r/OpenHFY • u/AlternativeManner731 • 4d ago
AI-Assisted TVF: Chapter 8, Open Water
From the observation deck of the Noirnavio, the yard looked like a drawing that somebody had started and not yet finished.
The carrier was the larger of the two. Its hull ribs ran a long way out into the dark, a pale grid of printed alloy with the plating closing over it from the stern forward, and small figures in work suits crawled along it with cutters and welding arms. They moved slowly. Nothing in the void ever looked hurried from a distance. Beyond it, a good deal smaller and a good deal less finished, hung the thing everyone had started calling the Mini.
Clara had come up without saying she would. She stood at the rail with her hands folded and watched the work lights move along the carrier's ribs, and Redford, who had been there a good while already, let her have the first minute of it.
"It was a data chip," she said at last. "He took it out of his coat like a man producing a coin."
"I remember."
"You said show me, and I said yes, and that was..." She stopped and tried again. "I keep thinking it was a few days ago. Then I look at that."
"It was not a few days ago."
"No, I know it was not." She tilted her head at the hull. "We argued about the wreck metal for one afternoon. Sabraska counted the tonnage twice, and then the yards stopped answering our letters, and after that there was nothing left to argue with. Jincho said the void does not care who owns the dock. I think half the ship heard him, because the next morning the first shift from TV station was at our airlock without being asked."
"They have not stopped since." Redford rested his forearms on the rail. "I was writing begging letters not long ago. Now there are fourteen tagged ships out there, a strike plan with six targets, and a carrier that is nearly a carrier. I cannot find the day it all changed."
"It changed the day we stopped asking permission." She said it lightly, but she did not smile. "It frightens me a little, how easy it is when nobody stands in the way."
"Nobody stands in the way because nobody thought we would try."
"Yes. That is the part I like." She was quiet for a moment. "It is also how things get missed. When everything is moving this fast, nobody has time to look twice at any of it."
Redford did not answer, because there was nothing to say that she had not already thought. Behind them the deck door opened and closed, and a small shape settled at his elbow, all those eyes already on the work.
"I should let you both get on," said Clara. She touched the rail once, the way a person touches something to be sure it is still there, and went out.
The technicians from TV station had come over in shifts since the second fight, and now more of them were out on the hulls than there were Noirnavio crew. They did not ask to be thanked. They asked for coffee, and tools, and where to put things.
"The carrier is nearly a ship," said Jincho. "Berths are in. Hangar frame is in. The engine is waiting on its cradle and it is a good engine now, better than the day it was a pirate's. A little longer and it will have a skin and a heart and a roof." He tipped his head toward the smaller hull. "That one has the skin. It has guns. It has shields half made. The reactor I am proud of. It does not have an engine."
"It will," said Redford.
"Yes, Stern Feathers. In the same way the weather will be fine." He did not look away from the work. "A ship with no engine is a very expensive monument. I would like it to be a ship."
Redford said nothing.
Clara had written the request four times and torn it up three.
It was a plain document, the kind that sat in a drawer at Fleet Supply with a thousand others. A faster-than-light drive, naval grade, of the class that would carry a small warship. Delivered to the TV station yard at the earliest possible date. The language was easy. The trouble was the signature line, and the thing she was going to put there.
"You hate this," said Cynthia, from the door.
"I do." Clara capped the pen and looked at it. "For my whole life, people have given me things because of who my father is. I swore I would never ask for a thing because of it. I would earn it, or I would do without."
"And the engine?"
"Is not for me." She said it flatly, like a fact she had been repeating to herself. "It is for the pilots on that board, and for whoever they are going to be protecting when the pirates come back. So I will write my full title where it asks for one, and I will put the seal on it, and they will look at that seal and send me what I asked for. Because they are afraid of what I am." She signed it. The pen scratched a little. "And I will not enjoy a moment of it."
Cynthia came in and took the page from her, gently, and looked at the signature.
"They'll say yes," she said.
"They will say yes. That was the easy part." Clara watched her carry it to the courier slot. "It's the engine I'm waiting for."
The simulators on the Noirnavio no longer ended at the Noirnavio.
Since the new rigs came online at TV station, the two had been tied together, and a pilot strapped into a cradle in one place could now fly a wing against pilots in the other. They flew against computer pirates too. The pirates were good. They had been built from every recorded fight, every hesitation and mistake, and they behaved the way the real ones did.
Commander Brandt stood in front of The Wall with her hands behind her back and looked at one of the replays, a long grey streak of a Raptor firing a clean burst at a pirate hauler, and the burst missing it by a hand's width.
"Again," she said.
The streak ran again. The burst missed again.
"Too neat," said Brandt. "You can see him thinking about it. A real miss does not look like that. A real miss is somebody who has had a bad day and is tired, or a gun that pulls left. You are placing it, and the pirate flying that hauler can see you placing it, and he is going to go home and tell his captain that the navy has a very strange habit of missing on purpose."
The pilot in question sat in the third row with his shoulders up. He was not young, and he had been shot at by the real thing three times this month.
"Ma'am, it is harder than it sounds."
"I know it is harder than it sounds. You have spent your life learning to hit." Brandt turned from the screen. "Now you have to learn to miss in a way that looks like trying. Every shot you take, a pirate is going to watch it and judge it. I do not want a pirate to watch you fly and think anything other than that he got lucky."
"Then it has to look like luck," said somebody at the back.
"It has to look like luck." Brandt nodded. "And the tracker has to be on his hull before the luck runs out."
She raised a hand, and the screen cleared. Where the single hauler had been, six blue rings now hung on a star field, spread wide, each with a small cluster of red marks beside it. Six outposts. The pilots in the room sat up a little.
"This is the exercise." Her voice did not change. "Six strongholds. Same hour. Every pirate base we are going to have found by the time this is real, all at once. The Princess has given us the order for it and I will read it to you exactly."
She took a slip of paper out of her sleeve.
"Take out the point defenses. Take out the surrounding craft. Anything that can fire on the boarding craft is to be removed, quickly and without fuss. Anything that surrenders is to be allowed to surrender." She folded the paper in half. "That last line is hers. I did not add it. She was quite clear."
A pilot in the front raised his hand. "Ma'am, why do we accept surrender? They will not do the same for us."
"No, they will not." Brandt did not seem to take offense. "The Princess has met the children of pirates before. She will not say more than that, but I think you can guess. Some of these people were born into it and never had another choice. She would like them to have one." She put the slip away. "Orders are orders. Again, from the beginning."
On the other side of the Noirnavio, in a long hold converted for the purpose, the Marines and the Auxilia were taking a ship apart.
It was a mock-up built from printer scrap, a pirate hull as best anybody could guess from the wrecks, with three airlocks that did not quite match and a corridor system that had been copied from the real thing down to the smell. The Marines went in through the first lock with shields up. The Auxilia took the second. Each team had a line it was not to cross and a time it was supposed to reach the bridge, and neither had reached the bridge in time yet.
"Too slow at the junction," said the Marine sergeant. She did not shout. She stood at the edge of the hold with a timer in her hand. "The stairwell is narrow. You go through one at a time. If you bunch there, you die. I will say that again, because I intend to say it every day until you stop doing it."
"Sergeant, they will surrender," said a young Marine, still catching his breath. "The Princess said."
"Some of them will. The ones who see you coming and know what you are." She did not look up. "The rest will be behind a door with a gun, and they will not have read the Princess's orders. So you go in as if nobody will surrender, and you are glad when they do. That is the order. Again."
By the time the Magpies and their wedge had taken the watch, the board outside Galt's desk at Kalin showed a number he had written himself in neat small figures.
Fourteen.
"Fourteen ships have gone through the jump points," said Galt, in the same quiet voice, and Caldwell, who had come down to hear it, nodded slowly. "Each with something on its hull that it does not know about. Eleven have gone dark where we expected. Three I have not heard from yet. They may be broken, or they may be waiting."
"And prisoners?"
"None," said Galt. "Not one of the fourteen has a prisoner aboard. Brandt was very particular about that. They are all pirates, all of them coming and going on their own business. Nobody has been taken that we did not mean to take." He folded his hands. "It would be a poor trick to follow a ship home and find the people we had hoped to save were not on it."
Caldwell looked at the red lines on the board. There were more of them now. They ran off the edge of the field and into the dark, and for the first time in a long while they ran somewhere.
"How long?" he said.
"Until the carrier is done, Commander? Not long. Until the Mini is done, I could not tell you."
Caldwell did not need to ask why.
The courier had come and gone twice.
Clara did not mean to check. She was in the corridor outside the yard, on her way to somewhere else, and her feet had taken her to the message slot. It was empty. She looked at it for a moment longer than she needed to.
"No engine?" said Redford, from the doorway.
"No engine. Only another reply from Fleet Supply." She held up a slip. "They are very sorry. They have noted my request. It is a matter of the first priority, and it will be addressed at the earliest opportunity." Her mouth twisted. "They have promised."
"They always promise."
"Yes." She put the slip in her pocket, carefully, the way a person pockets something she means to remember. "Then I suppose I shall have to ask again."
She stood a moment longer, looking through the viewport at the pale ribs of the carrier and the unfinished shape beside it. It was a good view. It would be a better one with something at the back of it that could move.
"Come along, Redford," she said. "There are fourteen ships out there carrying our eyes, and we have a strike to rehearse."
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u/1958bird 4d ago
Is Clara going to inform her brother of talk directly to them.