A skimmer the size of the Andros was no small matter to keep aloft. Her eight sail projectors were each three times the size of a normal military skimmer’s, and that introduced the complication of keeping the lines from crossing during maneuvering. Even at best, after each flight you had to check every single line, projector, hard point, and several dozen other potential points of failure.
They’d been doing it for generations, however, and the empire had ship handling down to an art and science.
The crewmembers Mira had managed to scrounge up were among the best people he’d ever worked with, even though most of them would never have made it on the empire’s dinars without facing a firing squad. He sometimes wished that he knew where she’d met them all. Most of them were former empire military, of course, but the few that weren’t were a strange bunch.
Gaston wasn’t one to press, but he was almost certain that three of the Andros’s crew were rather notorious pirates from before they’d joined up. He supposed that being Cadre meant walking in some dark places, but actually seeing evidence of it shook him a little.
Not enough to object, of course. They were able ship handlers, and the Andros needed every able hand it could get.
Especially with what was bearing down on them.
“Crank that pod up into place.” Brennan pointed as he maneuvered the hydraulic lift into place under the other side of the old Fire Naga. “It should click into place with a little shove.”
He did the same on his side, putting the weapons pod up and shoving it hard until he heard the audible click of the hard point locking it in.
“What are these anyway?” Mik grunted as he shoved as hard as he could on his own side, struggling to hear the click to little avail.
Brennan strode over, gripping the pod beside him, and between them they shoved again and were rewarded with the telltale sound.
“It’s a MAC cannon,” Brennan said. “Not in issue anymore, mostly because the lase blasters are cheaper. The MACs use magnetic accelerators to fire chunks of metal downrange. I trained on them in the simulation systems back home. Nasty, but heavy and expensive. Not enough usable metal lying around to throw it at people, mostly.”
“So why are we loading it?”
“Because we’ve got more than enough for a full load just sitting around here,” Brennan said. “And no one ever mounted a lase blaster on a Naga, so there’s none in storage that would fit.”
“Oh.”
Brennan patted the side of the machine. “Believe it or not, it actually packs a bigger punch than a lase blaster. Especially against modern legion armor. These days, no one expects to be hit by a two-inch-diameter chunk of metal moving at hypersonic speeds.”
“I wonder why,” Mik said dryly, shaking his head.
Brennan just smiled, a hint of the fear and nerves he was hiding showing through, but he distracted himself quickly by turning to where Lydia and Dusk were working on the Naga’s flight systems.
“Lyd, everything check out?”
Lydia looked up, nodding. “Brennan, you’re not going to believe how good Dusk here is with an interface …”
Brennan raised an eyebrow, glancing at Mik questioningly. Interface compatibility wasn’t exactly rare in the empire. In fact it was fairly common. But for Lydia to describe someone as good meant that they had to have a particularly high natural aptitude.
Mik just shrugged. “Ma was a systems engineer for the local water and food reclamation center. She taught Dusk everything she knew … Sis, well, on her own she went on to figure out a lot more that Ma didn’t know.”
Brennan nodded. “Nice. So, are we green?”
Lydia nodded. “I just gave Dusk the specs and code from your skimmer, and we’re using it to bring the operations system up to date. You’d never be able to fly this the way it was. Everything was automated with the worst control system I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank the legion for that.” Brennan chuckled. “It must have been wiped and set back to factory specs before it was stored here. Most pilots wrote their own operational code back in the day.”
“I can see why. You’d fly into a hill if you tried to run this thing on the code they put in there.”
“Just bug test it as much as you can, all right?” he asked, a little more agitatedly than he would have preferred.
“Relax. We just pulled most of the code from your skimmer,” Lydia assured him. “It’s almost identical, physically.”
“It should be,” he admitted. “My skimmer was based on the Naga frame. The same design firm built skimmers for popular use after the war.”
“It shows,” Dusk said, entering the conversation without looking up. “Just watch out for the weight. It’s going to pull differently on the sails.”
“I know. I’ve flown heavy craft before,” Brennan said. “Leave it to me.”
“Going to have to. I don’t know anything about flying.”
“Stick around, and I’ll teach you.” He grinned, winking at her when she glanced up.
Dusk turned several shades darker, sticking her head back down to avoid his eyes. Brennan just shrugged off Lydia’s glare; he was used to his sister not approving of his interactions with others. Mik’s matching glare, however, made Brennan hold up his hands and shake his head.
The other teen boy kept up the glare, clearly warning Bren off his sister. Brennan, while certainly not opposed to flirting with the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl, decided to back off.
They had other worries to deal with.
“Everyone grab what you’ve got, leave the rest,” Mira ordered as she stepped off the lift and walked into the vault. “We are leaving.”
“But there’s more here—”
“We’ve a full legion heading our way!” She cut off the man with a sharp gesture. “And we already packed everything we had to grab. Unless you want to be hosted by Corian and his empire for the rest of your natural lives, be on the Andros before I fire the projectors up. I won’t wait.”
That shut them all up, and they grabbed whatever they could and bolted for the lift.
Mira herself picked up two cases and marched calmly but quickly behind them.
“Skipper, the long-range recon team think they spotted a skimmer in the distance, but we lost it when it dropped below the wind shear.”
Commander Horace Kim of the Imperial destroyer Elemental nodded, taking a long lens from the holder next to him and using it to scan the mist ahead. “Location?”
“Right over the target depot, skipper.”
Kim sighed, considering his potential actions. The target skimmer, if it were the Andros Pak, would certainly have spotted them. He might have been able to sneak his own destroyer in under their spotters, but a whole legion on his tail would be impossible to miss.
“Signal the squad to spread out. Keep the Elemental in the center of the formation, but I want flankers ready in case they try to bolt.”
It wouldn’t do much if they decided to run into the Great Desert, but he’d worry about that if it happened. At least in that forsaken wasteland there was nothing for Delsol to raid or steal, and though hunting her and her compatriots down in that mess would be a truly grueling affair, it would also be a quiet one.
“Aye, skipper.”
The destroyer squadron under his command was the vanguard of the Bulls. Behind him rode fifteen hundred men and women, armed to the teeth, looking to slam any enemy of the empire into the ground like the garbage they inevitably were. It was likely overkill, since even a single destroyer like the Elemental would be more than a match for the Andros.