Ships of Valor 1: Persona Non Grata (2 page)

I was getting really sick of simply moving from point
A
to point
B
when I should already be at my destination. I had spent the last month on the
Compass Rose
, a five megatonne spaceliner. And before that, two of the longest weeks of my life on a dirtball of a planet called Nalath 4 watching the locals being exploited by the resident corporations.

The Kabrins were dumb as a box of rocks. They were about eighteen to twenty-five kilos on average, topped out intelligence around a human toddler, and looked like a cat and a monkey had a love affair. They were beta level predators, communal, and not someone to piss off. They had a social memory that humans, like myself, have a hard time grasping. The little catmonkeys can be annoying at times, like a younger cousin, but will bend over backward if treated at least halfway right.

When I left Nalath, they were playing at baggage jockeys and ironically doing a better job than most humans I had encountered. I wouldn’t trust the Kabrins with anything breakable, or that could get lost, but I knew they wouldn’t steal anything. They were honest to a fault. Their social memory bit bordered on telepathy making it impossible to lie to each other and hard for them to even understand the concept of deceit. However, they were predators and very good ones at that. If it wasn’t for their size, they would be really dangerous. Kabrins intuitively understood when someone was untruthful and it did not turn out well for those who took too much advantage of them.

I wished I had a similar ability when we finally arrived at our destination. I doubted my escorts had come down there very often as they handed me off to a gray-suited lady who introduced herself as a functionary second class something-something. I stored the name for later and forgot it for the moment. She escorted me from the drop off to an elevator and made small talk. Nothing makes my battle senses tingle like small talk. I had already been on edge since the door slammed in my face and wherever I was going was significantly farther up the food chain than someone like me rated. Days like this I'm glad I wasn't a real officer. Something was off, really off, and I was lucky enough to be part of it.

I probably should explain that last bit. I was a brevet Lieutenant. I wore bars but got paid stripes. In essence, not a real officer, but I played one in vids. The command decided to promote me to a staff position during my last tour. I think the idea was to keep me from getting killed so close to retirement more than anything else. Not that I really subscribed to gods or fate, but lady luck seemed to have watched over me a long time and made sure I’ve received equal doses of both her hands. Eventually, she would get tired of me, much like a cat tires of a mouse and just eat it. My leadership team seemed to be aware of my penchant for interesting situations and decided close supervision was needed. Either that or the brass wanted to give me a taste of power to keep me in. I'm not really sure actually.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though, everyone in the Legion starts out the same. Based on skills, folks are promoted up the chain. We keep it fairly simple, and there's a lot of up and down based on needs of the service and the Peter principle. Nothing wrong with going back down if things didn’t work at the next rank up.

Everyone is a Legionnaire first and foremost. That's the no stripe rank. We have corporals, then sergeants, then lieutenants, captains, colonels, and finally brigadiers. It’s a much more streamlined system than some of the traditional rank structures out there, lacking several intermediate ranks. A unit is small enough that everyone knows everyone else, and rank is never truly an issue. It’s more about pay and dealing with outsiders. A sergeant is a senior combat specialist and handles internal issues while being a lieutenant was more about dealing with planetary governments than anything. Had it not been a brevet promotion, I actually would have ended up with a pay cut. For whatever reason, saying Lieutenant Gadsden was more impressive than Sergeant Gadsden. I never actually understood that aspect.

When we finally made our way down to the appropriate floor, she knocked once on the door and opened it, and ushered me in. Rising behind the desk was a woman in a severe cut indigo suit. Tall, probably had two centimeters on me, and I'm no slouch being over 185, but low-g grows people tall. Not pretty but striking. Couldn't guess age, but mature. At least as old as me. Brows were brunette but the hair was auburn so guessed dyed. She exuded confidence and power through crisp blue eyes the same color as the Terra sky. She was in charge, and in charge of a lot. All of this was secondary thoughts that flashed through my head and I shoved back down almost as quickly. I only wanted to find out why I was here.

The functionary disappeared by the time I was in the room. "Ari Gadsden, right. Pleasure to meet you. Sorry under these circumstances. Please have a seat. Would you like a drink?" I shook my head, but thanked her, and took a seat in what was an amazingly comfortable chair. A man could retire in a chair like this.

"My name is Lysha Kellinger. I'm Managing Director of Luna Corporation." All right then. My original assessment of being in charge was correct. I guessed low, by a lot. When estimating her being in charge, I figured a large company, in the realm of several thousand. Luna Corporation was several million. In actuality, the moon was a sovereign nation, but legally couldn't be called one.

Nobody owns the moon. The big thing to remember is the moon is free territory. People control it, but no single country owns it. Luna Corp. controls it, at least, the side facing Terra. There are smaller subsidiaries controlling other sections, but in reality, it was Luna Corp.

"I understand you just got back to Sol. I hope the trip wasn't too unpleasant." Statements, not questions. It was easy to understand why she was in charge. Her presence was comparable to anything I saw in the Legion. She would have put a couple brigadiers to shame honestly. "How familiar are you with the current political realities on Terra?"

I replied that I had never tracked politics at home, and she gave me a rundown of the last three decades. The situation was frankly disconcerting. A lot of this won't make sense without a history lesson, but here's the down and dirty.

The Sol System consists mainly of Terra, Luna, Mars, and the outlying moons. Terra and Mars have independent governments. Luna is a Corporate Trust, and each of the outlying planetary moons like Ganymede and Titan are properties of those three. Fairly simple. Outside Sol, everything works pretty much the same. Each system has its own government or corporate set up that works best for them.

Luna is effectively the Galactic Seat. The Luna Corporation makes sure the moon stays free territory. They're greedy bastards but they're fair greedy bastards. Seems strange, I know. They’d been around in one way or another since we started colonizing. Originally, a construction company they expanded into frankly everything, but on the moon they were management. Luna Corp kept the population breathing, working, and running.

The Legion, my organization, is a peacekeeping force. We don't get involved in politics. We actually don't care about politics at all. What we do care about is galactic stability. The last thing anyone needs is some knucklehead with atomics killing off settlers, or some pirate causing people to have a bad day. So we stop those kinds of shenanigans. When each new government or corp joins up, they apply for Galactic Citizenship. All that means is ships can travel to and from those planets’ space-ways unmolested and the Legion can patrol that region of space. If someone wants to join the Legion more the better, but we don't conscript. It's actually against our charter.

It's a voluntary arrangement. Planets can leave anytime, and some do but normally not for very long, because trade routes are what keep planets alive. Most new places aren't self-sufficient, at least not for a hundred years or so. They don't have the tech or the people.

But what happens if an old planet pulls the plug? That's what Terra did. It left the Galactic Union. I didn't understand all the complexities of what Lysha was telling me, but I was getting the gist of why this was bad. The major problem with this was that Luna was Terra's Moon. This created a major pissing contest, having since been resolved with some very large military and financial threats, but one of the sticking points was that Legion wasn't allowed on Terra. I was Legion. I wasn't allowed home. I was persona non grata.

I asked if the offer for a drink was still open, and received some very good rye. We sat there talking over several other details including things like my existing holdings, the status of my Terran Citizenship, all of which blurred past me until I finally excused myself and Lysha escorted me up and out. “Ari, I know this is a shock. If there’s anything I can do to help or just talk, please call. You have my direct number.”

The return from central admin dragged as I tried to work out exactly what had happened. Ms. Kellinger’s explanation was simple and straightforward, but it didn’t explain why. I think my escorts saw my frustration peak and let me out sooner than was absolutely necessary as I found myself in the center of Luna City in a bit of a fog and decided to make my way to the closest thing I had left to a home, White Caps.

To call White Caps a bar would be doing her a grave injustice. White Caps was the bar for Legionnaires. She had originally started out as a small shack next door to the recruiting desk back when Luna City was a couple imperial centuries old. The recruiters would put the new guys up for the night there before shipping them off to basic at Peary Basecamp near the northern pole of Luna. A few years deeper into its history, one of the bartenders got smart though and started offering extra services. Little things at first, like long-term storage lockers, and basic kit issues. He used that idea to expand the footprint, building up to the dome, and down further than anyone knew.

Then a guy named Clemmons came up with an inventive idea. He made us shareholders. We all own a piece. We all benefit. When a Legionnaire gets out of basic, they're shipped back to Luna city for a little R&R before heading off to their unit. Of course, we all end up at White Caps, with half a years’ back pay in our pockets, and itching to go crazy. Clemmons started selling stock in the bar. A single share would cover room and board anytime a Legionnaire was in Luna City and that happened a lot back in those days. The share didn't pay for booze, but it made sure Legionnaires had a place to stay for the night, and people to guard their backs. It also paid the locker fee for the Vault. Somewhere to store the stuff from before joining or collecting along the way. White Caps had been around over a hundred years at this point. She wasn't going anywhere, and after the first batch of guys signed up, the rest followed in droves.

They used the share money to cover operating expenses, expand as needed, and turn the place into a home. The old pensioners are taken care of, and the new guys see they never truly leave the Legion. Make it out of the Legion alive, and there was a place to live forever.

But I digress. I had been walking from the Luna City Administration Center towards White Caps for almost an hour when she finally came into view. Most of LC is under the large central dome, and there are a few smaller underground caves linked via tunnels and access ports. The thing about domes is they have defined limits. The sky is essentially a large white painted ceiling, and there is no real horizon because so many buildings butt into the inner wall. White Caps was one of those buildings. Originally, she started several hundred meters away from the closest wall, but over time expanded to the point where she touched the dome itself. She took up about five percent of the wall in total. In essence, she was a monster. I could see her, and I was still several clicks away. A landmark of the city.

When I finally got to the entrance and palmed my way through the secondary door, I took the lift to the Legion section. The main door is for tourists and recruits. It's their last chance to bow out before joining, but most can't. Not after seeing the shrine this place is. Old banners, trophies, and photos of our fallen brethren. White Caps has more memorabilia than Legion HQ by several orders of magnitude, and that's not including the personal items in the Vault. Every so often, we get word of a Fallen, and a bequeathment and find some new item for the collection. We have an active custodian who tries to keep things in rotation, both above and below decks, but the last word I heard she and her team only has a small fraction even categorized.

The Legion section is built more like a hotel than anything. Once on the main level, head towards a reception area, towards housing, recreation, or dining. Since it had been several years since I had last been in LC, I headed to the reception. Checking in is never a problem, flash idents, and a clerk issues a room key. For pensioners, we can let them know they'll be staying permanently, and arrangements for a permanent room are made as soon as one opens up. Although I'm technically a pensioner, I wasn't planning on being on Luna very long so I checked in with an indef key, which is basically a weekly key that can be renewed. If the key isn’t extended, at the end of the week the staff move any personals they find into the private vault for pick up later. After stowing my duffel, I headed down to the vault to dump a few items and get a couple others out.

The vault comes with the share. Each share gets a one-meter cube as part of the default, but the Legionnaire can upgrade as needed. Every chance I've gotten, I've bumped mine up, because I'm a bit of pack-rat. My vault was sitting at twenty-seven cube, or a three by three by three meter, which is about the same size as a personal stateroom on ship. Funny considering, I shared my last one with three other guys. It's not the biggest vault size available, but the next one up is hangar size and I wasn’t sure I could quite justify that yet. I tend to keep mine about eighty percent full, but it's mostly mementos. One nice thing is vaults have their own addresses, meaning they can receive mail. Whenever I get back, the items are waiting inside almost like having an extra birthday finding the stuff I mailed previously. The last time I had cracked the door, I had the pleasant surprise of finding a case of cryo-sealed plums from my grandad.

I could spend all day going through decades’ worth of memories, but my goal was to pull out a couple specific things. I kept a bag prepped at the door, as well as a table so I got to work. LC is a nice place, but most of the rest of Sol proper can be less hospitable. If I ended up on Ganymede, I likely wouldn't need what I was pulling out, but on Titan or Mars, I'd be a fool not to have it.

An ancient slug-thrower covered in protective oil, waiting for me to pull it out of storage. It was a simple steel model I found years before as part of an auction and worked diligently to get operational Not as nice or as fancy as the energy weapons we used in the Legion, but it was just as effective. The slugs were a centimeter in diameter, and the thing kicked something fierce, but it was effective. The goal being to poke enough holes in a smart suit to just end a fight through pure catastrophic damage.

The worst battle footage I ever saw, if it could even be called a battle, was a Legion platoon who went up against what we thought was an abandoned outpost using weapons similar to these things. Lost six guys in as many seconds because they were overconfident and didn't anticipate energy displacers not working on kinetic energy transfer. Our suits are great, but massive blood loss inside a suit that’s sealed is as dangerous as getting a hole burned through. What works for modern doesn't work for ancient. Hard lesson.

Another nice part about these old school weapons is most scanners won't pick them up. That's not to say all, but much of the new stuff ignores them as mechanical devices. I placed the gun and holster beneath my left armpit, thinking my arm should mask it enough to where I wouldn't have any too many issues. I grabbed a couple other minor pieces of equipment, secreted them about my person, and then headed down to the bar proper.

Schmiddy was staffing the bar. Schmiddy was ancient when I joined, and he was still ancient when I came in. When I said we don't age normally, I meant it. Between the nanites repairing any incidental damage, the genemod therapy the Legion subjects us to when we join, and spending so much time in zero-g our clocks slow down. We have Legionnaires pushing triple centuries, and to the best of my knowledge no one knows how old Schmiddy is, but old timers have heard him mention others who were old timers to them.

As I said, I'm good at math. Part of the training while in deep-sleep. From what I've been able to gather, Schmiddy was a payroll clerk, a long long time ago, and he got the same kind of treatment. He just knows Legionnaires. Remembers us all. Not just our names, but little things as well.

He greeted me with a "Hey Rattlesnake," and poured me an Arnold Palmer. Lemons! I hadn't had lemons in years. Trees take up so much physical space we don't generally grow them in the hydro labs on ships. It's easier to grow vine plants, so we juggle nutrition around the use of space. Luna had a lot more space and with it, the luxuries of things like citrus fruit, and even apples. I'd have to be careful, I could eat myself broke if I didn’t watch myself.

I drained the drink, and Schmiddy got me a second before I realized what I was doing. He gave me a look and then slowly said "Hell of a thing." Word travels fast. If had I come to White Caps first instead of straight to the ticketing center, someone like Schmiddy would have warned me and I probably wouldn’t have spent the last few hours traipsing around LC.

I nodded and left it at that. I was still trying to wrap my head around the idea myself. The old saying regarding never really leaving the Legion is true, but I couldn't hang my hat up in Luna City either. I'm young by pensioner standards. Most of the old timers have me beat by triple digits. That's not to say I wouldn't be welcome, but I wasn’t the right age group yet. Most guys don't settle in until they're near bicentennials. Sort of an unwritten rule, to keep the space available for those who need it. The guys who couldn't work any longer. I was barely a quarter of that, and with deep-sleep excluded, closer to a fifth.

I needed to find other employment, and other pastures. LC would remind me I couldn't head back to Terra, at least for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t even sure what I was qualified to do on Luna. At least on Terra I could turn my Legion skills into something marketable.

The thing stuck in my mind was the one on one the Kellinger woman. I couldn't quite shake it, so I asked Schmiddy. “Ah, she's a hands-on type. Delegate the good, but handle the bad herself. Remember Bris?” I nodded. “Like him. She's come down here a couple times when the corp messed up a shipment to figure out where their process failed. A bit of a looker.”

Brigadier Brisendine was one of the slickest combat commanders I had ever seen. A tactical genius who made sure his guys, guys like me, knew and believed in the plan. Not only did he empower his troops in case things changed on the fly but when things spun out, he liked to take the wheel. Not a bad thing, just gave him a chance to make instant decisions and coordinate top down. Matched his leadership style and worked for him.

If Schmiddy was comparing this Kellinger to Bris, then she deserved respect by proxy. A nod from him was enough to convince me she was worth following into battle.

Schmiddy and I talked trash and war stories for a bit while I drank and ate. He got me caught up on where some old buddies were hanging their suits at the time, which was his way of pointing out employment leads. He's super old school. Big on making sure no one loses face. Lots of Legionnaires are prideful sons of bitches, myself included.

Eventually, my internal clock caught up with me and I excused myself. That's the thing about living in space, is I set my clock based on local time, or the ship itself. When patrolling a specific sector, adjusting to the local government became a matter of course making communication easier. The
Compass's
clock was set to LC so adjusting wasn't a big deal, but that didn't mean anything since Luna runs all day and night. Having a big dome above and no actual sunlight, there isn't any real night or day, so it's a matter of what I was used to and the other people on the same schedule. My personal schedule was about a quarter day of sleep right after midnight. I could survive on as little as half that, but retirement had its perks. I ducked up to my room and crashed for the evening.

Morning came with all its normal routine. Quick hygiene in the included pod followed and breakfast down in the canteen. It had been a few years since I'd been back, so rather than dedicating real though to my problem, I played tourist and grabbed some basics from out in town. Luna is a major hub, making it easy to get the most recent tech, and replace old gear on the cheap. It's not that I couldn’t get items elsewhere, only I didn’t want to pay an arm and leg for it, and the old stuff worked well enough while I was still in. I picked up some replacement jumpsuits, a new set of dampers, and more books. I can never have too many books.

I have an extensive library already but always on the lookout for more. Some folks like paper claiming to love the feel of a real book in their hands. I’ve always looked at the space issues, though. My vault is only so large and it gets hard to justify shipping at a certain point. Don’t get me wrong I'll take whatever I can get but generally prefer data, whether aud, vid, data-stream, simply because I can take those wherever I go. The vault is for memories, touchstones, and things I did. Reminders of friends who have somehow slipped away for a little bit. Irreplaceable things.

My trip through Luna city that day was about replacing items, though. It’s amazing what gets lost each time a person moves. Little things that don’t seem important until you need them. When I had gone through my duffel in the morning, I found I was missing one left shoe. I hadn’t needed it up until then but it’s always fun to find out what gets forgotten in the shuffle. This led to me spending a couple hours wandering around wasting creds before getting back to White Caps to find I had a message waiting for me.