing a heavily armed unit on Hale's Moon that wasn't authorized by the local government. Which they weren't. I'd seen to that.

For once, the 1st Marine Raiders would be more than welcome to expend some ammunition on our behalf.

There were also a few other things they'd encounter, should they try and get back into the business. While there were undoubtedly some factions within the Alliance and its fractured Parliament that would still see them with favor, they'd find that in some, quite powerful, circles, they were personae non grata.

It was a big 'Verse, and they could probably hide if they stayed away from civilized worlds. But their actions had started some big, heavy, wheels turning. They would have a hard time not getting ground under them.

Soldiers of Fortune

Cowards prey upon children

Your days are numbered

The trouble with Mercenaries

I've said it before. Mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, guns for hire, what ever you want to call them, have their place. People willing to take money in exchange for fighting under someone else's flag is a tradition as old as history. They are not a new phenomena. They're not even an uncommon phenomena. During the war, the Indies made extensive use of mercenary units since it was often easier to higher a complete unit than to try and raise one of your own.

There were multiple problems with mercenary units, of course. There have been instances of them turning on their employers, executing a coup d'état and taking over whatever hapless colony had hired them. There were instances of mercs being summarily executed by the local army after an operation was over, obviating the need to pay them for their services. There were examples of a victorious adversary treating the mercs like criminals or terrorists, quite unlike the regular military. Or, in some cases, the mercs changing sides in the middle of a fight because they got a better offer.

Since the war, the mercenary business had seen a rather precipitous decline. Mostly, they'd gone to more legitimate or small scale prospects. With the Alliance's tendency to outsource security on a lot of Border and Rim colonies, there were quite a few units that had converted from Military to "Security." The results weren't always stellar.

Then there were the units that were hired by private interests for internal security, body guard duty, or whatever else they were being paid for. Again, not always with with spectacular results. Or, perhaps, not always spectacularly good results.

We'd had mercenary units on Hale's before. I hadn't liked it then either. Each time, whoever hired them hadn't done so to augment our existing Militia. They'd done it for their own reasons and, while the results hadn't always been bad, they had always caused friction between the mercs and the local militia and law enforcement unit.

Seems "Ask the local authorities first" never crossed their minds.

I had a fair idea who'd hired the unit on the ground now, which I would confirm one way or another in short order. But their presence complicated things. While they'd but a few impressive dents in Ravish, they'd also attracted the attention of the Alliance regulars.

That, I did not need.

I'd already gotten a message off to Colonel Silvermane that the mercs weren't ours. They weren't here in any sort of official 'with the blessing of the Colonial Government' capacity. If it came down to a confrontation between the mercenaries and the Marines, our Militia would stay the hell out of it.

I hoped it didn't. But, from my perspective, the mercs were more trouble than they were worth. If it came to a fight with Ravish, they'd be in the thick of it, giving the Milita more trouble getting a clean line on their target. If it came to a confrontation with the Alliance, I could just hope whoever Silvermane had on the ground wasn't of a mind to ignore collateral damage and just deal with the issue.

Whoever hired them would get a talking to. But that could wait. I had more pressing matters to hand.