Chapter 8

Kat was tired of listening to Lorelei. She couldn’t continue to allow the Erikson hersir to best her. If she did, the pirates would turn on her and find new leadership. The problem was he was too well protected. Kat needed a plan to lure him out into the open.

Bjorn summoned Brodie for a morning meeting. When Brodie walked in, his father looked troubled.

“What’s wrong?”

Bjorn frowned before saying, “You’ve been summoned to Mulheim to meet with King Denhardt.”

It was Brodie’s turn to frown.

“Do you think this has to do with Sven?”

“That would be my best guess,” Bjorn said. “But it also will pull you away from Norse. We haven’t found the leaks yet, and I worry the pirates will take advantage of this.”

Brodie went quiet for a moment as he considered what to do about the pirate situation. The longer it dragged on, the more likely the pirates would get their act together and become a real problem. Almost every fledgling leader encountered a situation where the challenge exceeded their ability. The only way to get through that period was to do what you must anyway. The alternative was to consider the situation as something impossible and not even try.

“If they come for me, then I’ll have to face it,” Brodie said, making his decision.

“Take some precautions,” Bjorn said, adding, “Take Pursuer and Relentless as backup.”

Brodie considered his dad’s suggestion. It would be a good way for Erik and Val to have a meaningful shakedown mission with the two Yahve phantom-class stealth warships. The extra firepower would be nice to have in case they ran into real trouble.

“That’s a good idea.”

They had some personnel issues to deal with, specifically some young men and women full of ‘I don’t give a shit.’ It amused Brodie that the two in trouble were both older than him. One young man hadn’t liked Aurora being in command of him and had actually told her to “Lick his testicles.”

Brodie felt Aurora had shown extraordinary restraint when she simply put him on report. It had also been a genius move because when the young man finally had a moment of clarity, he’d run to Brodie to beg forgiveness. Bjorn suggested the man apologize to Aurora and allow her to give him his punishment.

Then he’d discovered one of his sergeants had abused her power a couple of times. Brodie wondered why some people found power so tempting. He’d seen that weak people seemed to desire power more than others. The weak were never satisfied because they lacked the strength to deny themselves what wasn’t theirs to begin with. He prayed to the gods to give him the strength to quash his own weakness.

This would take more than a reprimand to fix. Brodie would have to keep an eye on his subordinate and do some personal coaching to nip this in the bud. Bjorn gave him some tips and then let Brodie plan his trip to the capital.

“All hands,” Loki tapped into the three ships’ comms systems and announced. “Mission briefing in ten. I repeat, mission briefing in ten in the command center.”

Val looked at the speaker and shook her head. She’d been working to get the Pursuer in shape to carry humans. The Yahve were used to hardship, so the original design lacked what Beck, the ship’s AI, called ‘creature features,’ including stuff like crew showers and cabins for sleeping. Beck said her old crew would wait until they made planetfall to bathe and wash their clothes. That had gone a long way toward explaining the unusual odors throughout the ship.

Val had put her first, Arnulf, in charge of making the ship livable. She and Beck had focused on establishing the Pursuer as a fierce fighting platform.

She knew Brodie had been summoned to his father, so she suspected they’d be doing a shakedown mission to make sure everything worked. Val was a little miffed because Brodie had promised her a month, and this was only the third week of her command.

She got on the comms. “Arnulf, you’ll remain on the ship with a skeleton crew. Everyone else, head to the command center.”

When Val left the bridge, the hallways were packed with people making their way off the ship. She nodded to Arnulf as the veteran hustled to take her place on the bridge. The ship’s complement consisted of fifty space marines and twenty-five personnel responsible for flying the ship, taking care of the crew, and the like.

Their brother ship, Relentless, had Erik as captain, Iverson as his first, and Gunner as their AI. They had the same crew breakdown, with seventy-five crew on board. Brodie’s first was Aurora, and he had fifty permanent crew.

When Val walked into the theater, which could hold nearly two hundred people, she noted that Aurora flanked Brodie. Loki was capable of commanding the three ships on his own, so she saw the logic of Aurora accompanying her captain to the meeting.

She spotted Erik, and the two of them made their way to the front of the room to take seats at the head table. Brodie didn’t wait for everyone to sit down as he began the briefing.

“I’ve been ordered to travel to Mulheim to meet with King Denhardt. Since we haven’t cleaned out the pirate threat, I’m expecting they’ll use this opportunity to try to take me out. To prevent that, I’m taking Relentless and Pursuer to watch my back.”

Until that point, the room had some general background conversations going on. Now, it was deathly silent.

“From this point forward, we are communications silent,” Brodie continued. He nodded to Aurora, who sent a command. Val’s communicator chirped to let her know it had lost its connection to the outside world. She still had her links to the three ships and her crew.

Brodie then turned the presentation over to Aurora, who laid out how she would defeat Loki’s Mischief and their planned actions to prevent that from happening. Val was betting on the pirates using EMP mines to take Brodie’s ship out of jump space and attack it before his systems could reboot.

When the briefing finished, Brodie ordered everyone back to their ships; they would launch in twenty minutes. Val could tell Brodie took the pirate threat seriously because he wasn’t giving them a chance to intercept him if at all possible.

“As you predicted, comms chatter is telling us Loki’s Mischief is launching and traveling to Mulheim,” Kat’s number one told her.

“What about Relentless and Pursuer?” Kat asked.

“They aren’t ready to launch. Our reports show they’re six weeks out at the earliest.”

Kat got a feral look and nodded.

“Let’s go hersir hunting. Brodie thinks he can run, but we’re ready for him. Let everyone know I want him alive so I can have the pleasure of personally putting a hole in his head,” she said.

There were three ways to travel in space: jump gates, a jump drive, or a sub-light drive. The preferred method was a jump gate because they were the most reliable and reduced the wear and tear on the ship. The gates had been put in place as soon as Norse was inhabited to connect them to the rest of the galaxy. Even though spaceships now had jump drives, it was standard procedure to use a gate when possible, for a number of reasons.

Jumps required precise calculations to get from point A to point B. If your jump software was off even the tiniest bit, it was difficult to calculate where you might end up. Granted, that rarely happened, but when it did, you might end up inside a star or thousands of light years into the middle of nowhere. Either was a death sentence.

The other principal reason was jump crystals were not cheap and eventually would wear out unless they were of the highest quality. Thankfully, Bjorn had insisted that all combat vessels be given the best crystals and have a backup on hand.

Otherwise, Brodie would have simply gotten out of Norse’s traffic zone and jumped directly to Mulheim. If he wasn’t planning to ambush the pirates, he might have done just that.

A sub-light drive was by far the slowest means of travel and typically only used in-system.

Loki’s Mischief cleared the atmosphere and used a micro-jump to reach the jump gate that would take them to the Mulheim system. With a bright blue flash, Loki’s Mischief’s sub-light engines roared to life. Kat had anticipated that and laid her trap where Brodie’s ship would drop out of jump so it could line itself up for the jump gate.

Brodie sat in the command chair, and his crew was strapped in as they came out of the jump. As they exited hyperspace, Loki’s Mischief made a violent course correction that threw Brodie against his harness; he felt like it had broken all of his ribs.

“Minefield...” Loki announced as the ship came to a sudden halt, and almost every system crashed.

They were in the worst possible situation for any spaceship: they’d stumbled into an EMP minefield. A mine had gone off, and a burst of electromagnetic radiation had disrupted or damaged every electrical device on the ship. Brodie worried that as the spaceship drifted, it would set off other mines.

Loki had worked to minimize potential damage from a mine by installing shielding that reduced the electromagnetic field in a space by blocking the field with barriers made of conductive materials. It was amazing that a simple cage of wire mesh around critical systems, grounded to the capacitor storage system, could reduce EMP damage so much while adding so little mass to the dead weight of the ship. But a sufficiently strong pulse could still leak through. Loki had focused on critical systems and also installed dumb AIs to assist in the restart process.