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Skipjack

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So it's just straight up "a wizard did it" territory? or, like, the sci-fi variant of that, which is probably aliens? If it was aliens, did they seed the planet with life or are they setting up space elevators to better facilitate coming in and taking advantage of the biosphere that already exists?
Are all of these just complete unknowns?
Did octopi become sapient, form societies, and grow the space elevators?
 
Sounds like nobody's really sure in-universe, but determining how and why the tethers were created has fallen to the wayside because politics got in the way.
 
Iridium Flare said:
So it's just straight up "a wizard did it" territory? or, like, the sci-fi variant of that, which is probably aliens? If it was aliens, did they seed the planet with life or are they setting up space elevators to better facilitate coming in and taking advantage of the biosphere that already exists?
Are all of these just complete unknowns?
Did octopi become sapient, form societies, and grow the space elevators?
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see

Jake said:
Sounds like nobody's really sure in-universe, but determining how and why the tethers were created has fallen to the wayside because politics got in the way.
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but word of god is that it was a series of alien probes that may or may not have fully completed their missions before going offline.
 
Jackie said:
but word of god is that it was a series of alien probes that may or may not have fully completed their missions before going offline.
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So, Mars wasn't always blue, but rather it got aggressively terraformed (Aresformed?) through asteroid and comet redirects in the 30s...

Oh shit. It's only been ~70 years since those Probes hit (as they likely did the redirects before landing and growing the Elevators), so that means whoever sent them probably isn't far behind; you wouldn't reasonably be able to wait for "Seeding Complete" confirmation over interstellar distances, so you'd send the seeders and the colonists, staggered with enough time for the Probes to work.

That's assuming they lack FTL, but this seems to be a fairly Hard-Sci-Fi setting.
 
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This May Be A Business Run By Family, But It's Not A Family Business.
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    • This May Be A Business Run By Family, But It's Not A Family Business.​



    Martian soil was something of a rare commodity, given that there were only a few places above water on the whole planet and most of those were covered with ice. Most people who found themselves standing on on terra firma did so at the bottom of the ocean.

    "It's not that I don't trust the science here, it's just that last time I was in a submarine with a hole this big in it we were sinking." I commented off hand as Trip operated the chain hoist that was lowering the drilling rig to me on the ocean floor.

    "Hey, we've got a pressure skirt. A lot of boats just leave that last few inches of water at the bottom," he answered as the feet of the drill began to settle into the mud. He was right, of course, flowing water would have made the job more difficult than it already was.

    "Either way," I grumbled, my fingers picking at the shackle holding the top of the drilling rig to the chain, "the sooner I get out of this mud hole and back up there where I'm actually inside of the pressure hull the better."

    "You're not wrong," he admitted as slammed the ram-set in his hand against the drill's support leg, firing a bolt through a hole pre-cut into the plate, anchoring it to the ocean floor. The ignition of the powder charge sounded like a gunshot, because it basically was.

    I glared at him and held my hands over my ears for the next two bangs of the ram-set, not that my ears weren't already ringing from the first one. He could finish by himself if he wanted to be like that. I grabbed onto the ladder rungs set into the bulkhead next to me and started to haul myself up into the moon pool room.

    My dad was hunched over a junction box with thick cables trailing into it from the battery room, the drill sitting fifteen feet below us on the ocean floor, and the drill stem loader. To his left, leading down to the drill, the chain tightened back up as the winch reversed.

    "Positive tension, we're anchored for drilling." Trip called up from below while I kicked my boots off from the edge of the decking. Mud in my CIC? Hell no.

    "Dad?" I asked over to him, looking in time to see him screwing the access panel back down.

    "Drill is ready as soon as Trip gets back up here," he confirmed as he toggled the power to the system and the amber caution lights on the equipment began to flash.

    Long chain hydrocarbons were one of the stranger things that we'd found up here, on Mars. Nobody had actually been here before the back to back strike of about a thousand comets slammed into the planet with an orbital eccentricity greater than one. After that, well, who is to say where they came from? More importantly, it was one of those questions that people didn't like to ask too loudly.

    Some, like 'how did that many comets end up on the same collision course with Mars?' were best left unasked entirely.

    Of course, long chain hydrocarbons meant that even those of us not blessed with atomic power could operate near indefinitely. A vessel with a drill, like ours, could theoretically stay submerged for as long as it took for our food to run out, albeit most of the time at periscope depth.

    The relative purity of those hydrocarbons was another thing that we all agreed we wouldn't look to hard at, let the science guys worry about the implications, we'd worry about sinking pirates.

    Or in this case, worry about setting up a well head so a submarine tanker could fill up and keep the generators at Midway running for a while longer.

    "Random stop program is running. We ready to drill or what?" Trip's voice cut across my thoughts like a dog dragging it's--

    "Fuck it, let's poke a hole. Fire it up, Pops." I answered as I stood up in my socks, shuffling over to the rack of drill stem to make sure the straps were released. We had about four hundred fifty feet of stem, my sincere hope was that we'd strike gold before we ran out.

    The drill started up with a low chug, and continued along at the same speed. Low speed, high torque. Keep things as quiet as we could. The random stop program gave us randomized stop intervals of random length, to keep anyone from figuring out a pattern to our noise and sneaking up on us.

    Of course, our drill site was equally useful for that. A nearly perpetual thermal layer sat more or less right above our masts and the trench we had set down in shielded us from any side scan. We were about as safe and quiet as we could be, given that we were boring a hole into the seafloor.

    "So why are you getting the seventy five percent cut when you're using our drill, Dad?" I asked with a slight frown. Even the twenty five percent cut wasn't bad money… which honestly rubbed more salt in the wound.

    "Well, it's my contract and you don't know how to set up a permanent well head. Also I literally made you, J.J." He answered with that obnoxious grin and a clap of his oven mitt sized hand onto my shoulder.

    I pulled his hand off my shoulder and cracked my neck as I walked around him to pick up my inside shoes, "Yeah, you did, although I'm not sure I'd call that a good thing. Besides, you weren't this tight with Trip."

    "Well it was both of you then, and I like Trip!" he protested.

    I tied the white lace sneaker with my foot against the railing around the erstwhile drilling pit. "I know you like him Dad, he's your buddy. I also know that you don't have the same relationship with marital fidelity that I do. Just because you were cheating your wife when you 'made me' doesn't mean I'm okay with being cheated on, but you two have fun."

    "Hey hold the fuck on, are we not supposed to be friends? If you hate him so much why the hell do you keep him on your boat, Jackie?" Dad shot back with that finger, the one he pointed at me when he was proper angry.

    Because I still lov—"He's a philanderer and a cheat but there isn't a better arms officer on the planet and I would know," I answered instead as I stomped out towards the CIC.

    Trip gave me a deer in headlights look as I stomped past him, but he knew better than to say a word to me when I was in that state. Maybe that's why I was so pissed off, maybe dad had a point, thought. Dad did the exact same shit, him being buddies with my ex felt like a tacit endorsement of Trip's infidelity.

    But I knew trying to get Dad to empathize with me on that particular point would be like trying to piss up a rope and I was far less equipped for that endeavor than he was. But maybe it wasn't fair for me to ask my Dad not to like him when I still had him on my crew.

    Well, nobody ever said emotions were fair.

    I stopped in the engine room on my way through to the bow. It had been widened considerably when the profile of the hull had changed with our extension, and there was as a result a lot more space between the engines. Not having them directly coupled to the propellers offered a lot of flexibility we might otherwise not have had.

    It gave Jimmy more room to work and it gave all of us the benefit of much larger air scrubbers. Me most of all given the large number of un-bathed men on my boat.

    Jimmy was, as he could usually be found when not working, laying in his hammock strung above the port engine. I was going to talk to him but the rip-saw like snoring that announced his presence drove that idea from my head. Better to let sleeping Jimmys lie.

    Crew bunks were full of sleeping crew, as one would expect, and the heat and moisture that filled the air in the compartment was almost suffocating. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like in the war, given that I had maybe half that complement and it was… not unripe.

    The CIC was nearly deserted but for Francis playing Gameboy at the sonar station and Ninety Percent Lewis passed completely the fuck out in the radio room. I gave a wave to Francis and he gave me a nod of acknowledgement as I passed by.

    Admittedly, there wasn't much to do when the boat wasn't moving.

    I briefly entertained the idea of raising the periscope and seeing if there was anything I could illuminate with the flood light, but that got old three years ago. The best solution for boredom on the submarine was the one that most of the crewmen had taken; rack time.

    Sleep was a time machine into the future.

    Hat, gloves, jacket all came off as I stepped through the hatch into the officer's quarters. Albert's room, Trip's, Mine. The warm bed would be better than the cold decking, and with the drill running that didn't spare many amps for the heaters.

    Still, I mused as I bumped the door to my room open with my backside, blankets worked just fine and the more of them and the thicker, the better.

    I reached to set down my jacket on my desk to see that there was already a jacket there, one of Marie's if I wasn't mistaken. I set mine atop it along with my hat and gloves. When I turned to my bed I confirmed that I was not mistaken as to the owner of the jacket.

    Blankets worked even better for two.
     
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    • Pops is just grinding sand into those open wounds, isn't he? Though given how free Trip was with Jackie's boat - and her account numbers - it's him who reopened all those insecurities...

    Ah, well, at least Jackie has some shared warmth.
     
    Ah, the Navy Dad: extremely up his own asshole while simultaneously being up the Navy's asshole and disappointed that you aren't also filling both of those assholes like Erwin Schrodingers dildo.
    Its like i'm back at my parents' house.
     
    DocMatoi said:
    Ah, the Navy Dad: extremely up his own asshole while simultaneously being up the Navy's asshole and disappointed that you aren't also filling both of those assholes like Erwin Schrodingers dildo.
    Its like i'm back at my parents' house.
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    I prefer to think of Lee as Schrodinger's Dickhead.
     

    Marinate in this for a minute while i format the update!~
     
    From Now On They'll Call Me Jackie The Giant Killer
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    • From Now On They'll Call Me Jackie The Giant Killer​


    "We've got the wellhead installed and the drill is stowed. We're ready for push-off to the next site." Trip's voice buzzed in my ear over the intercom headset. I was tired of sitting on the bottom, even if the nights weren't all that bad.

    I felt a slight flush in my cheeks when I turned to look at Marie. She'd surprised me, but it turned out not to be a bad one in the end. "Marie, blow the tanks and take us up to periscope depth. I'd like to get some fresh air in here."

    "No complaints from me. Letting a little air into the tanks now," she answered, and a moment later there was a slight jolt as the boat lifted up and out of the mud. The humming of the electric motors driving the moon pool doors shut followed a moment later before it ended with a thump.

    "Ahead slow, no rush--"

    "Conn, Sonar, picking up a subsurface contact bearing two six two… sounds like two five bladed screws. If it's a Delta Four, and I think it is, they're making turns for twenty knots at least. Range is about eight thousand." Francis announced over top of my order, and I couldn't complain.

    "Marie, cease blowing the tanks, maintain our current depth and course. Francis, feed your data into fire control and work out a torpedo solution. I don't know what the hell they're in such a hurry for but we can help them to the bottom," I ordered as I reached over my head and turned the ship-wide lighting to blue.

    The boat leveled off immediately and all of the little noises and whispers of conversation evaporated. If it wasn't necessary to make noise, we wouldn't be making any.

    "Ma'am, I've got a firing solution."

    "Send it to the forward torpedo room. Flood forward tubes one, two, and three, and open the outer doors," I ordered and wiped the sweat from my palm against my trouser leg. This was a hell of a whale to try to harpoon but with nukes getting thrown around it wasn't like there was much of a choice.

    "Uh, Captain…"

    I looked over at Francis and he had a look I hadn't seen on his face before: confusion. "What've ya' got?"

    "For a second it looked like there was some VLF traffic coming from Jacob's Ladder. It's gone now—contact is slowing, sounds like they're flooding their missile launch tubes!"

    Well, fuck me if that wasn't a hell of a coincidence.

    "What the hell is even in range out here?" I asked aloud to, well, anyone.

    "Uhh, Nzila-Mazulu?" Ninety Percent Lewis suggested.

    Of course they were going to fire on the Congolese elevator. Motherfucker. "Do we have a firing solution?"

    "We do," Francis confirmed with a look up from his station.

    "Alright let's get ourselves killed. Launch tubes one through three!" I yelled and the sound of the pressure dumping into the tubes echoed through the hull, three torpedoes away.

    "No reaction from the target, if they heard the launch they're not doing anything about it, still flooding their VLS tubes." Francis announced

    "Keep sending tracking updates down the wire. I didn't just fire three spearfish to have them miss." And of course that fat fucking bounty check.

    This was always the really tense part, the time between firing and impact when they could counter fire or an escort could appear out of the ether. A boat like that running that hot was still too good of a target to ignor—

    I found myself behind the map table, which was weird because I'd been in my chair on the other side of it. My ass was wet which I didn't like and I couldn't hear a damn thing over the roaring sound in my ears. I also wasn't sure where my glasses were but that didn't really matter because half of the lighting was off so I wouldn't have been able to see anyway.

    "J.J. on your fucking feet!" I heard screamed over the sound of the roaring before a pair of rough calloused hands hooked me under the armpits and hoisted me into a standing position. I recognized that voice. That wasn't just Dad, that was Captain Dad.

    "Tell me we did not just get hit by a fucking torpedo!" I screamed over the roaring; a pipe had exploded and was letting the ocean in.

    "Well I'd be lying!" Dad answered as I became aware of just how tilted to starboard the deck was. That wasn't good.

    "Get back to the engine room and help Jimmy fire up the EPU," I told my dad as I stumbled across the CIC to Marie's station. I didn't bother to check to see if my dad had listened to me, I had more important matters to attend.

    "Are we fucked?" I asked in a lower voice as someone had begun to secure the burst pipe.

    "We are if we don't surface." she answered simply. No joking, no snark, no sarcasm. It was serious then.

    "Well let's hope those spearfish do their job. Get us to the top any way you can. I sent dad to fire up the EPU. As long as we didn't take the hit to the screws you'll have full propulsion power for about fifteen minutes, will that help?"

    "You say that like there's a good place to get hit by a torpedo. No, based on how she's handling I think we were hit in the sail," she speculated as our depth gauge slowly crept up into lower numbers.

    "I'm going to be pissed if they broke my fucking periscope. Francis are you still with us? Is sonar still up!?" I yelled back to the sonar station.

    Francis had blood pouring down his face but he didn't seem to notice, he was still fixed to his screen and doing his job. Shock or training? He looked up to meet my eyes and spoke, "There's a lot of noise but we've still got hydrophones."

    "Then I'm done fucking around. Flood forward tubes four, five, and six and open the outer doors. Bring active sonar up one ping full power every five seconds, repeating. I want a firing solution on whoever the fuck fired that torpedo and I want it five minutes ago!" I ordered as I threw my hat to the ground and pushed my hands through my hair. Wet, sticky. I could deal with it later.

    The high pitched whine that shrieked through the hull signaled the activation of the EPU. The emergency power unit was a curious thing. It was, for lack of a better comparison, a big torpedo engine hooked to a generator. Not unlike a ram air turbine on a jet liner, in an emergency we could start this thing spinning to get power back up.

    Unlike a jet liner, our torpedo-fuel powered EPU produced eight thousand effective shaft horsepower.

    The hull groaned with the sound of rending steel as we accelerated towards the surface, our propellers putting out more power than the four of our diesels combined due to the sheer output of the EPU. The only downside was the noise output and that the electric load could potentially blow out the main bus.

    "Cap, the only thing out there is the Delta and our fish. I hear something that could be a helicopter rotor but we'd need the radar to confirm." Francis offered.

    "I'll do it visually. You keep your ear on those torpedoes and call out any hits," I ordered as I stepped around the periscope to the locker on the opposite side. It was a small thing, shaped like a long pizza box. I popped it open and removed the Thompson submachine gun and it's magazine from within, before combining the two.

    Sling over my shoulder, weapon under my arm. I grabbed onto the ladder for the moment we broke the surface, I wouldn't have much time before we were spotted once we were topside and whatever was up there had to be dealt with before it could deal with us. "Marie?"

    "Five seconds!" she yelled back and I started to climb. This wasn't going to be a violent breaching like an emergency blow, no this would be comparatively gentle. Not out of a lack of urgency, more that I wasn't sure the boat wouldn't snap in half after being hit with a torpedo.

    "Go!" she yelled, and I started to spin the wheel above my head.

    Round and round and round, the hatch unlocked and I shouldered up through it like the devil was chasing me. A spray of water hit me as I came up the ladder and out onto the upper deck. I wasn't supposed to be outside yet.

    The water pooling around my ankles was a clue that the outside had been let in, the sea spray from the—"holy shit."

    The entire starboard side of the sail was just… gone, torn out along with a sizable chunk of the starboard superstructure. A goodly portion of our anti aircraft weaponry along with it. Even over the sound of the sea crashing into the boat I could hear the rotor of the helicopter overhead. Not exactly how I wanted my first breath of fresh air but hey.

    A moment later the rotorcraft showed itself as it crossed over top of us and became visible through the wound it had put in us—if the three torpedoes occupying its four weapon hard-points were anything to go by—and he was coming around for another pass.

    Nope.

    "Get me a fucking stinger!" I screamed down the hatch before spinning out from behind the torn edge of the sail and loosing a burst of fully automatic fire from my SMG. Forty-five wouldn't do anything to a helicopter but it wasn't like he would be able to hear the caliber when the bullets started to hit him.

    I had considered going for the forty up on the sail but the ladder to get up there was somewhere near the bottom of the sea. Instead, I held down the trigger as brass rained down around me, clattering and clanging against the decking, playing into the cacophony of muzzle blasts as I rode the lightning.

    The bluff did the job, the helicopter pulled back from its run while the remote turret on the underside swung around to—oh that's not good. I ducked back behind the relative cover of the torn up sail as a spray of high caliber autocannon fire filled the space I'd just been standing and then continued on through the other side of the sail, tearing a hole the size of a trash can through it.

    Okay, lesson: concealment isn't cover.

    "Where's my fucking stinger!?" I yelled down into the hatch as I knelt down and threw the empty Thompson back into the CIC.

    "Catch!" Trip yelled up to me as the cylindrical body of the missile launcher came sailing up through the hatch. Not a bad throw.

    I snagged it by the carry strap and yanked it the rest of the way up and directly to my shoulder. Power was already on, I toggled targeting on and knelt in front of the hole that the fucker had shot through the port side of the sail.

    There it was, straight above and coming around for a pass from the port side. It would have been a valid tactic if he hadn't given me my new window. Target in the center… the missile locked onto the engine of the helicopter and gave me tone.

    Click. I squeezed the trigger and an instant later the rocket engine ignited and the stinger missile leapt from its tube and towards my foe, trailing a rope of fire behind it. The pilot hesitated, he couldn't decide in the split second he had if he wanted to die and kill us, or try not to die and miss his opportunity completely.

    His delay robbed him of the chance to do either.

    The missile tore into the center of the helicopter's engine intake and exploded a second later, enveloping the rotorcraft in a cloud of expanding debris. Bits of fire rained out of the smoke cloud, sizzling against the surface of the ocean.

    Ahead and through the starboard hole, I saw three blasts near the surface in rapid succession with water spraying up into the sky, followed a few seconds later by a submarine with a very large hole in its back. At least we were going to be rich.
    Hell, we might even be able to capture the thing if the crew didn't scuttle it first—and then the launch doors started to open, slowly and jerkily as if damaged. Didn't like that.

    I dropped the missile launcher and jumped down the hatch into the CIC, the snap in my ankle told me nothing that I hadn't felt on impact. No worries, I bit my cheek against the pain. "Bring us right fifteen degrees, ahead flank and ram that fucking sub, now!"

    Marie had slammed the telegraph forward before I'd even finished the order, her hands firm on the wheel as she turned the rudder. There wasn't much distance, probably not enough to gain any real speed but we would keep pushing after we hit if we had to.

    The collision alarm sounded, echoing through the boat for three or four seconds before the sound of steel plates tearing drowned out everything else.
     
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    • Holy shit, if they can take that sub... That'd be one hell of an upgrade.
    Might have to sell the old one to repair the new one, though.
     
    Kinda surprised they managed to tank three ADCAPs. Those Delta IVs aren't anywhere nearly as beefy as an Akula (Typhoon), after all.
     
    Brought To You, Courtesy Of The Red, White, And, Blue.
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    • Brought To You, Courtesy Of The Red, White, And, Blue.​



    The impact, in the end, was much worse on the Delta than it had been on us; our boat was still water tight. That wasn't to say it was un-damaged, the superstructure that made it look like a surface ship when surfaced was, well…

    Skipjack was more of a Pug for the moment.

    What was more important for the moment were the nuclear missiles in that boomer. Like most problems with pirates, it was a problem we could solve with violence, and the cacophony of boot-falls following me across the upper hull was me solving that problem.

    I clenched my Winchester tight in my grip as I leapt off the mangled bow of Skipjack onto the broken back of the Delta Four, legs bicycling through the air before I crashed down onto the wet steel in a crouch.

    My shotgun made a clacking noise as I eased the pump forward to chamber the first shell as I stood, "Trip, take your team to the forward escape trunk, I've got the launch tubes!"

    He answered with a nod and took his team of five gunner's mates forward towards the sail while mine stayed near our impact point about half way down their vertical launch array. Whereas his team was composed of his own gunnery crew, mine was composed of Ninety Percent Lewis, the night shift Officer of the Watch Joslin Pike, and our ship's cook: the mononymic 'Bob'.

    "Lewis, cover the hole in the hull and make sure nobody surprises us. Bob, get the charges on those missile tubes. Joslin, you're with me." I ordered while pointing where I wanted the first two.

    Skip Lewis—I had finally looked him up in the company roster—had our only M16 but he was also the only one who'd actually carried one in combat, having been a U.S. Marine before he joined us. He might have been only a radioman, but every Marine learned how to shoot.

    Bob on the other hand, well, he didn't really have much to say about where he came from but he cooked a mean bean soup and he knew more than most people should about shaped charges. Mostly I just had to bank on the idea that he wasn't going to blow the sub up while he was still on it.

    Meanwhile, my boots were pounding the deck as I charged the dry dock shelter mounted to the forward most missile tubes. I really doubted they had enough missiles to fill them all, so it was an intelligent move to add extra ingress/egress.

    I held up my hand to signal for Joslin to cover me while I let my shotgun hang from its sling to work the wheel on the door. One thing that most submarines lacked, that would have really come in handy for the crew of this Delta, were door locks.

    The wheel turned smoothly in its race and it was about four turns till the bolts slid out and the hatch swung freely. In my left hand, I thumbed a flash bang off my bandolier and eased the pin out with my teeth.

    Door open, I tossed the grenade over the gap, releasing the spoon a moment before shouldering hard back into the door—and had the door shoved back against me an instant before the grenade popped. My ears started to ring, but I didn't have it nearly as bad as the Russian who stumbled out into Joslin's line of fire.

    Joslin had come up through the Royal Navy much in the same way I'd come up through the U.S.N., though she didn't have a sunken boat on her record. Even so, our backgrounds were similar and she was a shoe-in for the job.

    Four back-to-back blasts of buckshot erupted from her shotgun. Her finger was tight on the trigger as she pump-fired the shells into the dry dock shelter, and the men within. The sound of the buckshot scattering around the inside of the metal can was… evocative.

    "Clear!" she yelled, and I spun around the edge of the hatch with my shotgun in hand.

    Three very much not alive Russian sailors with three very much intact SKS rifles. "Bag those," I whispered to Joslin as I pointed down to the weapons. Beyond the rifles lay an open hatch into the submarine, with flickering red light emanating from the hatch in a dance against the walls of the chamber that looked almost like fire.

    I eased the muzzle of my shotgun over the edge of the hatch and checked the mirror taped to the end of it for anyone standing in wait below. I didn't really like the idea of not knowing how many were on-board, but I was glad enough that I wasn't going to get shot the second I dropped down the ladder.

    Out of the corner of my left eye I saw the blaze orange of a mylar flotation bag; Joslin was loading the rifles up for recovery. Waste not, want not, right?

    I jumped into the hole and landed in a crouch inside of the submarine. The source of the flickering became obvious, half of the emergency lights were blown and the other half kept shorting to the hull. I wasn't sure if that was from the torpedo attack or when we rammed them but I'd take it.

    The path to the launch control room was flooded, and so I took the high path to the control room of the boat. If I couldn't disable the launch controls, I could sure as fuck scuttle the boat. Onward and upward, or forwards and upwards as the case may be, the muzzle of my shotgun lead the way.

    Deltas were huge boats, but fortunately most of that length was missile tubes, we were only a couple of minutes away at the most.

    "J.J., we're ready to breach the control room." Trips voice whispered into my ear over the radio.

    "I'll be there in one twenty, breach on my mark," I answered back, I could bitch him out about the nickname later. The my hands were tight on the shotgun, storming a room we couldn't see inside of always held a lot of risk, but less than letting them fire strategic weapons.

    Even in the low gravity my boots felt heavy as we stormed up the last flight of stairs. I was aware of how few people we'd seen and that bothered the hell out of me for reasons I was unsure of but I was sure that they'd soon become clear.

    Around the corner, a single guard. I squeezed the trigger and took him in the chest with a round of buckshot. I cycled the pump and rushed for the door, they would have heard that. "Breach!" I yelled into the open channel as I sprinted down the final corridor, Joslin hot on my heels.

    Oh yeah, this was cardio.

    The hatch wheel turned, I jumped into the air. Time seemed to slow as a crescent of light appeared around the corner of the door. My shoulder was low, my weight was behind it. The door was heavy, the man behind it more-so, but I could run a four minute mile and he wasn't ready.

    I heard my collar bone crack when I hit, the door slammed back on its hinges and I slid across the steel decking of the control room with the momentum I had left. The guy holding onto the door was above and in front of me, I raised the shotgun from my vantage on the floor and squeezed the trigger. At that range, the buckshot didn't even scatter before it punched through his torso and into the bulkhead.

    I pumped another round into the chamber as I slid to a stop, then fired one round straight up into the face of an extremely surprised planesman, who didn't have much of a chance to worry about it. A boot came crashing down onto the shotgun after that, pinning it to my chest and knocking the air from my lungs.

    The right elbow of my jacket slammed into the ground and my little two shot thirty eight slid out into my hand. Click, bang. His hat hit the ceiling and he tumbled off of me like a tree felled by an axe. Other gunfire bled into my perception as I started back to my feet.

    But the time I made it there, the action was over.

    One survivor that I could see, seven who didn't. On their side, my guys were fine. The Russian captain was easy enough to spot by his uniform. The survivor on the other hand, the one with a bullet in his shoulder, had a decidedly… different uniform.

    "And who the fuck are you?" I asked the man held up by his shirt collar while a shotgun rested under his chin. His uniform told me one thing, but of course I needed to hear it from the horse's mouth.

    "No, who the fuck are you?" he asked me in return with the kind of smug venom that I knew to expect from people like him. The accent, the attitude, the uniform.

    I drove the butt of my shotgun into his gut and knocked the wind from him to give him some time to think about that while I turned to trip. "Where'd you find him?"

    "Operating an American VLF set. Funny thing, that." Trip said to me with a sort of mock casualness that betrayed the very palpable fear forming in the room.

    I turned back to our captive and grabbed him by the chin to lift his eyes to mine. "I'm Commander Jacquline Johnson, US Navy Retired. Again, who the fuck are you, sailor?"

    That arrogant smirk crossed his face again, "I'm afraid I don't answer to people who sink their own ship."

    "I was afraid you were going to say that," I answered as I took a step back and slid my shotgun back over my shoulder. I turned towards the aft hatch to the control room, I would be going back out the way I came.

    "What about him?" Joslin asked as I walked past her.

    "Shoot him. We're leaving, if the scuttling charges we have set don't do it we'll use an ADCAP." I put my head in my hands. We were absolutely fucked, but then that did answer the question of where the hell the pirates were getting back into orbit. Of course the Americans blamed the Congolese.

    The footsteps behind me as I left the room must have been Joslin. The gunshot came a moment later and I flinched. "If we're running from the Americans, to where can we run?" She asked me.

    "Tsukuyomi." I answered simply. "The Japanese are the only ones who can stand up to them."

    "Olympus Junction is still inaccessible."

    "I know, but we're not going up."

    Of course we wouldn't be going anywhere if the Skipjack couldn't sail.
     
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    • Not taking any evidence? I guess there's not any real way to prove this, and the feds will just declare her a pirate or something
    quite the scheme, though, sell American nukes and expertise to Russian pirates, blame the Congolese, and punk the japanese
     
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