The Privateers

Desertion

When I enlisted with the Solar Liberty Coalition, I felt like I was contributing to the war effort. Somebody had to stick it to those selfish Earthers, I probably thought, so I joined a naval flight school, got certified, and after about half a year of drills and training, I'd landed my first assignment as a pilot.

But I wasn't fighting. I was looking over the mess.

My assignment was with the BDA wing, out of the SLCN Sword Beach. Battle damage assessment. It was three of us: Captain Myers, 1st Lieutenant Burroughs, and myself. We were the ones that went back to the battlefields after everything had calmed down, taking note of any interesting-looking bits of debris, marking down names and serials of any ships intact enough to still have them. More often than not, the job meant looking at floating corpses, of the kinds of pilots not lucky enough to have pulled their ejector seat in time. Shattered evac helmets, punctured oxygen tanks - not everybody out there even had all their parts. The weapons we use against ships are powerful enough to pierce through so many inches of armor, to short hundreds of kilowatts of shields. Imagine what that kind of ordnance does to flesh and bone. I don't sleep much these days. You can guess why.

About three or four years of this was enough to sour me on the idea of moving up to a fighter wing. There wasn't any glory in it. Colonel Garfield questioned it, because of course he would. Why shouldn't a promising young pilot want to go where he's most needed? But he didn't need to see what I saw.

My last flight with the BDA wing, though? That was the one that did it.

We were fanning out through the asteroid field, that the brass had told us was supposed to be clear. Beyond the occasional bit of crumpled metal, it was. I certainly wasn't seeing any dead pirates out here, let alone any Coalition craft besides our Spyglass-class recon ships, and the only comms chatter was Myers and Burroughs joking around about whether there was anything valuable they could bring home as a trophy. Place looked pretty picked-over, to me.

I felt a twinge at the back of my neck. I glanced at my radar just in time to see some of the random debris seeming to move, in ways that didn't make sense for unpowered bits of scrap metal. But before I could think to warn anybody, those "bits of scrap metal" started opening fire. Out of reflex, and I couldn't tell you why this was my reflex, I cut my throttle to zero and switched off my blinkers... and then I started recording. Before me, my two squadron mates were taking fire from at least ten different directions, from fighters none of us had seen seconds ago. I had no idea how this ambush was so perfect. I considered turning and jetting back to the Sword Beach, but hearing Myers screaming over the comms, I froze. He kept screaming after his ship had scattered to the winds, as he floated around the field in his suit. "Hey! Blue-on-blue! Cease fire!" he shouted, hard enough that his voice broke. An authority figure to the end. "Cease--" He didn't get to finish, as a spray of mass-driver slugs tore through his suit and everything else inside it.

I sat there, my eyes wide in horror, for I forget how long. Whoever it was that carried out this attack had seemingly left the area. My radar showed nothing but space junk. I had no idea how nobody had seen or attacked me, that entire time. But I had to get back and look over the footage.

When I made it back, I said nothing to anybody. Nobody was expecting me back so soon, but nobody was asking me why, either. I quietly grabbed the recording media out of my camera and ran back through the footage I'd taken, back in my quarters. I'd barely gotten any shots of the attacking ships, just Myers and Burroughs blowing up, and then Myers' body getting cut in half by gun fire. Shortly afterwards, it seemed like such a long shot, but I thought I'd managed to capture part of a wing of one of the attackers... and what looked, to me, like a Coalition insignia on it. I had to run the footage back and forth - trying to ignore Myers' torso splitting and reassembling itself as I did - to make sure that the wing was attached to something, and not a part of Burroughs's ship. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't make myself think this wasn't an SLC fighter. I grabbed the datastick out of the player and marched to the Colonel's office. If there were op-fors flying SLC flags, he needed to know.

I wasn't sure the Colonel believed me when I explained it all to him, my voice not fully obeying me the whole time I stood there, quivering almost as bad as the rest of my body was. He took the datastick - I realized, I hadn't made a backup of it until I left his office - and sent me on my way with a spot of fury in his voice, as if I'd done something drastically, damagingly wrong.

The next day, he called me back and asked me if I was okay. A kindly gesture by a commanding officer? Maybe, I thought. I was sure I'd need some kind of therapy. A discharge from the Coalition Navy would have been inconvenient for me, but understandable. It wasn't either of those things. Colonel Garfield told me that I'd been reassigned... and promoted. My bravery (hah) in the face of mortal peril proved I was capable of thinking outside the box under pressure, but also, he believed that my future wasn't behind the joystick of a fighter craft, but in an office like his. Something quiet, where I could serve the rest of my tour of duty in peace.

My new assignment, he said, was with the SLCG Orenomah. She was a prestigious colony ship, on her fiftieth year of service to the Coalition. At first she'd served as a seed ship for the lunar colony, then was retrofitted for a mission to Mars. Now she was in orbit around Europa, and in need of a new XO. A bump from 1st Lieutenant all the way up to Lieutenant Colonel was a bit drastic, but I was assured it was a job I would be quite comfortable with. The Orenomah might not have been as up to date as the Sword Beach, but she was still a good ship, and a better place to finish my service, he could not have offered.

That was what I believed until I'd seen the thing. The Orenomah was full of holes in several decks, rusting out in places that would absolutely have gotten somebody killed if they tried to open the wrong door. She needed one hell of a fix-up job. It only took a week on duty before I realized that the handful of colonists still on board actively resented the Coalition. She wasn't "prestigious" at all. She was an outmoded piece of shit.

I hated it there. Evidently, so did the Orenomah's Colonel - a man that stuck around for so little time that I never once heard his full name before he bailed and left me in charge. And once I became the sole figure of authority to a crew of jaded, would-be mutineers, I came to understand it all. Europa had no trading infrastructure. We were too far away for most merchant vessels to come around. Natural resources were rare. Building resources, the kind that we would use to patch holes and seal off unusable rooms, had to be repurposed by scrapping other unusable parts of the ship. And try ordering your crew to dismantle the one useless fighter-bomber left in the hangar bay, when half of them retch at the sight of your Coalition badge.

The few who did respect the uniform were a handful of ex-pirates - affiliated with the Red Chasm, I think they'd said - who tried to board through a decommissioned shuttle bay and got themselves stuck there. A party of three, led by a rough-cut guy named Ingram. The crew weren't very happy with them being on board (they weren't very happy with any decision I'd make, frankly), but Ingram in particular knew a thing or two about jury-rigging, and that'd be all too useful a skill.

Suffice to say, it didn't take me long to understand why my Colonel jumped ship. The 'Nomah should have been put out to pasture ten years ago, if not longer. She was a losing bet, a proposition doomed to failure. I hadn't been transferred here to finish my service in peace. I'd been sent here because I was too inconvenient to keep around. The Coalition, and Colonel Garfield in particular, saw me as a whistleblower, a liability, and this was my reprisal.

A year after my assignment, after countless calls for assistance and resources went unanswered, I decided that the Coalition, and my crew, neither wanted nor needed me. I hung my uniform in my locker, grabbed whatever seemed useful to bring along, and took off with one of the handful of functional shuttles. SLC didn't need to know I was going. They wouldn't bother to check. All I had to do was start from the bottom, fit my little space-RV with a gun or two, and start building a reputation as a freelancer.

Didn't seem like it'd be terribly hard to stay out of trouble.

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