RavensDagger

  Chapter Two - The Lunatics

  Everyone khat the Lunatics had esprit up to their eyeballs and nuts of pure titanium.

  They lived one mistake away from certaih, far from anyone and anything important, ahe st bastion of the disenfranchised, the lonely, and the funally unhinged.

  The Lunatics' standard operating procedures were a mystery to every war-capable nation in the sor system, most of all to themselves, and it meant that no one, not the Earth Alliance fleets, not the Empire of Mars, not even the space pirates of Ceres, wao fuck with them.

  There was everything to lose, and only hundred-year-old paraphernalia to win.

  Every culture across the sor system gained a quirk or two over time. The Lunatics went to the quirk dispensary with a five-gallon drum and loaded up on them until it was full to the brim. They revelled in being a few pennies short of a dolr, and it showed ihing they did.

  Their ships weren't just a scrapheaps abandoned and stolen from other nations. They were a scrapheaps painted in garish colours, covered in dazzle camoufge, then modded until the base ship was unreisable.

  No one needed a glowing red nose on the end of a destroyer. The Lunatic did it anyway. Then they spped on seven different turret hardpoints ihey didn't belong, one short-circuit away from blowing ks out of their neighb ships, and they called it art.

  It hadn't always been that way. In fact, the Lunatics could trace their ins back to one of the first off-Earth ies: a joint France-ada-Britain lunar y on the sunny side of Earth's girthiest satellite.

  The Lunar High Module y was built like a sea e bubbly capsules on the lunar surface. They looked like a swarm of ticks stuck to the moon's surface, which earhem the hey wore to this day.

  When shit went haywire and the first Sor System War started, the Lunatics left the moon and fucked off to Haumea.

  The stuff didn't start until a few years ter.

  As it turned out, scrubbing and rescrubbing oxygen was a thankless job. It was a lot easier to do if everyone would just wear some damned respirators so that their mouth bacteria would stay in one pce.

  Hence, aire cargo-tainer full of cheap, ese-made, low-danger enviroal proteasks.

  They even worked.

  Problem was, the masks were a rge white oval with two gss circles for the eyes and nothing else. It turhe entire fledgling y into bnk-faced freaks living out in the ass-end of the sor system during a full-scale intra-system war.

  Culture has a way t up from that kind of thing. Soon, people were painting their masks, and the Lunatics had new faces to show the world.

  Ivil Antagonist was aware of all of this, most of it through cultural osmosis. She wouldn't admit it to anyone, but she had a secret fasation with Earth-made soap operas, which frequently romanticised the Lunatics as handsome devils with hearts of gold and a few roguishly rough edges that could be won over by a kied aiful B-movie starlet.

  She had met a few Lunatics away from their d home, and they'd all failed to be handsuish people with a few rough edges and were a lot more likely to be insane, angry nutjob anarchists with a chip on their shoulder and too much makeup.

  The frigate, the Lucky Despot, shook as it was freed from its m links.

  So far, the officers on the ship's bridge were quiet and professional. Ivil could tell that the captain was sweating under her fiailored uniform, but at least she was taking things seriously. She checked and double-checked every security measure and had her crew oness level e as if she was about to navigate through an active minefield ing space battle instead of just a simple A-to-B transition from the Purgatorial Oblivion to the waiting Paradoxical.

  Ivil felt the weightlessrying to pull her off the deck. She frowned and put a stop to that, the heels of her boots king down. "Do we have aA, captain?" she asked.

  The captain gnced up, then shook her head. "Not yet, Ma'am. Five me, but we haven't received firmation from the Paradoxical."

  "In their defence, we didn't tell them that we'd be ing," Ivil said.

  The captain blinked. "We didn't, Ma'am?"

  "I imagihey saw us ing. Just fly towards their capital ship, keep yuns pointed away from anything important, and they'll eventually acquiesce."

  The captain nodded slowly, theuro her duties. Operating any warship, even an advanced Imperial warship, was a thankless, plicated job. The Lucky Despot fired its man thrusters, sliding away from the massive bulk of the Purgatorial Oblivion and deeper iy space.

  The frigate rotated on its tral axis while the crew g on, then it aimed towards Haumea and the Lunatic fleet. A burst of thrust ter and they were gliding at just shy of two G of stant acceleration towards the fleet.

  Ivil g the ETA on the navigator's s. They had an hour until they flipped and started a slow-down burn, then awo hours before they were close enough to start any sort of dog manoeuvres. The captain ying it safe, moving slower than she o, and more cautiously.

  That was fihe caution would be he fact that the Imperial Navy hadn't bsted the Lunatic's entire fleet into a cloud of debris was a good enough sign that they weren't here to fight.

  Ivil was sidering finding a seat for herself when she felt a faint buzz at her waist. Sighing, she tugged her pager from her belt and g its s. MEETING W/ B PARTY, scrolled across.

  Ivil spun on a heel and walked out of the Frigate's are. She slipped into aor and rode it up a few floors. Theepped out onto one of the topmost floors of the ship. Imperial ships were all long and narrow, but unlike Earth Alliance vessels, they were built vertically, the 'top' of an Imperial ship was the 'fore' of most other navies' vessels.

  That was just a normal evolutionary ge that happened when one's entire navy was built in zero-g by people who'd been born and raised in low gravity. Earth-built ships were still designed by people that were born with dirt underfoot.

  This being the topmost floor meant that the foot-thick windows built into the ceiling gave her a fantastic view of Haumea and the Lunatic fleet. Her attention only lingered on the ceiling for a moment before she took in the rest of the room.

  This was the space that would be hit first in any attack that broke through the ship's shields, so the room was little more than a luxurious lounge, a space for the crew to rex. At the moment there was no one rexing at all.

  The couches as, eai systems and small cafeteria were all uhe people in this room, ten in all, were standing at attention to one side, hands closed as fists over their hearts and eyes staring out into the distance.

  Ivil looked them over. There were seven women, three men, all on the younger side, though they were all adults. They wore tightly fit spacesuits with armoured panels worked over them.

  They were all Valkyries, which meant, of course, that they wereirely human, not anymore. She saw arms made of interlog metal, eyes that were pitch bck orbs, some had metallic hair, and one of them had a set of skeletal wings folded close against her back.

  At a gnce, Ivil judged most of them to be C-cssers. The kind of people that could probably wipe out a ptoon of the Empire's best and who would be the front-line in any grand flict. One of them stood out from the rest.

  She was a shorter woman, or was trying very hard to remain that way. Her armour writhed, and on occasion she would appear several timetres to the side of where she was, then flick back. She was utterly silent. No breathing noises. beat. No grinding of metal oal or squelg anic parts.

  Her face was a doll's, a perfectly beautiful pieetal, carved to appear feminine and pretty, with very real and anic eyes filling the sockets.

  "Are you in charge?" Ivil asked her.

  The shorter woman nodded. "Yes Ma'am, B-css Imperial Valkyrie, Sonic Spectre, Ma'am."

  Ivil narrowed her eyes. "Oh... I think I've heard of you," she said. "You were the lead of a strike for Ceres a few years ago."

  "Yes Ma'am," the valkyrie said. "That's when I earned my huh core, Ma'am."

  Ivil he empire might have had some of the best te the sor system, but they didn't have quite as many Valkyries as some of the other nations out there. The various nations around Jupiter were ri Valkyries, ah had cimed a fair number of them over the first tury of space travel. Mars was behind, but they made up for it with quality.

  No one had more A-cssers than they did, and it showed whenever push came to shove.

  "I presume that your team will be my escort?" Ivil asked.

  "If you'll have us, Ma'am," Sonic Spectre said.

  Ivil shrugged nguidly. "I suppose there's no harm. It'll reassure the brass, at least. Do we have any idea how many cores the Lunatics have?"

  "Enough to cause trouble, Ma'am," Sonic replied.

  Ivil grinned. "Good answer."

  ***

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