Providence – Part 4
Creation isn’t free. Creation isn’t simple. Creation doesn’t involve idyllic trances on back porches watching wildlife and willing worlds into being.
Creation is mess and horror and pain. Creation is like birth: wet, screaming, and requires months upon months of discomfort and irritation to reach a singular moment of purest agony.
You will get knocked down, and you will be beaten while you’re there. Life is a boulder rolling down a hill; it doesn’t care one way or another about who gets flattened and who is spared.
A writer isn’t someone who doesn’t get knocked down, a writer is someone who refuses to stay down.
Providence – Part 4
Janet Magrathia Hinshiro crossed her dusty boots upon the inordinately expensive desk as she sat in the equally pricey chair across from the most powerful woman in the whole of the south-eastern Milky Way. She donned her most rakish grin, one that had stolen hearts and enraged opponents for all of her nearly thirty years.
Her mother was not amused.
The battle was brief, a contest of wills whose weapons were gimlet stares and haughty disregard.
For all her competence and swagger, Janet did still love her mother. Eventually, a gaze which should have set them on fire drove her boots from the desk. Whatever else lay between the two of them, Octiva Hinshiro the III was still her boss and she was here to deliver her report. No matter how thoroughly they encrypted a beam, the fact of the matter was that Janet’s job didn’t exist. It couldn’t exist, because if it did, or if she was ever found out, Clan Inoue would be isolated from galactic trade at astonishing speed.
Octiva’s deep baritone broke the tension of the moment “Warmaster, report.”
Janet leaned forward, setting the small data stick on the wooden surface of the desk before her, and as the small metallic cylinder touched the surface of the desk it morphed from the honeyed wooden tones that Octiva preferred into the three-dimensional display that lurked just under the surface. Two bio-metric locks appeared, and Janet and Octiva placed their hands within the indicated circle simultaneously. They spoke their names in unison, in the even, calm tones of one not under duress. They both spat upon the surface of the table, and after a few heartbeats the soft chime of clearance sounded throughout the office.
A projection of the Panopticon system appeared, the official mining operations site of Clan Thompson. It was also the location of not one, but three separate naval garrisons, each crafted into the empty husk of a planetoids in the system which had most certainly not been cleared for mining processes. The planetoid mining would be a minor scandal at best, and one the United Enclave of Humanity would hush up given the right amount of payments. The shipyard had swelled to fill the entirety of the largest planetoid, and the naval bases located in the other two bodies could barely contain the output of ships. It was the speed and efficiency of the civilian engineers that had even allowed Clan Inoue to learn something was amiss. Clan Thompson was their closest neighbor, equal in size to the vast Inoue complex, but far less wealthy. Clan Inoue had become the preeminent extractors and refiners of power cells within the entirety of the Milky Way.
Clan Thompson seemed to have had enough of living with Inoue’s vast shadow, and almost ten years prior had begun to do something about it. The Enclave did not permit individual Clans to maintain a significant military presence outside of the normal gatekeeper protocols that all colonized systems along the Tube adopted. Yes, each clan had representatives in the Enclave Armada, but those were the only military presence that would be tolerated. It ensured both that the Armada was the biggest military force in the Galaxy, and that no individual clan could coerce the Armada to attack another. A portion of the Armada would be made up of ships from that clan. It also guaranteed the Enclave both eyes and ears within every Clan, and while Octiva was cunning enough to spot most of them, she also wasn’t arrogant enough to believe she had gotten them all. That was what made Clan Thompson’s move so dangerous. If they brought sufficient tonnage, something akin to a full Enclave strike fleet, then the could pop the gate protections like a soap bubble. They weren’t designed to stop a full scale invasion, only prevent targeted raids and allow for control of the cargo flowing into and out of the system.
The main issue facing Clan Thompson had been obtaining and training the crews which would man the newly minted navy vessels. Retired commanders and captains could be had within every Clan, but bringing one man or woman into a mining system was far easier than bringing in thousands of crew. It had to be done carefully, in stages over months and years, and it had to be done with utmost care that those being brought in weren’t on the payroll of another Clan. It had taken nearly eight years for Thompson to make their first mistake, and to their credit it wasn’t even one they made. One of the Enclave auditors on site had been finishing their report of activities and abidance of regulations to the main Enclave offices when an aging cruiser used to smuggle in troops and to take a cargo load in exchange had suffered catastrophic engine failure. Age of the ship and general disrepair were to blame, but the official noted in his report that there were an unusual number of bodies for a simple cargo vessel of that size. It hadn’t triggered an official investigation, and had Clan Inoue not taken great pains to have reliable eyes within the audit department, it would’ve gone unnoticed entirely. Once spies had been placed at the main mining complex, the real work that took place in Panopticon became clear.
Janet, armed with a captial-class ship crammed into a cutter’s frame, had been tasked with making a single strike which could not be linked back to the Clan but would still set back operations in the system by a significant degree. When the time had come for several thousand troops to be transported to the naval bases, Janet knew the time to strike had come. She had flown in-system, the mining station had been unaware it was anything other than a personal vessel, and she had a wonderful cover story and flawless fake ID’s. None of the other cutter class ships boasted the speed or the firepower of Janet’s baby girl. She had charged up her phase-cannon, one strong enough to create small Tube doors that the target vessels would not have the necessary energy alignment patterns to allow for the door to be broken, and sent each vessel to their doom one after the other. Tube doors were impossibly strong, and the ships had crashed against them without warning or an opportunity to evade. No shieldshell could compensate for full in-system impulse travel at ten percent light speed. The transport vessels had become their own executioners, and with a few concentrated bursts Janet had slain at least twenty capital cruisers worth of crew. Clan Thompson would be furious, but could do nothing to compensate for the loss lest they risk exposure of their operations.
Octiva watched the display and readouts of Janet’s operation with a wolfish smile. Neither woman reveled in slaughter, but the work Janet had done would save millions of Clan Inoue’s citizens, and it was those citizens which represented the real wealth of the Clan. They both knew that any attack Clan Thompson could launch would be stalled for years, and now that their location was known and Clan Inoue had withdrawn its spies, Clan Thompson didn’t even know where to strike back. They would lose years to necessary paranoia, all the while trying to put the pieces together. With that much time to work with, Octiva would lead them by the nose to wherever she needed them to be.
Janet Magrathia Hinshiro had woven fortune through her hair like wildflowers. Her smile would’ve made even the most lascivious demon blush.
To be continued…
Blushfully,
The Unsheathed Quill
