Battle for poe the brad.., p.1
Battle for Poe: The Brad Mendoza Chronicles, page 1
Battle for Poe
The Brad Mendoza Chronicles
Skyler Ramirez
Persephone Entertainment Inc.
Copyright © 2024 Skyler S. Ramirez
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design and illustrations by: Persephone Entertainment Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Published by Persephone Entertainment Inc.
Texas, USA
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Books by Skyler Ramirez
About The Author
Chapter 1
“Captain, with all due respect, you’re being an idiot.”
I regarded my executive officer with a raised eyebrow as she finished her statement, glaring at me across the desk in my small day cabin. I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Come on, Kitty, tell it like it is. Don’t pull your punches.”
“How many times do I need to tell you to stop calling me that?” Commander Katherine Henderson fumed, the red flush in her cheeks showing up even against her dark complexion. “I haven’t gone by Kitty since I was a plebe at the Academy, and I hated the stupid nickname back then, too!”
I nodded and grinned at her. “Well, as I recall, you got the nickname from releasing a feral, flee-infested cat in the men’s dorm to get back at an ex-boyfriend. With a name like Katherine, you had to see the nickname coming from a parsec away.”
“And as I recall, you’re the one who managed to catch that same cat and set it loose in the bachelor officer quarters!” she shot back.
My grin got even wider as I recalled a few of my Academy professors scratching at the fleas in their hair days later in class. “I’m also the one who didn’t turn you in,” I reminded her.
“Likewise.” She was smiling now. Say what you will about Katherine Henderson’s temper—and it was often swift and epic—she also had a sense of humor, and we fit together well as captain and XO. In fact, we’ve gotten along pretty well since she was a precocious plebe at the Promethean Naval Academy and I was a firstie with one foot out the door on my way to graduation.
Then, her face turned serious again. “Listen, Brad, you’re going to make a fool of us. We’re supposed to be at Cillian Heights in four days. We do not have time for your little side trip.”
I raised an eyebrow at her, waiting.
“Sir.” She added the word begrudgingly.
“You’re right,” I told her, shrugging.
“I’m right?” She looked at me incredulously. “What do you mean I’m right? If you know I’m right, why are we going to Poe?” The name of the system came out like it tasted bad on her tongue, and I couldn’t blame her. Poe was a hole of a system, with only a single inhabited planet, barely even big enough to hold atmo. Most of the population lived out in the asteroid belt, where mining was abundant, but life was hard.
“Well, Kat,” I said, her eyes flashing at my casual use of my current nickname for her, but at least she didn’t yell at me this time. “We’re going to Poe because I think we need to be there.”
“Is this another one of your hunches?” she asked with a frown.
I shrugged. “Call it captain’s intuition if that makes you feel any better. But there have been rumors that Skalgan’s little fleet has been harassing the mining stations in this part of the Corpus Christi Cluster. Small stuff so far, but it’s been almost a year since His Majesty’s Navy has even visited the Poe system, and the last ship to do so stayed for a few hours and then turned and left right back through the same jump point. Didn’t even take the time for a proper system scan.
“We’ll stop in, cross the system, and get good scan readings. We’ll exchange a few friendly messages with the locals and then jump out on the other end. All goes well; we’re in Cillian Heights about a day late, within tolerances.” That was mostly true, except that Rear Admiral Norton wasn’t usually the forgiving sort who appreciated being inconvenienced by one of his battlecruisers showing up a day late.
She stood there, staring at me, and I thought she might argue again. Then, her shoulders slumped. “Fine,” she spat out. “You win. I guess we’re going to Poe.”
I smiled. “Of course we are.” I pointed to the four bars on my shoulder. “I am Lancer’s captain, last time I checked, so I do have the final word on where we go.”
She bristled at that but said nothing, mostly because I was right. As the captain of a King’s ship, I didn’t even have to consult my executive officer on decisions like this. Still, smart captains always did, even when their executive officer was as argumentative as Katherine Henderson—maybe especially when their executive officer was argumentative and called them on their crap.
“Besides,” I said, my grin getting wider. “This is probably the last time I get to boss you around.”
It took a moment for that to sink in, and then her brows furrowed. “What are you talking about?” she demanded sternly, reminding me of my mother when I tried to explain why I punched Ben Kittridge in the ninth grade after he gave me a wedgie in the bathroom.
I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could. “Never mind. Slip of the tongue, that’s all.”
“Brad…” Now, she really sounded like my mother.
“Fine,” I said, holding both arms up in surrender. “Well, it won’t be official until next week, but scuttlebutt is that HMS Wilkes needs a new commanding officer, and I may or may not have submitted your name and gotten a positive response.”
She stood there, speechless for the first time I could remember. Kat was many things, but circumspect was not one of them, at least around me.
“Brad, if you’re messing with me, I will murder you, and Carla will never find the body.”
I grinned. “Putting aside how happy that would make my father-in-law, I’m not messing with you. Congratulations, Captain Henderson.”
She started to tear up a little. I knew she’d wanted this and deserved it for a long time. Despite my flippant delivery of the news, I was overjoyed that I got to be the one to tell her. I had to call in a lot of favors to make it happen, and seeing her reaction was a small reward for my efforts. Seeing her succeed in the position, as I knew she would, would be the greatest reward of all.
“Now,” I said, putting a measure of fake sternness in my tone. “XO—for now—Henderson, if you will, prepare my ship to jump to Poe.”
Chapter 2
“Skipper, coming out of jump now.”
“Thanks, Brian,” I said to the helmsman as I took the cup of steaming coffee from my steward. Lucas knew I liked to have a good cup of coffee when I exited a jump. It helped to bring me back to full alertness after the dull monotony of jump space. Especially since I always burned my tongue with the first sip. Today was no exception.
“Let’s do a full scan, passives only to start,” I ordered as soon as the burning sensation stopped. “Helm, plot us a path across the system that gets us to the Umbra jump point in 24 hours or less but maximizes close passes of as many of the mining stations as possible. I’d also like to do a quick survey of the planet if the orbital mechanics allow.”
As my bridge officers jumped to fulfill my orders in calm efficiency, Kat stepped up next to my command chair. “Passives only?” she asked in a low voice so that only I could hear. “How strong is your intuition that there may be trouble here?”
I looked up at her and frowned. “I don’t know. This morning, I was reading a report from a freighter that came through here a few weeks back. And it was the most boring transit report I’ve ever read.”
She looked confused. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
“No, Kat. I mean it was really boring. As in, nothing happened. Routine report in all respects.”
“Except?” she asked, knowing me too well.
“Except that a closer look at their fuel usage and mass readings revealed that they burned far too much fuel for their transit time. All told, they should have completed transit eight hours faster than they did. And they entered the system with a lot more mass than they left it with, though the captain tried hard to hide that in how he wrote up the report.”
My XO shrugged. “So, they’re smugglers making an unscheduled drop-off in Poe. Not so abnormal.”
“That’s what I thought at first, too,” I admitted. “But the captain of this particular vessel is a retired member of the Layton System Patrol, as are most of his crew.”
Kat’s eyebrows shot up at that. Layton was a medium-sized system that happened to sit at the crossroads of multiple jump points, leading to much larger systems within the Promethean Fede
“OK, that does seem like something is off,” she admitted. “But how do we know it’s not just a malfunction or a loss the captain didn’t want to report to the insurance company? It’s not that unusual for a ship to have to dump some of its load to account for a drive sputter or something like that.”
“Well,” I admitted, “that’s where the unsubstantiated rumors of Skalgan’s gang operating in this part of the cluster come in. Skalgan has a reputation for threatening his victims with reprisals if they tell anyone what happened to them. My guess is he stopped them, took most of their cargo, and then let them go. The guy is unpredictable; sometimes, he kills everyone, and other times, he lets them go with nothing more than lighter pockets and some big threats. I’m willing to bet this was a case of the latter.”
She frowned. “It’s flimsy, but you’re the captain. And as much as I hate to admit it, your gut is right more often than it’s wrong. Of course, when it’s wrong…” She let that hang there, though I knew she wanted to bring up what had happened in the Apollo system a month before. I’m glad she didn’t; I was sure I’d get enough grief about that at the next family dinner with my in-laws.
I smiled. “Let’s hope I’m right. It’s been a few weeks since we got to shoot anything.”
Chapter 3
OK, maybe I was wrong. Because 16 hours into our transit of Poe, we hadn’t seen anything more exciting than a dust cloud. I had the sensor officer start pinging the system on actives a few hours into the journey, and still nothing. Just the normal in-system traffic you would expect for a place whose entire economy is based on asteroid mining.
I was about to order a comm call to the inhabited planet just to check in with the local governor when Ensign Bryson, one of the junior officers I was rotating through bridge duty just for the experience, cried out in alarm.
“Calm down, Ensign!” Lieutenant Commander Roberts snapped. He was filling in for Kat at the moment and was a little overeager about it. I shot him a mildly reproving look, and his tone softened. “Bryson, tell us what you have.”
“I…uh…” the boy stammered and then looked up at Roberts and me in chagrin. “I’m not sure, sirs. One second, there was nothing on my scope, and then I saw a group of blips out by the jump limit like they were headed toward one of the asteroids. They were moving too fast to be merchant ships, but they disappeared off the feed before I could get any more on them.”
I mulled this over for a second. “Is there a mining station on that asteroid, Ensign?”
“Y-yes, sir,” he answered. “One of the richer veins in the system, according to the latest reports.”
“Any unusual comm traffic?”
By his expression, he’d forgotten to check. I could tell Roberts was about to chastise him again, but I stopped him with another look. Rotating junior officers through bridge duty was supposed to be a learning experience, and mistakes were to be expected.
“Uh, I think we’re too far out to detect it?” Bryson responded, the question clear in his tone.
“Marcucci, can you confirm?” I asked the junior lieutenant on comms, part of the regular bridge crew.
“Confirmed, sir,” she replied in her usual crisp and professional tone. “There’s a solar storm happening now in the system’s primary, and it’s wreaking havoc on all the local comms. I’m getting some transmissions from the direction of that rock, but they’re pretty garbled. AI’s trying to clean it up, but it may take a while.”
I turned back to Bryson. “Good job, Ensign. Even if it turns out to be nothing, it’s still worth checking out. Helm, set a course for that asteroid…AB3264. Engines at two-thirds power.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Ensign,” I said, turning back to Bryson. “Halt all actives and go to passives only. If there are enemy ships trying to hide out there, no use giving away our position too soon.”
The young man bent back down over his console to fulfill my order. I looked up and met Robert’s gaze over the Ensign’s shoulder. The lieutenant commander nodded that he would keep an eye on the kid, but I motioned him over to my command chair anyway.
“Sir,” Roberts asked in a low voice, “do you want me to wake the XO?”
I considered that for only a moment. “No, let her sleep. This is probably nothing, but if things are going to get exciting, I want her well-rested. But,” I motioned for him to come even closer so that the rest of the bridge crew wouldn’t hear, “go wake up Chelsea. I want her in the CIC putting a second pair of eyes on those sensor readings.”
Roberts nodded, casting a glance over at Bryson. The kid had picked up the transient contact, though likely, it was nothing more than backscatter or a solar flare messing with the sensors. However, despite the glimmers of promise the young ensign had shown on this voyage thus far, I wanted my first-watch sensor officer looking over his figurative shoulder. Lieutenant Chelsea Zhou was a savant when it came to reading things in the sensor picture that most people would miss. By having her down in the CIC, I could leave Bryson in the primary chair and not let him know that his commanding officer was checking his homework. I didn’t want to undermine the kid, but I also didn’t want to miss anything.
Roberts scurried off to do as I asked, and I turned my eyes back to the plot on the forward viewscreen. As I did so, I felt an excitement rising in me. The chances that the kid had actually seen anything worth worrying about were pretty low, but something in my gut—the same feeling that made me come to Poe in the first place—was telling me that he was onto something. After a year on Lancer, I’d had more than a few scuffles with pirates and smugglers but nothing that could rightly challenge a battlecruiser’s raw firepower. The thought of finally putting my command to the test was invigorating, especially if the rumors about the size of Skalgan’s force were accurate.
Of course, an entirely sane and intelligent man wouldn’t yearn for a fight, but if I’d wanted to just fly through the stars in peace, I would have become a freighter pilot or maybe a garbage scow commander. No, like most of my crew, I’d joined the Promethean Navy because a part of me wanted the action. And my gut was telling me that we were going to find some.
Chapter 4
“Skipper,” the silent voice said in my implant so only I could hear, “I’ve reviewed the records, and I don’t think Ensign Bryson is jumping at shadows. I’d say there’s a 58 percent chance those ships are out there.”
I fought the urge to chuckle. Senior Lieutenant Zhou was very precise. She never talked in generalities. If she said there was a 58% chance that Bryson’s sensor ghosts were real contacts, then there was precisely a 58% chance: not 50-50 or 60-40, but precisely 58-42 in favor.
“Thanks, Chelsea,” I subvocalized back to her. “Keep your eye on things, and the second you see something, let me know. I can ask Bryson to focus his search on where you tell me, and he can make the discovery. Call it a confidence booster.”
“Aye-aye, Skipper.”
Ending the call with my sensor officer down in the CIC, I got up out of my chair and walked over to the comm station. We’d been burning at a fairly sedate pace for two hours toward AB3264 without so much as a sniff of anything amiss.
“Talk to me, Marcucci,” I told my comm officer, who was sitting with her eyes closed as she always did when trying to decipher a weak signal. Startled, she looked up at me.
“Sorry, Skipper, just trying to parse through a few overlapping signals. The AI can’t separate them yet, but I swear I’m hearing two distinct transmissions through the noise.”
“Anything I should know about?”
She frowned. “Not yet, but there’s a…a tone to one of the transmissions. Hard to say, but it just doesn’t sound all that friendly to me.”
